1. The science of communications and control in animals, especially physiological feedback mechanisms and central nervous system control.
2. The study of how communication and control occurs within the bodies of living things between different parts of the body.

1. A coffee house that provides patrons with computer terminals for browsing the Internet for a fee.
2. A virtual gathering place on the Internet where people communicate using a chat program or by posting messages on a BBS.

1. The killing of a person’s projected virtual persona in cyberspace. This may be part of a VR game, or it may be an act of vandalism.
2. An expression for killing another person’s online character, or persona, in a multiplayer game or on an Internet chat room.

Fictional stories, or lies, dispensed on the Internet.

To control a manufacturing process with a servo-mechanism or with a computer.

Someone (a “sailor”) who surfs, or navigates, the Internet.

Of or relating to the principles of cybernetics.

A specialist in cybernetics.

1. The science or study of communication in organisms, organic processes, and mechanical or electronic systems.
2. The replication or imitation of biological control systems with the use of technology.
3. The study of messages and communication in humans, social groups, machines, etc., especially in reference to regulation and control mechanisms; including analysis of feedback mechanisms that serve to govern or modify the actions of various systems.
4. Coined by U.S. mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) who hypothesized that there is a similarity between the human nervous system and electronic machines.

An electronic toy that behaves like a pet.

A fondness for, or a fascination with, the use of machines; especially, working (or playing) with computers.

Someone who has an abnormal fear of computers and working with the Internet or who has tension, anxiety, and stress when required to work with a computer.

1. A pathological fear of direction or authority; fear of control, especially mind control.
2. Fear of computers, computer technology, or the possibility that computer intelligence will supplant human intelligence.
3. Tension, anxiety, and stress in people who are required to work with computers.

A type of science fiction featuring characters living in a darkly frightening, futuristic world dominated by computer techonology.

1. The notional realm in which electronic information exists or is exchanged.
2. The imagined world of virtual reality.
3. A computer network consisting of a worldwide network of computer networks that use the TCP/IP network protocols to facilitate data transmission and exchange
4. Not a real location but rather the “world” created by computers and specifically the Internet. In this virtual space, people can do many of the things they do in “normal” physical space; that is, interact with other people, shop, read the news, etc. Computer games often create a specialized cyberspace the user enters while playing the game and all the action of the game occurs in that world.

"Cyberspace" is said to be coined by William Gibson, who described the term to mean, “a consensual hallucination—lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellation of data. Like city lights, receding.”

William Gibson was born near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in 1948. In 1972 he moved to Vancouver, Canada. In the early 1980’s he wrote Neuromancer, and with this novel he established a new kind of science fiction literature called cyberpunk. William Gibson defined the word cyberspace, and described virtual reality long before we saw the similarities with the Internet of today.

In Neuromancer, Gibson presents the idea of global information network called the Matrix, and the term Cyberspace, by which he meant a virtual reality simulation with a direct neural feedback. Gibson talks about Cyberspace as if it were an addictive drug and people feel incomplete without it.

In Gibson’s fiction, cyberspace is a computer-generated landscape that characters enter by “jacking in”; sometimes by plugging electrodes directly into sockets implanted in the brain. When they get there, they see three-dimensional representations of all the information stored in “every computer in the human system” with vast sources of data.

During the years since Gibson wrote Neuromancer, other names have been created for that shadowy space where computer data exist: the Internet, the Net, the Web, the Cloud, the Matrix, the Metaverse, the Datasphere, the Electronic Frontier, and even the information superhighway.

Gibson’s coined term may be the most lasting because by 1989 it was borrowed by the online community to describe today’s interconnected computer systems; especially, the millions of computers on the Internet, and not just a science-fiction fantasy in the author’s imagination.

The practice of registering names as Internet domain names, e.g. harrods.com, ibm.firm or sears.shop, in the hope of later selling them to the appropriate owner at a profit.

Someone who spends a great deal of time surfing (using) the Internet.

Computer technology; including programming, usage, etc.

Conducting, or preparing to conduct, military operations according to information-related principles. It means disrupting, if not destroying, information and communications systems, broadly defined to include even military culture, on which an adversary relies in order to know itself: who it is; what it can do; when it can do it; why it is fighting; and which threats to counter first. It means trying to know everything about one’s adversary while keeping that adversary from knowing much about oneself; including, turning the balance of information and knowledge in one’s favor.

A fictional being that is part human and part robot; or a human body, or other organism, whose functions are taken over in part by electromechanical devices. Formed in about 1962 from English cyb(ernetic) org(anism).