Images and the edges of cyberspace

When I first went online more than a decade ago, I found the text-based tools of the Internet - like Gopher and WAIS - interesting and useful, but it wasn't until cyberspace went visual with the new "browsers" like Mosaic that my eyeballs started popping. Let's face it, what made computers and cyberspace take to public use like wild fire was the fact that we weren't just reading text, but rather interacting with windows, icons, and pictures - and experiencing the sense of space and place that images create. Words appeal more to the conscious rational mind, images to the unconscious dreaming mind. In fact, it was my fascination with the visual and spatial qualities of the Palace chat community that launched me into cyberpsychology.

As an imagistic type person, I've been delving deeper into digital photography this summer. I recently purchased the slr Canon 20D and am digging into Photoshop CS2. I contemplated writing about these pursuits here in this blog, but I hesistated, thinking that perhaps it wasn't relevant to cyberpsychology.

Or is it? As I suggested in my previous post, I'm not entirely sure what "cyberspace" is. I can't exactly define it, but I know it when I see it. When I place online a picture from my camera, clearly that picture becomes part of cyberspace. So then the camera itself has entered cyberspace, has become an extension of cyberspace, another eye for the Internet.... Right?

If there are any doubts remaining, I should mention that I'm researching online resources for digital photography, and have entered the forums at PhotoPoint and dpreview, where I get information and insights that lead to changes in my camera and PS settings, my techniques, and my philosophy of photography. I share photos online with family and friends. After contemplating the pros and cons of whether I wanted to bother with the arcane world of color management, I decided to go ahead and download the printer profiles that have now become integrated into my computer workstation and how I interpret color. Since I first started my online book The Psychology of Cyberspace, I've been creating graphics for it in order to highlight certain psychological themes. It seems to me that the psychological aspects of photography are intimately intertwined with the psychological aspects of what I do in cyberspace.

Which makes me think.... is it possible to find the edges of cyberspace, the boundary beyond which we have left that psychological realm? If you have your hands on a cell phone, the Tivo or XM radio clicker, or an iPod, don't you have at least one foot in cyberspace? As technological gadgets enter more and more spaces in our lives, cyberspace follows. It and we are all interconnected in very subtle and hidden ways. Perhaps we don't even need the gadgets in our hands to be there. Perhaps just a thought, an image, of something you experienced in cyberspace places you there.

When it comes right down to it, cyberspace is an extension of the mind - an image of the mind.