The End of Cyberspace and Other Surprises

This article reports on Web 2.0, the end of cyberspace, and the internet of things. It proposes that these concepts have synergies both with the current fashion for modifying physical objects with the features of virtual objects, as evidenced in O'Reilly's MAKE magazine and similar projects, and with the potential technologies for collective intelligence described by Bruce Sterling, Adam Greenfield, Julian Bleecker and others. It considers Alex Pang's research on the end of cyberspace and asks whether the ‘new’ of new media writing will have any meaning in a world that is updated by the microsecond every time there is fresh activity in the system.