The much talked about Wired piece about the death of the word "cyberspace" (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 to cite a few) is nothing if not late, but ties in very neatly with the graph I posted a couple days ago. The problem is that people are 'looking for' a new word, one to replace "cyberspace," that will encapsulate everything that this word signifies, but also all that has failed to signify with adapting cultural reactions to new-media networks. No such word will come to be the central point, and metaphorical umbrella, that "cyberspace" was, rather a host of words are arising to take its place as the graph begins to hint at.

"Social network," "Web 2.0," "social software," "blog," and, doubtless, many others together are forming the new image, the new encompassing linguistic point to which we can look. This new distributed formation is all too appropriate for the phenomenon it describes. In fact, how could we expect anything other than a network of associated terms to win out over a single (dare I say hierarchical) word like cyberspace?