Someone is going to be able to write an interesting little article on the usage evolution of this word "cyber". It is indeed enjoying a renaissance, I think largely owing to excitement in government security circles (and the largess which inevitably follows). Some combination of growing technical possibility for citizen and criminal expression (i.e., Estonia DDoS and Conficker, respectively), military exhaustion with human-centric wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (i.e., let's get back to technical operations where we have an advantage), and the rise of China (endemic corporate espionage) has fostered a propensity to attach "cyber" to just about any activity. Fear mongering and wildly exaggerated metrics and interpretations follow. In several cases of ongoing normalization, the space or hyphen goes away altogether: cyberspace, cybersecurity, cyberwar. We're not quite there yet with cyber weapons, cyber deterrence, cyber dominance, or cyber protest.
Different people seem to use cyber-X to mean very different things: either cyber-X is even scarier and more potent than regular X (cyber weapons as a new nuclear age), or cyber-X is ephemeral, virtual, and less tangible than regular-X (cyber weapons "merely" non-lethal supplements to war). However it's used, "cyber" has almost always been a bound morpheme used to modify X, but even that has now changed. Military writers now routinely use "cyber" as a stand alone word-- "We have to figure out how we are going to operate in cyber, and how we should train for cyber..."--as a formal "domain" like air, land, sea, and space. So now we have all these conversations and conferences dedicated to trying to figure out what "cyber" really is, whether its a logical dependence on IP, the physical electromagnetic environment, any sort of IT, etc. Now some people even want to make a new distinction with a past participle of this already tortured construction: "Cybered conflict" is somehow different than "cyber conflict" in cyberspace, and just uses IT, or something. I really hope "cybered" doesn't stick.
Personally, this notion of an autonomous cyber domain still strikes me as rather absurd in any metaphysical sense. Insofar as "cyber" from "cybernetics" means something like "control," then there is absolutely no action in air, land, sea, or space without the ability to command and control forces there. But bureaucratically it makes a great deal of sense for defining fiefdoms and lanes in the road and such. In any case, this bizarre noun "cyber" is probably here to stay now, at least in US military discourse.
Have a jolly cyber day!
Jon
On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 9:17 AM, Taylor-Smith, Ella
<E.Taylor-Smith@napier.ac.uk> wrote:
Hi
This is perhaps a little present-tense for this list, but I the guardian is running an interesting series of articles:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/series/battle-for-the-internet
In particular, I thought that you'd be interested in the term "cyber jedi" -seemingly used withou comment in this article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/16/militarisation-of-cyberspace-power-struggle
(It seems to me that the term cyberspace was out of fashion after the turn of the century and has recently become current again -just an impression though)
-Ella
Ella Taylor-Smith
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