Abstract

This contribution is tackling: a) the original acceptance of the term «cyberspace» in the literature and in the techno-sciences related to HEI (first and second paragraph); b) its inevitable ramifications in the political/strategical domain. The basic assumption of the analysis is that: there are two basic ways in which cyberspace is conceptualized. The first way excludes physical infrastructures from its definitions, whereas the second includes them to various degrees. In the former definition, «cyberspace» emerges just as a space between the hardware components of computer networks, where interaction happens, a place that is fundamentally different from physical reality. The latter definition, indeed, takes into account different layers and abstractions of information riding on a physical sheet of hardware, with various and effective types of entanglements between abstractions and physical components/contexts. This specific acceptance is to be privileged here (third and fourth paragraph). Thus, in the present contribution «cyberspace » is seen as comprising both a material and a virtual realm, in a very peculiar way, producing new combinations of material elements (infrastructures, wires, hardware) and abstract meanings, with a huge impact on politics. This is crucial for the interdisciplinary debate on which kind of political imagination is suited for the cyber domain.