Literature and cyberspace

Cyberspace, once a part of the fantastical realm, is now existing in reality – and for many people, it has become more real than physical reality, if one considers, for example, the development of artificial intelligence. Cyberspace has become an incomprehensible and layered environment that allegedly no one can manage or control. The advance of virtual technology has led to a comprehensive social reality that allows people to create novel ways of communication, support various initiatives and communities, exchange ideas, share information, play – and, of course, create. Among other things, the developments of cyberspace have inspired fiction (and this literature, in turn, has inspired the developments of virtual reality), especially beginning with the new wave of science fiction writing in the 1960s (Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny and others), including the 1982 film Blade Runner by Ridley Scott, based on a novel by Dick, where artificial intelligence thinks and feels like a human, and the 1984 novel Neuromancer by William Gibson, where virtual reality is called the matrix. How are cyberreality and literature influencing each other today? This will be analysed by literary scholar Piret Viires (1963), culture theoretician Tõnis Kahu and literary scholar Jaak Tomberg (1980), who has studied cyberpunk.