Last month the Guardian published an article in its technology pages entitled Death in Cyburbia Perhaps the title was meant to bring to mind Visconti’s haunting film “Death in Venice”. Unfortunately I am old enough to remember when it first came out, but fortunately I was young enough to be spell-bound by the old man’s quest for life and ultimate unchosen death.
In the Guardian article James Harkin describes Cyburbia as a vast virtual suburbia of peer-to-peer communication, Web 2.0, YouTube and Myspace in which real life has morphed into a strange virtual reflection of reality. He describes the death of a man who hung himself in full view of the world by broadcasting his final act on his webcam.
I am glad that I did not view this so called “Death in Cyburbia”, as this was a real death of a living man. “Death in Venice” was also broadcast but Dirk Bogard was acting. That death was never Real, but it was always Art.
Cyburbia is also a word that has long been used by the Urban Planning Community but I suspect that the new virtual world meaning of the word may overtake its grounded predecessor.
ETYM
Suburbia (noun) – an outlying district of a city, and its inhabitants and way of life.
Cyber (prefix)- it relates to things involving the internet and electronic communications and originated from the term Cybernetics.
Michael Quinion writes in World Wide Words about “a prefix out of control”. He discusses the many manifestations – cyberspace, cyberpunk, cyberphobia, to name but a few.
