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alt title(s): Inside The Internet 
They have the Internet in your brain now?
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. — William Gibson, Neuromancer
The idea of a dimension having mystical effect on our own dimension is Older Than Dirt. Sometimes the dimensional gateway would be a mirror or book. A computer screen is both of these.
Cyberspace just puts a modern spin on the idea.
Rather than go Down The Rabbit Hole into a Spirit World, the character puts on some VR goggles, plugs a DSL cable into his skull, or gets "digitized" into data. What do they see when they go online? A pretty nifty 3D world, designed as a Viewer Friendly Interface made up of Holographic Terminals over a background full of Matrix Raining Code superimposed over Tron Lines. Not only is everything online, you can expect "surfing" from one site/database to another to be handled with all the aesthetic aplomb of a Design Student's Orgasm and to be completely lagless.
One curious alternative idea that seems to infest many cyberspaces is travel time... The Metaverse of Snow Crash has people walking to the shops on the Internet. This could be seen as the illogical conclusion to the increasingly graphical user interface design evolution from the concise but user unfriendly command line to drag-and-drop windows and pointers and presumably to the final stages where your avatar crumples up your virtual document and walks over the virtual bin with it. People in the future clearly have a phenomenal amount of patience with their user interfaces. Essentially, Cyberspace is stylized into a simulation that's virtually indistinguishable from real life, and less of a recreational pastime or tool.
If there are other webizens or hackers in cyberspace (not to mention AI's and ghosts), they will either be amorphous gobs of light, be completely outlandishly dressed (or have non-human avatars) because there are no physical limitations, or appear exactly as they would in real life (even wearing the street clothes they were wearing as they logged on).
Sometimes, a Holodeck Malfunction turns Cyberspace outright dangerous—not just online, but in real life, because Your Mind Makes It Real.
Frequently pops up in Cyberpunk and Post Cyberpunk settings. See also The Metaverse. Compare Platonic Cave. Also compare Hard Light, where Cyberspace can manipulate the physical world.
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Examples
Anime & Manga
Films
- The classic example would be the movie Tron, which was made before the Internet was in its present form. Most modern cyberspace forms owe at least something to this depiction.
- The Matrix series is probably the most popular depiction.
- Also featuring Keanu Reeves, Ice T, and a talking dolphin: Johnny Mnemonic.
- The less-classic Lawnmower Man.
- In The Thirteenth Floor, humanity creates a computer-simulated reality so detailed that its denizens become self-aware. We then discover that our universe is itself only a computer-simulated reality run by the "next level up".
Literature
- The term "cyberspace" itself was coined by William Gibson in his 1982 short story "Burning Chrome", though it is indelibly associated with his later novel Neuromancer (quoted above). The setting in this story involves computer networks whose operating system is now a virtual reality simulation of a Tron-like "world in the computer".
- Interesting in that you don't "walk" through Gibson's cyberspace... you move across a grid more or less at will, assuming you know where you want to go. There is no slow walk or fly if you don't want to admire the view.
- Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is another notable example of the "cyberspace qua operating system" network and is the trope namer for The Metaverse.
- A particularly bad offender with respect to UI inconvenience... walking between sites in the metaverse takes time, and in one particularly unpleasant example a giant animated, unskippable intro flight sequence was required to visit a particular site.
- Tad Williams' Otherland books successfully combine Sci-Fi and Fantasy tropes by being set Twenty Minutes Into The Future, and creating Fantasy environments within the bounds of cyberspace. It's worth mentioning that travel time is normally nearly instantaneous, but specific virtual environments can be configured to simulate realistic movement, and this is considered something of a cachet of the eccentric and well-off.
- Alexander Besher
 's Rim trilogy starts with an earthquake which traps thousands of people's consciousnesses in the virtual worlds run by the Satori Corporation. Later in the trilogy, avatars gain sentience.
- The second most popular of Sergei Lukyanenko's novel series (after Night Watch) is Labyrinth of Reflections, which revolves around "the Deep", a Cyber Space that allows full immersion through a series of hypnotic images that each user is subjected to before going online. The images put the user in a sort of trance where their brain "fixes" the imperfect virtual reality of the Deep by perceiving it as a photo-realistic space, allowing for full immersion. Normal People can't leave the trance on their own but some (aptly dubbed "Divers") can and their primary job is finding people who are stuck in Cyber Space and bail them out before they die of dehydration in Real Life.
Live Action TV
- Americanized Sentai refit Superhuman Samurai Cyber Squad centered around this.
- Doctor Who: the fourth Doctor story, The Deadly Assassin, set on the Doctor's home planet, Gallifrey, had him venturing into a cyber dreamscape called the Matrix.
- VR Troopers featured virtual reality as an Alternate Universe, so things created in VR (such as Mecha Mooks, supervillain forms, and a Monster Of The Week for every occasion) could be brought into reality. "Virtual Reality" tends to resemble the BBC Quarry in most episodes.
- Fat Guy Stuck in Internet portrays cyberspace as the other dimension form of this trope.
- Although we never see it from his perspective, Moloch in Buffy the Vampire Slayer deliberately mixes cyberspace with this trope's pre-digital roots. A demon imprisoned in the pages of a cursed book, Moloch is accidentally transferred into cyberspace when the book's pages are scanned. Though he's technically still not free, the demon finds being "trapped" in the internet to be far more empowering.
- Ghost Whisperer unexpectedly brought Melinda into cyberspace in the episode "Ghost in the Machine", in the context of the fictional social network/MMORPG/sandbox Virtual Life. You see, there was a ghost who was in the game itself for complicated reasons... and she can "enter" the game, too, which of course is never going to be touched on again... and, um... Jennifer Love Hewitt in a stripperiffic avatar outfit!
Tabletop Games
- Shadowrun has the Matrix, which one can either skim or enter in full-immersion mode.
- Server Crash, a 4chan-made pen and paper game, is about all of humanity being trapped in cyberspace forever.
- Genius The Transgression has The Grid- a strange realm made from people's perception of the Internet as this trope.
- Similarly, Mage The Ascension had the Digital Web, an spiritual reflection of cyberspace heavily patronized by the Virtual Adepts.
- Cyber Hero by Hero Games. Travel and combat in cyberspace used almost the same game mechanics as in the real world.
- Cyberspace by Iron Crown Enterprises (I.C.E.).
- R. Talsorian Games' Cyberpunk 2020.
- In Alternity, the Internet, radio, TV, the telephone networks, etc., have all been replaced by a single netwoprk known as "The Grid". While most people just connect with PD As, "Grid Pilots" link their brain to it and walk around inside websites set up as 3D worlds.
Video Games
- Rez (pictured), an on-rails shooter/rhythm action game for the Dreamcast, PS 2 and the Xbox 360 based entirely around the process of of hacking into a Master Computer. Very much an example of Hollywood Hacking via Extreme Graphical Representation - the obligatory vector graphics are present and correct.
- The levels in Shadow the Hedgehog that are set in the Internet and the computer network in Eggman's base.
- The Cyber Track zone in Sonic Advance 2, and its equivalent in Sonic Advance 3 also fit this. Though the former is Tron-ish, while the latter feels more like the physical insides of a giant computer.
- Mega Man X4 had Cyber Peacock's level set in cyber space, X5 had the "Zero Space" final levels and the Zero series had cyberspace as the parallel world where Cyber Elves and reploid souls live, which is essentially the source code of reality, such that Cyber Elves do their magic by hacking cyberspace.
- System Shock frequently requires the player to log into a cyberspace representation of the Citadel Station network in order to retrieve passwords and disable door locks.
- Ansem the Wise from Kingdom Hearts II was obsessed with Cyberspace, as many of his inventions seen in game revolve around it.
- Roxas is trapped in a digital copy of Twilight Town where he can live as a normal teenager. He and everyone else enter the data-world physically though, not mentally, and apparently everything in that world can be brought into the real world, solid and everything. As the journal says that Ansem used ENCOM technology to build the virtual Twilight Town, and the movie Tron used a laser scanner to physically teleport Flynn in and out of cyberspace, this does make sense.
- Later, Sora enters a copy of the virtual world from Tron (the only case in the series where a Disney world is explicitly stated to be an alternate universe from that of the movie), which functions in a similar manner as the movie. However, like in the Data Twilight Town, items made in the computer world can be removed. The MCP even manages to use Hollow Bastion's Heartless Factory to materialize The Heartless from Cyberspace.
- In Final Mix+, Sora can visit the Cavern of Remembrance, where he can fight data simulations of the members of Organization XIII. Upcoming sequel 'coded' will also take place in Cyber Space and star a digital copy of Sora.
- In the Sly Cooper series, Bentley "hacks" miscellaneous devices by playing a retro-style shoot 'em up.
- Like everything else, this trope is used in a very tongue-in-cheek way as the setting of World Of Goo's fourth chapter, "Information Superhighway." All the levels are monochromatic green-and-black until you turn on the world's Graphical Processing Unit.
- Beneath A Steel Sky sees you revisit a Cyberspace environment as a number of different users to gain clues for the 'real world' adventure.
- Happens twice T 260 G's scenario in Sa Ga Frontier; once during a story mission and another which is the Point Of No Return
- Source mod Dystopia, which is set in a Cyberpunk setting, features Cyberspace as an significant part of gameplay.
Web Comics
Web Original
- In the Whateley Universe, being able to dive into cyberspace is Merry's best power. It turns out she's not the only one who can do it, though, and one of the others is trying to kill everyone...
Western Animation
- Quest World in The Real Adventures Of Jonny Quest.
- Some episodes of Freakazoid!, including his origin story.
- An episode of The Fairly OddParents.
- Futurama has the future Internet depicted as a classic cyberspace set-up, with a huge skyscraper as Google's home page, and all the porn sites in the red light district.
- Reboot was a variation; it had the actual computer data/programs/whatnot as characters, with the mysterious, capricious, and destructive "User" as the only sign of humans.
- In other words, it was modelled after Tron.
- Cyberchase on PBS. The entire series takes place inside a world actually named Cyberspace, where sentient computer programs act like people.
- Code Lyoko. Especially the Digital Sea in Season 4.
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