“Consensual hallucination”: Cyberspace and the creation of an interpretive community

Abstract

Stanley Fish's theory of interpretive communities claims that groups of individuals who share the same interpretive frame, through socialization or other forms of common experience, will tend to read texts in a similar manner. Their experiences reinforce the textual interpretations they create and, in turn inform, shape and regulate any text they approach. We contend that these interpretive communities themselves coalesce around certain host tropes' that provide the interpretive frame and engender the creation and maintenance of these interpretive communities. Thus certain texts work upon a group of individuals to create a community just as the community works upon a text to create meaning. In his 1984 book Neuromancer, William Gibson's creation of the metaphor “cyberspace,” describing a compelling performative, embodied dimension of the computing experience, provided a “host trope” which enabled the cybertech community to coalesce, thrive, and progress within this powerful interpretive system. This essay returns to the creation of the term “cyberspace” in Neuromancer, and traces the metaphor's subsequent adoption by a group of computer experts and enthusiasts that later became known within their self‐proclaimed community as the cybertech culture. Further, we examine the performative and rhetorical force of this trope to shape the discourse of this emerging community and its technology.

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