Cyberspace is real in that there is much going on in the world that is not reported on in the news. For example, if a man or woman had 1,000,000,000 highly det

Cyberspace is real in that there is much going on in the world that is not reported on in the news. For example, if a man or woman had 1,000,000,000 highly detailed pictures of porn in his/her house and that got reported to the news because they were stacked up on the porch, flying around everywhere, it might make the evening news in a "What a perv!" segment. But if that same person has access to even more pictures than that on the web and views them, they aren't called out on it if it is within the range of acceptable online and offline behavior. By the same token, I'd post what I think on HN and would say it in person to the same people in a bar having a drink, but I'd never post the same things in an editorial in a newspaper or on a blog. However, on HN everything is public and global. It just isn't the same as the rest of the world, even if in the end it is contained in physical space with real physical people communicating with one another. So we have another term for it. Our world itself is just as unreal, though. The media and government and even our friends and family just show us part of what is going on, and don't act or communicate as they would if they were being true. This is the reason that both philosophers such as Plato and Socrates differentiated between truth and what we learn in the world, and why popular religions such as Christianity teach us that the world is not truth- that there is something beyond it that we must aspire to.