What does this word mean, what does it have to do with technology, and why am I using it? All good questions.
First of all, it’s not a word, technically. You won’t find it in a dictionary or lexicon, because it is a neologism in Ancient Greek which takes chora, the term used in the Platonic dialog Timeaus for the container of the cosmos, and prepends the prefix kata, meaning ‘resting along side’. Taken together, katachora is the cosmos resting along side ours. It is one possible answer to the question of what the classical Attic thinkers would call that ‘place’ we call cyberspace.
I use katachora to indicate that I am dealing with a larger reality than what cyberspace might enclose. Cyberspace, with its science-fiction origins, has a very technocentric feel to it, and it’s usage seems to be coalescing into two camps; the virtual reality created by computers and brains anchored in the physical world but interacting in a liminal space, such as in William Gibson’s Neuromancer or Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash; or the loose referral to anything on the Internet as cyberspace and the accompanying frenetic hyping characterized by the affixing of ‘cyber-‘ to normal words in much the same way as ‘e-‘ and ‘i-‘ have been used by marketeers, managers, and journalists to stake out and support claims of credibility. In this way cyberspace seems unsuited for use as nomenclature for the setting in which investigations into the phenomenon that seem to have risen to prominence because of the Network Revolution, things like those described by the Network Sciences, the cultural effects of connectedness, and subsequent connetedness-enabled communities, such as Howard Reingold’s Smart-Mobs, and distributed communities with substantial on-line strong links, such as Suicide Girls or Orkut .
Katachora then, becomes the setting or the context for the investigation and development of understanding in these areas. In time it may turn out that it goes the way of the aether , but for now it’s nice to have a place to gather in all the various threads and try to sort them out