Whether it is Microsoft's "One Drive" or Apple's "iCloud", somewhere my friend's picture is out there. With the right password and the right software, I can get a specialized computer, a "server", to send me a digital copy of the picture by email. There are other ways to see the picture and none of them are the original.
What is the original? Da Vinci used a paintbrush to dab oilpaint onto canvas but I pressed a button on a modern tablet, letting the light from my friend stream through a lens onto a bit of hardware that is sensitive to the light. That little bit of hardware is inside my tablet and nobody even wants to see it. It doesn't look like my friend at all. However, the collection of electronic signals can be used by other hardware and software to make a display that looks just like my friend. The collection of electronic signals is itself useless except as a guide for display hardware. The collection itself stays on a Google Photos computer. I don't even know where that computer is. Even something as mundane as my shot of him has probably been copied and deposited on some other backup servers somewhere. I am not worried about losing my photo even though I don't know where it is. I don't need to know.
We can say that the photo is in cyberspace, that it is "in the cloud." Several large corporations are interested in getting me to use their cloud, their cyberspace to store my photos. I could have several archives in various clouds and not actually know where any of them really are. Just as there used to be no word on the street, no gossip, before language began, there used to be no cyberspace. But now there is.
