These are reasons, but I think the more important reason is that trying to define a "space" crewated by the telephone independent of the rest of society makes no sense to us. The telephone is simply a form of communication in society, not a space apart from it.

This is the primary reason for objecting to "cyberspace." It implies a separation which doesn't exist, and limits our awareness of the deeper interconnection which is the real phenomenon to think about.

To be literally true, I think, these statements would have to mean "Internet" is a symbol standing for "social" networking and exchanges of opinion. Not business transactions, traffic in scientific data, bilateral personal friendships, professional exchanges among, e.g. computer programmers, lawyers, criminals, etc., none of which groups consist of "like-minded peers."

Of these examples, only search biasing in broad websearch seems even to approach the seriousness you 're giving it. Facebook is about people you already know, or know you want to know. And in websearching, the more specific you are the less it matters what fine-tuning the engine might do on more broadly-phrased searches. Which makes the whole "Google keeps you from finding new things" argument seem pretty weak.

It seems to me that this essay depends on a narrow definition of both "Cyberspace" and "Internet" as something like "sites or modes of public discourse." You are offering Cass Sunstein's argument from Republic.com, that our public engagement is narrowed rather than broadened by forms of communication that enable us to locate and amplify the thinking of people we agree with, supplemented by an argument drawn (without much data) from the idea of search algorithm biasing. This argument says, in essence "people look for reinforcement of their views and opinions on the Net, and capitalism causes biasing in advertising-supported search facilities that causes them to get reinforcing information even when they weren't consciously seeking it out."

These arguments have problems on their own terms, which aren't addressed here. But more importantly, this is hardly the whole of the Net. These metaphors, as you rightly say I warned you at the outset, conceal more than they help to reveal. Obviously, to use another metaphor, our own nervous system transmits and makes "actionable" all our compulsions, our obsessions, and our cognitive biases. But it isn't made of or even mostly about those compulsions and obsessions. Mostly its about keeping our heart beating, our digestion working, and—at the highest level of abstraction—coordinating all the relations among all the cells in us that are "us," and also many of the cells in us that are "other." The "space" illusion implicit in "Cyberspace" has caught you too: you are thinking of the Net as "agora," where it is actually merely the fact of connection. Rather than a space, it's a condition of society, which is why I call it the Internet Society, rather than the Internet, or Cyberspace. Everything you want to say can be said, but it will be less confusing and more enabling of others' insights if it isn't put into an envelope that turns thought in these other directions.