My sister's writing a dissertation and maybe she'll pipe in on this thread to let us know the title and why this is relevant, but she needs to know how Germans "...referred to the internet in news media in the 1990s and 2000s... was it primarily called a "datenautobahn" or a global space or a cyberspace or a computer network? would you mind jotting down and emailing me all the words you think I should plug into a search engine to find articles so i can figure out which terms were used when? (...) i
don't want to miss a major term out of ignorance."
So I'm guessing she'll get a lot of computer terminology, but I think what she's going to be looking for is if the Internet was primarily viewed as just a technical thing, an infrastructure, or as a place, and how the social constructing of the Internet was reflected in the changing terminology. You all remember "meatspace", a term which died out pretty quick, don't know if that even ever made it to Germany... Anyway it sounds like an entire dissertation to me but here's what I've come up with so far:
Datennetz
Cyberraum
um... and it's awfully late at night but maybe someone'll have more ideas in the morning? Maybe this is more random chat or life in Germany than it is Translation anyway...