UPDATED Sept 2014 Historical overview of the study of cyberculture. Based entirely on David Silver, 2000, http://rccs.usfca.edu/intro.asp

1. MED122
Cyberculture:
A whistle-stop
trip
1

2. What is cyberculture?
• A slippery term to define
• ‘it is the culture of and in cyberspace’
• Read & Gessler, 1996: 306
2

3. What is cyberculture?
• ‘To define cyberculture is to engage in
obsolescence’
• Read & Gessler, 1996: 306
3

4. What is cyberculture?
• Cyberculture is the culture that has emerged,
or is emerging, from the use of computer
networks for communication, entertainment
and business.
4

5. What is cyberculture?
 ‘...the study of various social phenomena associated with
the Internet and other new forms of network
communication. Examples of what falls under cyberculture
studies are online communities, online multi-player gaming,
the issue of online identity, the sociology and the ethnography
of email usage, cell phone usage in various communities; the
issues of gender and ethnicity in Internet usage; and so on.’
 Lev Manovich (2002: 16)
5

6. • David Silver, ‘Looking Backwards, Looking
Forward: Cyberculture Studies 1990-2000’
• http://rccs.usfca.edu/intro.asp
6

7. • From mid 1990s onwards the study of
cyberculture flourished as the internet
began to grow
7

8. 3 distinct stages
1. Popular cyberculture
2. Cyberculture studies
3. Critical cyberculture
8

9. 1 - Popular
cyberculture
• journalistic origins
• descriptive in nature
• metaphor of the internet-as-frontier
9

10. AApprriill 11999933 JJuullyy 11999944
10

11. 11

12. limited dualism
dystopian rants utopian raves
12

13. limited dualism
dystopian rants utopian raves
13

14. John Perry Barlow
• A Declaration of the
Independence of
Cyberspace (1990)
Hear Barlow read the speech and discuss it’s origins here
Read the original speech on the EFF site here
14

15. MONDO 2000 bOing bOing Wired
15

16. 16
• Louis Rossetto (Wired’s
publisher) likened cyberspace
to "a new economy, a new
counter culture, and
beyond politics"
• Kevin Kelly (Wired’s executive
editor) proclaimed
"technology is absolutely,
100 percent, positive"

17. • Contributing editor John Perry
Barlow "with the development
of the Internet, and with the
increasing pervasiveness of
communication between
networked computers, we are
in the middle of the most
transforming technical event
since the capture of fire"
17

18. • “These highways -- or, more accurately,
networks of distributed intelligence -- will
allow us to share information, to connect,
and to communicate as a global
community. From these connections we
will derive robust and sustainable
economic progress, strong democracies,
better solutions to global and local
environmental challenges, improved health
care, and -- ultimately -- a greater sense of
shared stewardship of our small planet.”
18
Al Gore

19. • “Cyberspace. A consensual
hallucination experienced
daily by billions of legitimate
operators . . . A graphic
representation of data
abstracted from the banks of
every computer in the human
system. Unthinkable
complexity”
• (Gibson, 1984 Neuromancer)
19

20. Internet as ‘frontier’
metaphor
• Kapor and Barlow (1990) "Across the Electronic
Frontier":
• “In its present condition, cyberspace is a frontier region,
populated by the few hardy technologists who can tolerate
the austerity of its savage computer interfaces, incompatible
communication protocols, proprietary barricades, cultural
and legal ambiguities, and general lack of useful maps or
metaphors.”
20

21. Internet as ‘frontier’
metaphor
• D. Rushkoff (1994) Media Virus: Hidden
Agendas in Popular Culture:
• "Nowhere has the American pioneer spirit been
more revitalized than on the electronic frontier".
21

22. Internet as ‘frontier’
metaphor
• D.B Whittle (1997) Cyberspace: The Human
Dimension:
• "The pioneers, settlers, and squatters of the
virgin territories of cyberspace have divided
some of that land into plots of social order and
plowed it into furrows of discipline -- for the
simple reason that is natural resources can only
be found in the mind and have great value if
shared"
22

23. 2 - Cyberculture
Studies
• Julian Dibbell (1993) “A Rape in Cyberspace; or
How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two
Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database
into a Society”
• LambdaMOO
23

24. 24

25. • Cyberspace as "incontrovertibly social
spaces in which people still meet face-to-face,
but under new definitions of both
'meet' and 'face'"
• Allucquere Rosanne Stone (1991) “Will the real body please
stand up?: Boundary stories about virtual cultures” In
Benedikt, M. (ed.) Cyberspace: First Steps
25

26. • A group of people who may or may not meet one another
face-to-face, and who exchange words and ideas through
the mediation of computer bulletin boards and networks.
• In cyberspace, we chat and argue, engage in intellectual
discourse, perform acts of commerce, exchange
knowledge, share emotional support, make plans,
brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose
them, play games and metagames, flirt, create a little high
art and a lot of idle talk.
• We do everything people do when people get together,
but we do it with words on computer screens, leaving our
bodies behind
• Howard Rheingold, 1993, “A slice of life in my virtual
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community”

27. • The Virtual Community:
Homesteading on the
Electronic Frontier, 1993
27

28. The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link
1985-present
28

29. • We temporarily have access to a tool that could bring
conviviality and understanding into our lives and might help
revitalize the public sphere.
• The same tool, improperly controlled and wielded, could
become an instrument of tyranny. The vision of a citizen-designed,
citizen-controlled worldwide communications
network is a version of technological utopianism that could
be called the vision of "the electronic agora"
• H. Rheingold, 1993, The Virtual Community
29

30. • Sherry Turkle (1995) Life on the Screen
• 'Virtuality need not be a prison. It can be the
raft, the ladder, the transitional space, the
moratorium, that is discarded after reaching
greater freedom.
• We don't have to reject life on the screen, but
we don't have to treat it as an alternate life
either'
30

31. 31

32. mid-1990s onwards
• introduction of the first
web browsers led to an
internet gold-rush
• more people came online
• better user experience
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(gui > ftp)
• new scholar = new ideas
• dozens of academic
books published

33. 3 - Critical
Cyberculture
• Moves beyond description
33

34. Critical cyberculture studies...
1. … explores the social, cultural, and economic interactions
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which take place online
2. ... unfolds and examines the stories we tell about such
interactions
3. ... analyzes a range of social, cultural, political, and economic
considerations which encourage, make possible, and/or
thwart individual and group access to such interactions
4. ... assesses the deliberate, accidental, and alternative
technological decision- and design-processes which, when
implemented, form the interface between the network
and its users

35. critical caution?
• "Internet is another in a line of modern
technologies that undermine traditional notions
of civil society that require unity and shun
multiplicity while giving impressions that they in
fact re-create such a society"
• Steve Jones (1997) Virtual Culture: Identity &
Communication in Cybersociety
35

36. • complex interactions and behaviour
in Usenet communities
• ethical violations, policing of conduct
- M. McLaughlin et al (1995)
• news forms of expression and
relationships which move between
face-to-face and networked
interactions - N. Baym (1995)
36

37. Discoursing cyberspace
• cyberspace as a hostile masculine realm, a space unsafe
for women and children?
• “the idea that women merit special protections in an
environment as incorporeal as the Net is intimately
bound up with the idea that women's minds are weak,
fragile, and unsuited to the rough and tumble of public
discourse”
• L. Miller (1995) ‘Women and children first: Gender and the settling of
the electronic frontier’ in Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics
of Information
37

38. • Wired has consistently and accurately
been compared in the national media
to Playboy. It contains the same
glossy pictures of certified nerd-suave
things to buy - which, since it's
the nineties, includes cool hand-held
scanners as well as audio equipment
and cars – it is the wishbook of
material desire for young men”
• P Borsook (1996) The memoirs of a token:
An aging Berkeley feminist examines
Wired
38

39. Online Access &
Barriers
• the "digital divide" between certain groups of Americans has
increased between 1994 and 1997 so that there is now an
even greater disparity in penetration levels among some
groups. There is a widening gap, for example, between those
at upper and lower income levels. Additionally, even though
all racial groups now own more computers than they did in
1994, Blacks and Hispanics now lag even further behind
Whites in their levels of PC-ownership and on-line access.
• National Telecommunications and Information Administration
(1998) ‘Falling Through The Net II: New Data on the Digital
Divide”
39

40. Online Access &
Barriers
• "The Net nation deploys shared knowledge and language to
unite against outsiders: Net jargon extends beyond technical
language to acronyms both benign (BTW, 'By the way') and
snippy (RTFM, 'Read the fucking manual'). It includes
neologisms, text-graphical hybrids called emoticons, and a
thoroughgoing anti-'newbie' snobbery. Like any other
community, it uses language to erect barriers to
membership"
• C. Bailey (1996) Virtual Skin: Articulating Race in Cyberspace
40

41. Online Access &
Barriers
• Digital design
• HCI (Human Computer Interaction)
• Usability studies
• Access for the visually impaired
41

42. Web Studies?
• “The aim … is to shift scholarly discussion about
the internet forwards, so that it fully considers
the multi-faceted and popular Web, instead of
contenting itself with publishing yet another
article about how no-one knows who you are in
cyberspace (which is an interesting, if rather
obvious, point – but how many books do we need
to tell us this?).”
• David Gauntlett (2000) web.studies
42

43. Web Studies?
• “The idea behind Web.Studies was to treat internet
media like any other popular media that appeals to
people (without, of course, forgetting about the things
that made it unique). In a world where people are still
burbling about 'cyberculture' - a term whose useful
potential has been killed off by the staggering number of
tedious things that have been written about it - I believe
we can still be confident that this is refreshing and
appropriate. New media would be nothing if it wasn't
meaningful to people, if it wasn't a site of sociability,
politics, art, emotion, music and dancing. (Of course,
that's what 'cyberculture' refers to - maybe without the
dancing - but I'm not sure we need new nerdwords)”
43

44. Struggle to make sense
of the web
1. How do we make sense of the disruption to major
entertainment industries business models by people
exchanging files?
2. What is the role of established publishers when anyone can
self-publish?
3. To what extent has the Internet brought about increased
access to information and the spreading of democracy?
4. How beneficial is anonymity online and should it be
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protected?

45. 1 - have you ever participated in an digital/online
community?
2 - to what extent do you think it's appropriate to study
people's behaviour online (and what can it tell us)?
3 - have you ever witnessed something unsavoury or
unpalatable in the realms of online/digital/cyber culture?
4 - if so, what was it about that incident that that was
significant and does it have an offline equivalent?
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