11. CYBERCULTURE STUDIES

CYBERCULTURE STUDIES DEFINITION
Perspectives on the Internet and new media

COMPREHENSIVE LINK: University of Iowa Communication Studies
 links to a variety of cyber studies sites.

THEORY
 
Cyberculture Studies link

 Like Barthes, Foucault, and Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida continually uses the terms link (liasons) , web (toile) , network (réseau), and interwoven (s'y tissent), which cry out for
hypertextuality; but in contrast to Barthes, who emphasizes the writerly text and its nonlinearity, Derrida emphasizes textual openness, intertextuality, and the irrelevance of distinctions between inside and outside a particular text.
George Landow  HYPERTEXT: THE CONVERGENCE OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL THEORY AND TECHNOLOGY

Cyberculture Studies link

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
This fundamental dynamic of the old West demonstrates one reason why the metaphor of the "frontier" is useful, even indispensable, for thinking about the socio-political dynamics of the Net and the rest of the information society. The metaphor has been widely used vis a vis the Net not only because people, working sometimes alone but always within a social fabric of interconnections,  have created and settled new electronic spaces, but also because hard on their heels have come the lords of capital using all means possible to takeover,  incorporate, and valorize those spaces.
Harry Cleaver The "Space" of Cyberspace: Body Politics, Frontiers and Enclosures"

Cyberculture Studies link

BLADE RUNNER
A Cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of  fiction.
 Donna Haraway,"A Cyborg Manifesto"

PRACTICE:
Cyberculture Studies Practice Link

 a Hypertextual  analysis of SINGING IN THE RAIN

Cyberculture Studies Practice Link

Far from being a tool of dehumanization, the computer conferencign system could boost everybody's ability to contact a community of common interests
Howard Rheingold

Cyberculture Studies Practice Link
 
We don't have to reject life on the screen, but we don't have to treat it as an alternative life either. Virtual personae can be a resource for self-reflection and self-transformation.  Having  literally written our on-line world into existence, we can use the communities we build inside our machines to improve the ones outside of them.
Sherry Turkle,
Virtuality and Its Discontents

return to top

return to overview page

continue to Anti-Technology Perspectives