Principles of Digital Media

ME9HP

Cyberculture:Community

IdentityGender

Race

David Silver

• Provides a historical view of cyber cultural studies in David Gauntlett’s book Web Studies

Popular Cyberculture• Descriptive nature• dystopian rants• Utopian raves

Dystopian rants• declining literacy• less than grounded sense of reality• life in the real world is far more

interesting, far more important, far richer, than anything you'll ever find on a computer screen

Utopian raves• Technofuturists• Technology is absolutely, 100 percent,

positive• 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

Electronic frontier as metaphor

• Cyberspace a new frontier of civilization, a digital domain that could and would bring down big business, foster democratic participation, and end economic and social inequities

Gibson• "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)

Al Gore on new technology

• These highways 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.

Cyberculture Studies• Started with Julian Dibble’s A Rape in

Cyberspace• Typified by Allucquere Rosanne Stone’s

definition of cyberspace:• "incontrovertibly social spaces in which

people still meet face-to-face, but under new definitions of both 'meet' and 'face'"

• Stands on the twin pillars of Communities and Identities

Rheingold• Definition of virtual community:• 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

Knowbody knows you’re a dog

Turkle

• Described Computers early on as a second self

• Finds that people can be freer about the identities they adopt in cyberspace

• Interested in the multiple and dispersed self

• Disembodiment a theme

Identity online vs RL• '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’ (Quote from Turkle’s interviewee Ava)

Enthusiasm

• Both Turkle and Rheingold’s work is essentially enthusiastic about the potential of cyberculture

Other developments in the Cyberculture Studies period• Growing access to the internet

• Increasing analysis from a range of theoretical perspectives:– Sociology– Anthropology - Ethnography– Linguistics– Feminism– Community activism

Critical Cyberculture Studies• Instead of approaching cyberspace

as an entity to describe, contemporary cyberculture scholars view it as a place to contextualize and seek to offer more complex, more problematized findings.

Critical cyberculture studies:• explores the social, cultural, and economic

interactions which take place online; • unfolds and examines the stories we tell about

such interactions; • analyzes a range of social, cultural, political,

and economic considerations which encourage, make possible, and/or thwart individual and group access to such interactions;

• assesses the deliberate, accidental, and alternative technological decision- and design-processes which, when implemented, form the interface between the network and its users.

Jones

• The “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"

Gender

Haraway– Interested in the relationship between

feminism and technology– Opposes the idea that technology and

feminism are in opposition– Suggests that rather than a disembodied

future for humanity, that the model of the cyborg - half human half machine provides a better way of resolving feminist ideas about the importance of the body in culture with ideas about technology

The Cyborg Manifesto

– Is interested in the connection of the cyborg to hybrid, fluid, fractured and postmodern themes

– Considers the idea of postgender and the posthuman

– Haraway seems to suggest that if knowbody knows our gender online then we are free to be liberated from the contraints of gender

Plant– Recovers the history of the role of

women in the creation of modern computing

– Particularly focusses on the work of Ada Lovelace - the first programmer

– Concerned with the relationship between traditional female labour and the invention of computing

– Suggests that female perspectives will continue to influence the development of computing in the future

The power of identity

• Manuel Castells contends that in the Network Society Ethnicity is Probably more of an economic issue than in the pre-network society

Race in Cyberspace• Questions the idea that cyberspace is

a race (and therefore racism) free zone• Notes the absence of race identifers in

most MUD environments• Witnesses the refusal to address issues

of Race and ethnicity in many online environments

• Problematises the idea of the disembodied self online

Themes from Race in Cyberspace

• The connection between identity, language and race especially in text based environments

• Online Nationalism• Language online and cyber-english• Connections between access to

technology and funding for education• Black Characters as mediators between

the real and the virtual in popular film• Beth E Kolko’s Race-aware MOO

WebCam Women• Use the internet and webcam

technology to experiment with ideas about the connections between real life and virtual life

• Concerned with identity online• On the borders between presenting

real life and performance• On the borders between

art, eroticism and porn

I-love-Xena• Web sites concerned with building

communities around fandom• Fandom as a terratory where issues

of activity and passivity in relation to the media come into focus

• Fan fiction• Contested subtexts• Campaigning around content