An Introduction to Cybercultures, Part 1 (pp. 1-112)

My week-to-week postings here will usually focus on collected notes dealing with my attempts to identify key terms, theorists, and themes within and across readings. That’s not to say I won’t be posting other stuff here, but I’d also like to establish some kind of regularity, so there you have it. :)

As with any acts of selection and summary, these collections/groupings are necessarily fragmented and will most certainly omit a whole range of things that you, dear reader, will want to hear more about. I intend for these lists to be suggestive and multidirectional rather than definitive, and I’m sure my idiosyncracies and disciplinary affiliations will pop up from time to time.

All right, enough with the qualification. Moving forward!

Key Terms (for An Introduction to Cybercultures, pp. 1-112)

Cyberspace(s) – Saying that this term and its partner term “cyberculture” are contested would be quite the understatement. Bell usefully presents three dimensions of cyberspace: material, symbolic, and experiential (2), and the intersection among these three is, at least in part, where we can locate cyberspace. I find a couple of things particularly useful in Bell’s discussion: first, the foregrounding of material elements, where he points to the computational architectures that underlie cyberspace as well as the political-economic forces shaping those architectures. This is often lost in romantic conceptions of cyberspace such as ones found in pop cultural “symbolic” stories. Bell also discusses the mundanity of Internet use, which also counteracts the kind of techno-fetishism often associated with the term “cyberspace.”

Cyberculture(s) – Bell notes that distinguishing between cyberspace and cyberculture is “a false dichotomy” (8), which points to how culture enters into the picture not just at the level of online/virtual spaces themselves, but also in how cultural ideas, personal experiences and narratives, symbols, images, institutions, products, and so on interact with and are influenced by computer technologies and all things “cyber.” Pluralizing cyberculture (and cyberspace) also calls attention to the multiplicity of spaces and interactions that make up these terms.

Virtual reality – Associated with immersive virtual environments that simulate a particular “reality” and attempt to place the user in that “real” space using a mixture of hardware and software-based experiences. I’ve come across a few critiques of the word “virtual,” mostly in the context of virtual worlds such as Second Life, where some have argued for the phrase “synthetic world.” This acts as a reminder that these spaces are hybrid rather than representative of a binary between “real” and “virtual.”

Gibsonian vs. Barlovian cyberspace – Bell equates Gibsonian cyberspace with the symbolic dimension (as in popular cultural representations), while Barlovian cyberspace shifts the focus to the experiential dimension: how people experience computer technologies and how those experiences inform their cultural understanding of cyberspace.

Cyberpunk – An offshoot of sci-fi literature, film, etc. primarily (and originally) associated with the works of William Gibson; Gibson’s definition of “cyberspace” has also been highly influential. Cyberpunk’s themes include (dis)embodiment in virtual spaces, urbanism (e.g., street and city metaphors), anxieties over political-economic institutions and forms of control, and the construction of a punk/hacker ethos.

Social construction of technology – a perspective that traces the “social life” of technologies (Bell 67) and acknowledges that the interpretation of technologies by different groups of people produces situated, cultural knowledge about those technologies and influences the ways in which they are purposed for everyday use.

Forms of community – Defining “community” is too huge a task in the here and now, but I’d like to note Bell’s introduction of Tönnies’ “total community” and “association” or “society” (94). The latter is associated with the fragmentary, distributed nature of city life, while Bell notes that the “total community” is often used as a nostalgic reference point for what community “should” mean and represent.

Detraditionalization – Bell characterizes this as “the shift toward a ‘post-traditional’ society” (95). Of course, this begs the question of what exactly a tradition is, but this can also be linked with the discussion of community above (e.g., modernization has influenced the traditional structures of families and family households).

Disembedding – I associate this with a kind of fixedness in physical space and the disruption of that space; the distribution of information and points of access means that instances of communication are increasingly expanded beyond local geography.

Globalization – Related to disembedding, but the term globalization also calls attention to the challenging of political and cultural borders, where ease and speed of access have changed the ways in which we encounter information and think about inside/outside distinctions involving national communities.

Key Theorists

Gibson – definition of cyberspace; major work Neuromancer is a huge player in the construction of cyberpunk; has also provided accounts of how he arrived at the term cyberspace.

Turkle – construction of identity in online spaces; computer interfaces and representations/conceptions of interfacing; relation of social/cultural practices to “computational objects.”

Latour – I’m intrigued by the appearance of Latour and actor-network theory so far, particularly because it’s so prominent in rhetoric and professional/technical writing literature. The distinction between human and non-human in actor-network theory (and the problems thereof) will be an interesting point to keep in mind.

Baudrillard – notions of simulation and hyperreality; the simulacrum as an endless reproduction; intersects cyberspace with discussion of mediation and virtual reality.

Deleuze and Guattari – the rhizome is something I keep hearing all over the place, I’ll have to check these guys out sometime. The rhizome as hypertext; becoming and being – becoming is dynamic and never-finished.

Foucault – Discourses as not merely descriptive but definitive; discussions of surveillance and power (can be connected to both “everyday” surveillance technologies—e.g., security cameras—but also monitoring of Internet); application of Foucault: databasing and construction of various identities.

Virilio – speed and militarization as filtered through contemporary technologies; implications of these phenomena for global security; critiques of technological invasions of the body.

Rheingold – virtual communities as following from the desire of “total communities” online; associated with frontier metaphors of online community; “shared social codes and reciprocity” (Bell 100) as defining an online community.

Key Themes

Material, symbolic, and experiential dimensions of cyberspace/cybercultures – as seen in the discussion of the term cyberspace above.

Storying of cyberspace – cyberspace as constructed through personal narratives as well as various historical accounts of cyberspace.

Situating cyberculture in political-economic forces – cyberculture is not a neutral phenomenon; cybercultures are caught up in global economies, corporate interests, governmental control, etc.

Issues of ownership and control – surveillance, copyright and intellectual property, enforcement of laws and protection of rights in virtual spaces and as related to computer technologies.

Writing on/and computers – of particular interest to me as a rhet/comp teacher and student; how does writing change, materially and culturally, when it happens on computers? In online/virtual spaces?

Kinds of cultural studies of the Internet – Bell discusses Sterne’s distinction between cultural studies of online “subjectivity, textuality, and experience” and “episodic studies” that locate the Internet as “one site among many in everyday life” (qtd. in Bell 73). In terms of methodology, this distinction is useful in locating how and where to do Internet studies and reminds us that the “default” option should not be restricted to online communities only.

Tensions between “traditional” and “virtual” communities – This comes up in the discussion of Rheingold and the kinds of community referred to above; the tension arises in questions of to what extent online communities “reproduce” traditional, off-line communities or whether they represent “new” forms of community that are necessarily virtual. Also, when does a community count as a community?