Cyberculture
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Cyberculture is frequently and flexibly used term lacking an explicit meaning. Generally, it refers to (as the prefix indicates) cultural issues related to “cyber-topics”, e.g. cybernetics, computerization, digital revolution, cyborgization of the human body, etc., and always incorporates at least an implicit link to an anticipation of the future, to a kind of Lunenfeldian “not yet”. However, any more explicit understanding of the referent of cyberculture varies from author to author and is actually often absent. Basically, we can say that cyberculture encompasses the human-machine social and cultural levels involved in what was previously defined as cyberspace, or a wide social and cultural movement closely linked to advanced information and communication technologies (ICT), their emergence and development and their cultural colonization between 1960s-1990s.
There can be find numerous specific concepts of cyberculture formulated by several authors (Lev Manovich, Pierre Lévy, Margaret Morse, Arturo Escobar, for example), but most of these concepts concentrate only on certain aspects of what can be considered as constitutive elements of cybercultural phenomena and they do not cover these in sufficient detail.
Some authors aiming to more comprehensive approach distinguish between early and contemporary cyberculture (Jakub Macek) or between cyberculture as cultural context of ICTs and cyberculture (e.g. cyberculture studies) as "a particular approach to the study of the 'culture + technology' complex" (David Lister et al.).
Early cyberculture (dating from the beginning of the 1960s to the first half of the 1990s) can be described as a socio-cultural formation developed outside the cultural and social mainstream (or it developed in a kind of dialectical relationship with them). It is exactly this early cyberculture that initiated the signification of the world of advanced information and communication technologies. Contemporary cyberculture could be understood on one hand as a set of cultural practices enabling us to deal with new forms of information and on the other hand as a set of NGOs, civic activities and subcultural social groups forming the discoursive opposition against the governmental and commercial interests on the field of ICTs.
Cyberculture studies cover the examination of the subject and the forming communities within the realms of those networked spaces that are being created through technological devices and amplifications. Cyberculture engages into political, philosophical and psychological issues engendered by humans in the network and by humans in cultural relation to ICTs. Cyberculture studies are being developed in numerous institutions, with the European Graduate School being one of the most relevant and dedicated since it gathers in its faculty many staff who have worked on closely related fields of thought.
Donna Haraway, Manuel De Landa, Bruce Sterling, Hendrik Speck, Wolfgang Schirmacher, Victor J.Vitanza, Gregory Ulmer, Jean Baudrillard and few others that have produce relevant work that define the cyberculture.
See also
External links
- Defining Cyberculture (http://macek.czechian.net/defining_cyberculture.htm) by Jakub Macek (http://macek.czechian.net)
- Resource Centre for Cyberculture Studies (http://www.com.washington.edu/rccs/)
- A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (http://www.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html) by John Perry Barlow
- A place where Cyberculture is a topic of research and thought (http://www.egs.edu)