Key Concepts in Critical Cyberculture Studies

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Key Concepts in Critical Cyberculture Studies
NOTE Strangely enough, definitions are seldom
definitive. Almost any important word has
multiple, sometimes conflicting definitions.
These keywords will, along with the Glossary in
our course text Web Studies, represent working
definitions to give us a common vocabulary for
discussion.
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culture
Culture is one of the most complex, contested
words in our language. Culture involves at least
three components what people think, what they
do, and the material products they produce. For
our purposes a culture consists of the
collection of stories people tell, the actions
they take, and the objects they produce in order
to give meaning to their lives as members of a
particular group.
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cyberculture(s)
Cyberculture is the collective name for all the
meaning making practices that take place in and
around the internet. I use the term
cybercultures in the plural to note that this
overarching culture can be analyzed only when it
is broken down into smaller subcultures.
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cyberspace(s)
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination
experienced daily by billions A graphic
representation of data abstracted from the banks
of every computer in the human system --
William Gibson Neuromancer (1984). That the
term cyberspace was coined by a science fiction
writer 10 years before the Internet existed, yet
has become a common term for describing it,
reminds us that part of the reality of the Net is
that it is an imagined space. The imagined place
in which cybercultural interactions happen. For
our purposes, we will sometimes pluralize it to
cyberspaces in order to remind ourselves that
imaging this space as single, seamless one may be
misleading.
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subcultures
A subculture is a coherent, smaller collective
within a larger culture. There are ethnic
subcultures, religious ones, game playing ones
(Dungeons and Dragons) work-based ones, political
ones, fan subcultures, etc. Cyberspaces are
packed full of various subcultures, defined by
chat rooms, news groups, MOOs and MUDS, favorite
websites, fan sites, etc. Some subcultures can
be characterized as dominant, others as
oppositional or alternative (when they
explicitly or implicitly challenge mainstream
cultural values, forms, ideas, or styles).
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text
Any unit of meaning isolated for the purposes of
cultural analysis.
The text in a given analysis could be as small
as a single image on one web page, or as large as
the whole internet. Web texts can include
words, still pictures, animations, video, audio,
even the touch of a keyboard. Analyzing web texts
will mean looking at one or more of these
elements, and often their various interrelations.
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encoding/codes/decoding
Encodings are the meanings made by the producers
of texts
Codes are the material signs (words, images,
sounds) present in a a text.
Decodings are the meanings made by audiences
Note this does note refer to computer code in
our context, but rather to cultural coding via
language, sound and image.
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ideology
1. Consciously held and systematic political
ideas (traditional defintion).
2. Unconscious or hidden tendencies to offer
a viewpoint that supports the self-interest of a
particular group of people. Thus, the
ideology of a text is its unconscious or
hidden political bias in favor of one group over
another.
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ideological bias
All texts have ideological bias -- certain views
of how the world is or should be -- built into
them. Sometimes that bias is intentional, but
more often it is structured into a text
unconsiously. Claims to pure objectivity or
neutrality, or claims that something is natural
or unnatural, are among the strongest forms of
ideological bias since they attempt to remove the
possibility of cultural debate.
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hegemony
The process through which elite or dominant
groups gain consent to their rule from
subordinate social groups without force, physical
violence or overt coercion. Usually this is
done by convincing the subordinate group that the
dominant group knows best or is acting in the
best interests of the subordinate group or that
resistance is futile (inducing apathy is one of
the great tools of dominant social
forces). Hegemony is largely an unconscious,
social process, not a conscious conspiracy.
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hegemonic processes
Hegemony is always in process, never fully
achieved, never complete. There is always some
resistance, some counter-hegemonic processes at
work. Sometimes the dominant forces use even this
resistance to their advantage, however, by
pointing dissent as proof of free choice, while
continuing to dominate most social
institutions. Hegemony is often achieved through
saturation. It is not that alternatives to the
mainstream do not exist, but rather that they
tend to get drown in that main stream amidst so
many messages favorable to those with power (it
far easier, for example, for most Web users to
find mainstream websites than to find alternative
ones because of hegemonic control of portals).
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Myth
Repeated stories that take on a central pattern
of significance in a culture by linking many
smaller stories together. Myths are the
narrative form of ideology, the way ideology is
turned into stories that are taken for granted as
truths about the culture. Myths are usually
neither wholly true nor wholly false. They
are partial truths made to seem like absolute
ones.
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Key social variables in cyberculture analysis
Social class Race/ethnicity Nationality Urban/Rura
l Gender Sexual orientation Age Political
ideology Techno-knowledge
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gender sexism
Gender the system of meanings and
representations attached in a given culture to
sexed bodies as fixed or natural identities
Under U.S. cultural norms, gender is fixed as
masculine and feminine qualities attached to male
and female bodies. Sexism the practice by which
one gender is given systematically greater
social, economic, cultural and/or political power
over the other.
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racism vs. prejudice
Where racial prejudice has to do with personal
attitudes, racism is a power relationship in
which prejudice has been systematically
structured into institutions (political,
economic, social, and cultural) It is possible
to have racism without prejudice when a no
longer attitudinally racist group continues to
benefit from racist structures and institutions.
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race racism
Race is a socially constructed category by which
certain physical characteristics common to most
members of a group are ascribed to all members
and given positive value (racial supremacy) or
negative value (racial degradation). Race is a
biologically insignificant fact given great
social significance. Racism is a power
relationship by which racial prejudice is
systematically structured to the advantage of one
group and the disadvantage of another.
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formation
A formation is a historically changing, but
relatively stable, structure of practices and
ideas by which social categories of identity
(racial, gender, class, sexuality) come into
being and become dominant for a time. The term
formation, as we will be using it, was first used
in association with race as in racial formation
(Omi and Winant). We will generalize this idea to
talk about, gender formations, class formations,
as well as racial formations, among
others. Formations generally hide their
historically variable reality under claims to be
the natural order of things.
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cultural competencies
Cultural competency refers to the degree of
knowledge of a given community sufficient to
understand and represent it adequately and
fairly. Obviously, it is a relative concept
since no representation of a culture, subculture
or community can be perfect. Cultural competency
usually emerges from deep, lived immersion in a
culture, but may sometimes be gained from
serious, sympathetic study from outside that
culture.
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subject position
The socially structured positioning of an
individual vis-à-vis the wider culture according
to the key variables of race, class, gender, etc.
Production side the ideal receiver of a text
encoded into that text. (When a website is
designed, who is consciously thought to be the
target audience, or who is unconsciously
assumed to be that audience.)
Audience side the actual social position
through which a text is decoded (Who actually
uses a website, and how does their social
position shape how they use the site.)
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Culture in Motion
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Elements of a Critical Cyberculture Studies
?Production Political Economic Analysis
?Textual Analysis
?Audience/Reception Analysis
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Four Domains of Critical Cyberculture Studies
According to David Silver critical cyberculture
studies analyzes four main, overlapping,
interacting areas 1) Critical cyberculture
studies explores the social, cultural, and
economic interactions which take place online
2) Critical cyberculture studies unfolds and
examines the stories we tell about such
interactions 3) Critical cyberculture studies
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) Critical
cyberculture assesses the deliberate, accidental,
and alternative technological decision- and
design-processes which, when implemented, form
the interface between the network and its users.
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1) Critical cyberculture studies explores the
social, cultural, and economic interactions
which take place online
What various motivations bring people online --
work, play, sex, education, buying, selling,
meeting etc. -- and what happens to them when
they get there? Who does what in cyberspace and
to what end? To what extent are their desires
met? To what extent are their desires
changed? What possibilities for personal
transformation exist and to what extent are they
realized? What possibilities for group
tranformation exist and to what exent?
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2) Critical cyberculture studies unfolds and
examines the stories we tell about cyberspace
and theinteractions that occur there
How do the stories the culture tells about
cyberspace compare to what actual happens in that
space? How do those stories in turn impact what
happens in cyberspace?
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3) Critical cyberculture studies analyzes a range
of social, cultural, political, and economic
considerations which encourage, make possible,
and/or thwart individual and group access to
such interactions
How should we define access to cyberculture(s)? H
ow much and what kind of access is desirable and
for whom? What barriers to access have existed
in the past and what barriers exist now? What
has been meant by the term digital divide and
how should that divide (or those divides) be
bridged or eliminated?
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4) Critical cyberculture assesses the deliberate,
accidental, and alternative technological
decision- and design-processes which, when
implemented, form the interface between the
network and its users.
Who makes the hardware upon which cyberspaces
depend and under what conditions? Who makes the
software that shapes what can and cannot be done
in cyberspaces? What wetware design decisions
shape the look of cyberspaces and with what
cultural consequesences? What cultural ideas get
built into the Web interface and which ones get
left out?