Cyberculture

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2012, Cyborgs, Cyberculture and Cyborgs

Internet has changed individuals, cultures and is changing the world. New global cultural forms are emerging ever so quickly. Cyberspace interaction, like chatroom communication, video-conferencing, bulletin boards and blogs are bringing about a cathartic change in culture globally.

What is 'cyberculture'? Is cyberculture different from culture? Can 'virtual communities' affect 'real communities'? 

• the social construction of cultural difference in new media, cyberspace, and cyberculture; 
• a critical approach to cyberculture;
• analytical consideration of the cultures, economies, and discourses that are integral components of the social networks that constitute cyberculture.

Cyberculture refers to the cultures of on-line communities, and it includes cultural issues relating to other "cyber areas" like cybernetics and digital revolution. Cyberculture also includes associated artistic and cultural movements, such as cyberpunk and transhumanism.

Transhumanism is a philosophy that humanity can strive to higher levels, both physically, mentally and socially.

Cyberpunks are people using technology and information in ways that deviate from the expected norms and mores and laws of society. 

Students of cyberculture study political, philosophical, sociological, and psychological issues thrown up by the networked interactions of human beings.

Syllabus - Cyberculture: A Sociological Analysis for Educator

Professor Robert Runt, University of Lethbridge, Canada - home.uleth.ca/
The topics include
1) The Limits and Possibilities of Innovative Technologies: Hype, Cynicism, and Grounded Projection, The Contradictory Forces Of Democratization and Commodification, The "Information Age", The Virtual Classroom, 2) Cyber Culture: Is There A Cyber Culture?, Cyber Culture And Individual Identity, Cyber Culture And Canadian Identity, Cyber Culture And Society.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Virtual Community Discourse and the Dilemma of Modernity - Sorin Adam Matei, Department of Communication, Purdue University 
Abstract: Virtual communities are discussed as expressions of the modern tension between individuality and community, emphasizing the role that counterculture and its values played in shaping the virtual community project. This article analyzes postings to the WELL conferences and the online groups that served as incubators and testing ground for the term "virtual community," revealing how this concept was culturally shaped by the countercultural ideals of WELL users and how the tension between individualism and communitarian ideals was dealt with. The overarching conclusion is that virtual communities act both as solvent and glue in modern society, being similar to the "small group" movement. 

Cyberculture by Pierre Lévy (Translated by Robert Bononno), Publisher: Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press - Pierre Lévy's Cyberculture is a guide to the cultural and philosophical aspects of the digital age, and also the theoretical issues of cyberculture. 

From Counterculture to Cyberculture - Fred Turner
Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers.

Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.

Cyberculture and Cyborgs

The cyborg has come to to be the mascot of cyberculture. The cyborg represents a new structure of technological fusion. Pacemakers, synthetic knee and hip joints, anabolic steroids, and countless other technological advancements have enhanced the quality of daily life and increased life expectancy dramatically. As Donna Haraway asserts in her discussion of feminism, science, and technology, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, "we are all cyborgs" and the cyborg holds the promise of freedom from established categories of difference by removing the physical/social distinctions based upon class, race, sexuality, and most importantly for Haraway, gender. Thus her lament "I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess" attests to the liberatory potential offered by the infusion of technology into cybercultural social structure.

Haraway's vision of the cyborg as harbinger of a postgender world has not necessarily come to fruition in this era of technological fusion. Cyberculture has not fulfilled the promise of boundary transcendence but rather reclaims technology as a positive image of capitalism. In fact, it is arguable that cybernetic fusion serves to "express nostalgia for a time of masculine superiority". In many instances cybernetic fusion posits a realm where previously contested paradigms have become reinstitutionalized.

Cyborg

A cyborg is essentially a man-machine system in which the control mechanisms of the human portion are modified externally by drugs or regulatory devices so that the being can live in an environment different from the normal one. The New York Times, 1960.

Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline used the term cyborg in an article about the advantages of self-regulating human-machine systems in outer space.

The cyborg is seen today as an organism that has technologically enhanced abilities.

Cyborgs in fiction portray human contempt for over-dependence on technology threatening free will. Cyborgs are also often portrayed with physical or mental abilities far exceeding humans.

Real cyborgs, unlike fictional cyborgs are more frequently people who use cybernetic technology to repair or overcome the physical and mental constraints of their bodies, a man or woman with bionic, or robotic, implants.

"Cyborg" is a science-fictional shorting of "cybernetic organism". The idea is that, in the near future, we may have more and more artificial body parts - arms, legs, hearts, eyes - and digital computing and communication supplements. The logical conclusion is that one might become a brain in a wholly artificial body. And the step after that is to replace your meat brain by a computer brain.

Prostheses like the C-Leg and the more advanced iLimb are considered by some to be the first real steps towards the next generation of real-world cyborg applications. Additionally cochlear implants and magnetic implants which provide people with a sense that they would not otherwise have had can additionally be thought of as creating cyborgs.

In 2002, under the heading Project Cyborg, a British scientist, Kevin Warwick, had an array of 100 electrodes fired in to his nervous system in order to link his nervous system into the internet. With this in place he successfully carried out a series of experiments including extending his nervous system over the internet to control a robotic hand, a form of extended sensory input and the first direct electronic communication between the nervous systems of two humans.

Cyborgs in medicine

There are two types of cyborgs in medicine: these are the restorative cyborg and the enhanced cyborg.

Restorative technologies “restore lost function, organs, and limbs”. The key aspect of restorative cyborgization is the repair of broken or missing processes to revert to a healthy or average level of function. There is no enhancement to the original faculties and processes that were lost.

The enhanced cyborg “follows a principle, and it is the principle of optimal performance: maximising output (the information or modifications obtained) and minimising input (the energy expended in the process) ”. Thus, the enhanced cyborg intends to exceed normal processes or even gain new functions that were not originally present.

Retinal implants are another form of cyborgization in medicine. The theory behind retinal stimulation to restore vision to people suffering from retinitis pigmentosa and vision loss due to aging (conditions in which people have an abnormally low amount of ganglion cells) is that the retinal implant and electrical stimulation would act as a substitute for the missing ganglion cells (cells which connect the eye to the brain).

The "cyborg soldier" often refers to a soldier whose weapon and survival systems are integrated into the self, creating a human-machine interface. A notable example is the Pilot's Associate, first developed in 1985, which would use Artificial Intelligence to assist a combat pilot. The push for further integration between pilot and aircraft would include the Pilot Associate's ability to "initiate actions of its own when it deems it necessary, including firing weapons and even taking over the aircraft from the pilot. (Gray, Cyborg Handbook).

Social cyborgs
More broadly, the full term "cybernetic organism" is used to describe larger networks of communication and control. For example, cities, networks of roads, networks of software, corporations, markets, governments, and the collection of these things together. A corporation can be considered as an artificial intelligence that makes use of replaceable human components to function. People at all ranks can be considered replaceable agents of their functionally intelligent government institutions, whether such a view is desirable or not.

Cyborg proliferation in society
Many people could be making the transition to cyborg sooner than they thought. Applied Digital Solutions leads in the development of the human implant RFID chip. This small, rice sized chip has been marketed to help track medical records and keep credit information safe and convenient. Although there is a large community that is critical of this technology, RFID technology has done well in the past as a tracking chip in the industrial world (RFID's reduction for out-of-stock study at Wal-Mart, RFID radio), and for tracking pets and endangered wildlife (USDA Bets the Farm on Animal ID Program). This in effect turns all chipped people or organisms into cyborgs, which is also a source of discomfort to some. The critics of this movement claim that chipping people is an invasion of privacy

Cyborgization of the humankind
Fiction writers and futurists envisioning future technologically enhanced humans as "cyborgs" -- creatures that will have human biological bodies as their legacy core, but will hopefully have many important [and complex] biological parts directly replaced with improved technological equivalents (and a variety of new ones added).

So while people have been playing with the images of cyborg future of their bodies, they have overlooked the ongoing process of functional cyborgization they were already taking part in.

In the scenario of physical integration of biological and technological structures, a cyborg can (and has been) defined as a physically mixed system -- an organism with a sufficiently large infusion of technological parts.

A functional cyborg ( should we call it a fyborg? funorg? fuborg? ) may be defined as a biological organism functionally supplemented with technological extensions.

If you do not pay attention, the stream of technological supplements may turn you into a functional cyborg through cyborgization before you notice it.

Resource Centre for Cyberculture Studies - com.washington.edu/rccs/intro.asp

Center for Digital Discourse and Culture - cddc.vt.edu/index2.html

Fibreculture is a forum for the exchange of articles, ideas and arguments on Australian IT policy in a broad, cultural context. it concerns the philosophy and politics of new media arts, information and creative industries, national strategies for innovation, research and development, education, and media and culture - fibreculture.org/

Cyberculture, Identity and Gender Resources. - fragment.nl/resources

CYBER-CULTURE, SOCIOLOGY & ANTHROPOLOGY. - lastplace.com/page200.htm

Online Publications Towards Cybersociety and "Vireal" Social Relations Home: - socio.ch/intcom/index_intcom.htm

Sarah J. Zupko's Cultural Studies Center. - popcultures.com/subjects/cyberculture.html

Articles, features and message boards explore the way the Internet has changed individuals, cultures and the world. -  suite101.com/welcome.cfm/internet_society

Internet Identity and Community Cites and Sites of Interest. My dissertation focused on cyberspace interaction, specifically on chatroom communication. - uky.edu/~halbert/research/internet.html

Anthropologists have always been at the cusp of cultural exploration. Never before however have we had the opportunity to watch new global cultural forms emerge so quickly. - carleton.ca/~bgiven/cyberant.htm

Cyberstudies page. - acsu.buffalo.edu/~reymers/cyberstudies.html

Cyber Anthropology Project: a resource page for an anthropological approach to research on and about the internet. -  casnws.scw.vu.nl/cap/links.htm

What happens to democratic space when it is cyber? Author: Carol Reid University of Western Sydney. -  ultibase.rmit.edu.au/Articles/online/reid1.htm

Felix Stalder is Associate Director of Probe, the think thank of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. -  mrf.hu/digid

Ieva Cepulkauskaite Digital "third world" and its borders Internet is a world-wide mean of translation, enabling transmission of information, co-operation and interaction among individuals. - sociumas.lt/Eng/Nr18/third.asp

The impact of net culture on mainstream societies: a global analysis - 

in.arxiv.org/abs/cs.CY/9903013

Negotiating the Global and the Local: How Thai Culture Co-opts the Internet. This paper argues that the relation between computer-mediated communication technologies and local cultures is characterized neither by a homogenizing effect, nor by an erecting of barriers. - firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_8/hongladarom

iStuff: The Next Generation of Popular Culture. The Internet is creating a new form of Popular Culture: talksonline.com/

University of Michigan Law School - Law 897: The Law in Cyberspace - personal.umich.edu/~jdlitman/classes/cyber.htm

Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable computer, published by Doubleday, 2001.

Communities in Cyberspace

To date, there appears to have been only limited discussion of 'culture' in the context of the Internet. Terms like 'electronic commerce', 'digital libraries' and 'electronic publishing' are much more common. A term which is close to the idea of CyberCulture is 'electronic or virtual community'. The most useful reference is still Howard Rheingold's 1994 book, 'The Virtual Community'.

There is a wide variety of bases whereby communities can come into being and sustain themselves. These include:
existing geographical communities based on physical proximity;
communities of interest;
communities based on religion, philosophy or political outlook;
communities driven by particular social or economic issues
conventional formal organisations, particularly companies and partnerships (supported by 'Intranets');
clusters of companies operating within strategic relationships (supported by 'Extranets').
An example well-known to the author is a community of researchers in the Information Systems discipline, ISWorld Net. Some of the early history from its foundation in July 1994 until early 1996 has been chronicled. The community's population numbers 5-10,000 worldwide. The two primary media for participation are an e-list for announcements, which has 3-5,000 subscribers, and a set of some 200 community-service web-pages established and maintained by some 100 volunteers.

The community is driven by a leader/visionary, but the contributions are highly dispersed among the volunteers. The majority of the service-value has been provided by perhaps 2% of the overall community, but hundreds more have at least posted to the e-list, and many hundreds have accessed and in many cases bookmarked the web-pages. There are well over 1,000 hotlinks to ISWorld Net web-pages from other pages around the world.

The volunteer force is very heavily english-speaking, and virtually all of the content is in English. The heavy majority of volunteers are in North America, with modest numbers in Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and a scatter of Continental European and 'advanced' Asian countries.

Strenuous attempts have been made to ensure that the community services do not contain undue cultural biases. Given the strongly 'internationalist', but particularly Anglo-Saxon-American, style of the world's I.S. discipline, the attempt has achieved some success. There is, however, only limited and slow penetration in Continental Europe and advanced Asian nations (due to cultural concerns) and in less developed countries (due to slow emergence of the discipline there, mis-match between services and needs, cultural differences, and, importantly, infrastructure).

The initiative has been free-standing since its inception; but the possibility exists that it will forge an alliance, or formally join with, a more conventional professional association in the near future. If so, it will be negotiating from a position of strength, because of the enormous volume of electronic traffic it generates, and the extent to which it is perceived to be the life-blood of the disciplinary virtual community.

ENCOURAGING CYBERCULTURE
Roger Clarke
Principal, Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd, Canberra
Visiting Fellow, Department of Computer Science, Australian National University
This paper is at anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/II/EncoCyberCulture.html
Abstract
Many of the challenges presented by the information infrastructure are not readily amenable to legislative and other hierarchical solutions. They require gentler, community-based measures as an adjunct to, and even an alternative for, formal regulatory action.
Communities in cyberspace need means of achieving cohesion and maintaining relationships, while avoiding unduly dysfunctional behaviour by community-members and outsiders. This paper's purpose is to investigate the means whereby such a 'cyberculture' can be brought about.
It commences by considering formal and semi-formal authority in cyberspace. It then discusses the processes and structures of electronic communities, including a series of mini-case studies of community behaviour in some recent contexts. Examples are provided of existing and emergent mechanisms whereby civilised behaviour can be encouraged. Some inadequacies in existing technologies are identified, and an approach suggested whereby future products, services, protocols and architectures can better support culture in cybserspace.
Introduction
A culture exists when a group of people exhibits cohesion through the sharing of values, language, rituals and icons. 'CyberCulture' is used in this document to refer to the concept of a group or groups of people achieving cohesion by means of the information infrastructure.
For all practical purposes, 'information infrastructure' currently means the Internet. That may well change; but if the telcos persist with their broadcast-style 'cable-TV' philosophy, with high-bandwidth down and only low-bandwidth up the line, the Internet may remain as the only basis for CyberCulture to develop.
A series of questions present themselves. Are present Internet services adequate to support the development of culture? If not, are enhanced and new services in the offing that will support culture? Is the notion of a single culture relevant; or will we see the emergence of multiple cultures?
The Internet is at the crossroads between community and commerce. Can it be matured fast enough for the infrastructure to support both, with minimal disturbance by each of the other?
The Internet (aka 'the Electronic Frontier') is resisting formal authority. Is anarchy a tenable organisational form in the long-term?
Formal authority in the narrowly legalistic and jackbooted form that we regard as normal in physical spaces, may well prove unworkable in the virtual medium. Can we make do without it? Can CyberCulture deliver a sufficient set of equilibrating mechanisms?
This paper is a voyage of investigation. The community of netizens is struggling to come to terms with itself. This author is also struggling, and hence no apologies are offered for the many imprecisions of expression, for the many tentative, insufficiently analysed and argued statements, and for the many personal judgements, that are embedded in this paper. It is hoped that, by starting, he, and the community, will improve their understanding.
The audience to which the paper is addressed is participants in Internet communities, providers of Internet services, and executives and managers responsible for policies relating to information, information technology and information infrastructure, within university, public sector and private industry.
The paper commences with a brief review of formal and semi-formal authority in the Internet context, followed by comments on communities and community authority.
A series of mini-case studies is then assessed, in a search for commonalities in emergent CyberCulture. These include content-regulation, Spam and Cookies. Lessons are drawn from these cases, and suggestions made as to ways in which community-based control mechanisms can be encouraged.

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