COMPUTERS: From Whole Earth to the Whole Web

This conversation tracks and critiques the human journey from the electronic frontier to the Anthropocene through the lens of the history of digital media. The first part of the conversation reveals complex trajectories between countercultures of the 1960s and their predecessors in the 1950s and 1940s. It links information technologies with historical struggles against totalitarianism, and inquires their contemporary potentials for creating a more tolerant society. The second part of the conversation analyses the main differences between the New Communalists and the New Left of the " Psychedelic Sixties. " Using the example of the Burning Man festival, it outlines trajectories of these movements into present and future of our consumerist society. The conversation explores the complex relationships between counterculture, cyberculture, and capitalism, and asks whether the age of information needs its own religion. Looking at mechanisms in which traditional inequalities have been reproduced in the communes of the 1960s, it touches upon contemporary Silicon Valley's " soft discrimination. " The third part of the conversation explores contemporary transformations of various occupations. Looking at journalism, it shows that consequences of its transformation from watchdog of democracy into a tool of global neoliberalism are yet unclear, and seeks one possible solution in " computational journalism. " It also explores how the arts have often legitimated ideologies peddled by information technologies. Looking at human learning, it inquires the role of teachers in the contemporary society, and links it to the role of public intellectuals as writers of scholarly texts and builders of human networks. The last part of the conversation explores the main issues with cyber-knowledge. It examines traditional divisions between disciplines, and links them to cybernetics. It introduces the " biological metaphor " for describing the Internet and compares it to the traditional " computational metaphor. " It discusses the main pros and cons of Donna Haraway's cyborg metaphor, and inquires whether the Internet needs to be

Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies, 2000

The late twentieth century has seen a rapid succession of technological innovations, from the silicon chip to the Internet and virtual reality, each development accompanied by intense public debate, combining anxieties about change and upheaval with excitement at the new possibilities for democracy, education and recreation in the 'knowledge society'. But how much faith should we place in technology's ability to improve our lives?

The literature contains many examples of utopian predictions stemming from the widespread adoption of Internet technology, including extended democracy, personal liberation, enhanced powers of organization and coordination, and renewal of community. These are briefly described in this paper. However, more recently, researchers have begun to provide more critical, dystopian predictions for this technology, and these accounts are also summarised in the paper. Interestingly, researchers have tended to consider the utopian and dystopian outcomes as mutually exclusive, i.e., there is a tendencey to present extreme accounts which are entirely utopian or dystopian. It is suggested that both the utopian and dystopian visions are fundamentally flawed, in so far as they are founded on a predominantly technologically-determistic view. The paper draws on a comprehensive field study of the phenomenon in practice to illustrate that the Internet has the propensity to result in both utopian and dystopian outcomes. Thus, a central argument presented is that both utopian and dystopian outcomes can occur simultaneously, albeit in relation to different factors. The paper proposes a framework which illustrates the factors which influence the manner in which utopian and dystopian outcomes result.

Cyberculture is an umbrella term for the emergent and evolving forms of engagement with the Internet, the World Wide Web and the vast array of virtual environments, digital networks, devices, interfaces, formats and software known as the cyberspace. The concept of cyberculture defines all the social-communicational space that is created through computer-mediated communications in its most multifaceted forms. Cyberculture entails social, cultural and technological phenomena that span across a range of disciplines, including – but not limited to – literary studies, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, communication, information and computer sciences. This entry provides an introduction to cyberculture history and seminal concepts, contextualizing its intellectual path, while expanding it into contemporary perspectives.

Abstract Cyberlibertarianism is the name given to any discourse that sees the Internet and related digital media technology as paving the way to individual liberty free from centralized bureaucratic systems. Of those digital media commentators and practitioners who can be categorised as cyberlibertarian, many argue that liberty is realized through Internet communication escaping governments and enhancing free markets. However, there are also other forms of cyberlibertarianism that do not so readily embrace free markets, including an anarchist variety that sees the Internet as enabling freedom through bypassing not just governments but also capitalist systems. This encyclopaedia entry will discuss the meaning of the term cyberlibertarianism by sketching its various historical articulations.

Selected papers of internet research, 2023

Today it is commonplace to speak of the radical transformation wrought by the Digital Age, but the precise nature of that change remains elusive. The conference tackles with this challenging question and highlights the historical moment when the computer first became an affordable commodity, focusing on home computer subcultures before the global spread of the Internet. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the individual possession of or access to home computers facilitated the diffusion of new computing practices. Generally known as “crackers” and “hackers”, new user groups arose that transcended the established boundaries between social and technical, political and economic, private and public. Users tinkered with their machines and software. They assumed new identities, often simultaneously transgressive and deeply integrated with corporate and establishment cultures. In other words, home computer subcultures were part of their societies and are a key site for questioning the entanglement of technical with political and for explaining the paradoxes that come with today’s global use of information technologies.

Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 1998

I spend a lot of time in bookstores looking for books that talk about computers and the Internet from a cultural perspective, and I am often disappointed. There are a lot of books that explore the intersection of culture and technology, but so many of these cyberculture books take one of two oversimplistic perspectives. Many take what Stephen Doheny-Farina in The Wired Neighborhood calls the "techno-utopian" stance (x}, musing over "what will be" and "the road ahead" and concluding that technology; despite its minor (and fixable) flaws, is leading us inevitably in ever more positive directions to a wired culture in which individual freedom is complete and free-market capitalism is unfettered (Dertouzos; Gates, Myhrvold, and Rinearson; Negroponte; Tapscott). Others adopt a more negative stance, warning against 11 silicon snake oil" and the influx of /1 data smog" and arguing that computers and the Internet will be the death of culture (Postman; Shenk; Stoll).

The Information Society, 2002