CYBERCULTURE
OBJECITVE

Mahasiswa dapat membandingkan websites
yang berhubungan dengan cyberspace and
cyberculture, material, symbolic, dan
experiential stories, community and
cyberculture, identities in cyberculture, and
bodies in cyberculture. (C4)
MATERIALS
1.
Cyberspace & Cyberculture
2.
Material, Symbolic, & Experiential Stories
3.
Community & Cyberculture
4.
Identities in Cyberculture
5.
Bodies in Cyberculture
CYBERSPACE & CYBERCULTURE

Definition of cyberspace
A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every
nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. … A graphical representation of
data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable
complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations
of data. Like city lights, receding. (Gibson, 1984: 67)
Cyberspace: A new universe, a parallel universe created and sustained by the world’s
computers and communications lines. A world in which the global traffic of knowledge,
secrets, measurements, indicators, entertainments, and alter-human agency takes on form:
sights, sounds, presences never seen on the surface of earth blossoming in a vast
electronic light.
Cyberspace: A common mental geography, built, in turn, by consensus and revolution,
canon and experiment; a territory swarming with data and lies, with mind stuff and
memories of nature, with a million voice and two million eyes in a silent, invisible concert
to enquiry, deal-making, dream-sharing, and simple beholding. (Michael Benedikt in
Bell, D. Kennedy B. 2000: 29)

Definition of cyberculture
It’s a series of ideas, issues and questions about what happens when we conjoin the words
‘cyber’ and ‘culture.’ … cyberspace as culture and as a cultural artefact. (Bell, 2001:1)
MATERIAL STORIES

Computer stories
Computer history is related to the growth and development of US computer industry.
1. Intellectual history
Computers function primarily as the embodiment of ideas about information, symbols,
and logic,
2. Engineering/economic history,
Computers are devices for processing information,
3. Closed-world discourse of Cold War Geopolitics
Computers are used for the technologization in the Cold War,
4. Cyborg discourse from cognitive psychology and cybernetics
Computers are further developed to imitate human abilities,

Internet stories
1. US Department of Defence’s ARPA facility
2. ARPANET
Continued …
3. MILNET
4. NSFNET
5. WWW – CERN

VR Stories
1. Running parallel to the material stories is the Virtual Reality stories which can
be traced back to military research - simulation as a method of training - & to the
entertainment industry - 3 D movies, Sensorama and IMAX cinema system.
2. VEW, VEDS, Data-glove system – for space
3. VR is used as major feature in sci-fi movies & films,
4. VRML – for internet
5. MUD – for 3-D graphical virtual worlds
6. Through these stories the meaning of internet is invented and reinvented.

Political economy stories
1. Cyberspace colonized by corporate capitalism - cybercapitalism
2. Online – spatially vs socially
Continued …
3. Cyberspace – ownership vs control – hyperreal estate
4. Dromoeconomics.- political economy of cyberspace - … modes of production
organized around controlling the speeding flows of capital, labor, information, products,
resources and techniques coursing through global modes of production.

Work stories
1. Dromoeconomics & cyberspatial division of labor
2. Impact of cyberspace technologies:
* … provides a means for those exonomies and their workers to get ‘wired,’
* … against this issues of low-pay, health hazards, non-unionization and casualization
reveal the risks of this kind of work.
3. Gibsonian vs Barlovian cyberspace
* Gibsonian cyberspace – from William Gibson – is the purely symbolic version of
cyberspace found in fiction and film
Continued …
* Barlovian cyberspace – from John Perry Barlow – represents the mediation of image
and reality: ‘joining together the visions of cyberpunk to the reality of networks
creates a concept of cyberspace as a pace that currently exists.

Cyberpunk stories
1. Definition:
Cyberpunk is the intensities, possibiltiies, and effects of new modes of technologically
mediated experience.
2. History: William Gibson – Neuromancer

Pop culture stories
1. Symbolic version of cyberspace
2. Popular cybercultures
3. Barlovian cyberspace
SYMBOLIC STORIES

Cyberpunk stories
1. Definition:
- Cyberpunk is the intensities, possibilities, and effects of new modes of
technologically mediated experience.
- Cyberpunk imagines … a future by libertarian capitalism, where global wealth and
power are the preserve of multinationals and nation-states are weak or gone; where
a dual economy flourishes and is enforced through corporate modes of governance
and surveillance; where society is increasingly urbanised within fragmented, divided,
simulacra cities; where the body is enhanced through the use of genetic engineering
and technical implants.
2. History: William Gibson – Neuromancer

Pop culture stories
1. Symbolic version of cyberspace
2. Popular cybercultures
3. Barlovian cyberspace
EXPERIENTIAL STORIES

Personal computing
1. Personal experience with internet,
2. Experience in computer culture.

Writing on computers
1. Experience with e-mail,
2. E-mail language.

Computer games
1. Video, arcade, PC, and internet-based computer games, Play station,
2. Duel games (Pong, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat),
3. Quest games (Adventure, Zelda, Dėjà Vu, Myst),
4. Apocalypse games (Asteroids, Space Invaders, Pacman, Super Mario, Sonic the
Hedgehog, Doom),
5. Simulation games (Balance of Power, Sim City, Civilization).
Continued …
6. Tamagotchi, virtual pet.

Panic computing
1. Computer virus
2. Types of viruses (Y2K, Love Bug, SandMan, LOVELETTER, Love Bugs, Bubbleboys,
Chernobyls,\)

Medical cyberspace
Programs develop for medical purposes: NIT, CT, MRI, VHP

Cyberspecial effect
Special effects in film – developing consensual hallucination
COMMUNITY AND CYBERCULTURE

Online community – imagined vs virtual community,

Cyberspace is the solution to the ‘problem’ of community,

The social contracts bind online communities - bund – an elective
grouping, bonded by affective and emotional solidarity, sharing a strong
sense of belonging.
IDENTITIES IN CYBERCULTURE

Identity – ‘In cyberspace, no-one knows you’re a dog,’ ‘who we are is defined by
who we are not.’

Self-identity in cyberculture – Personal homepage – a reflexive presentation
and narrativization of the self – by the medium and the imagined audience

Race in cyberculture – are appropriated, adopted an consumed

Gender in cyberculture – cyberspace is predominantly male space

Sexuality in cyberculture
Continued …

Class in cyberculture
- Social architecture of cyberspace:
1. The ‘information users’ : an elite of transnational service workers, who have the skills
and knowledges to achieve positions of dominance in the digital economy (the digital
elite)
2. The ‘information used’: less affluent and less mobile workers, whose main connection
with the digital economy is a home-telematics consumers (the digital shoppers)
3. The ‘off line’: marginalized and underemployed/unemployed and ‘technologically
intimidated’ groups who lack the financial resources to participate at all in cyberculture
(the digital underclass)
- The digital elites
1. The pan-capitalist – has material and ideological interest in speeding up and
intensifying the process of virtualization and heightening the will to virtuality. Includes
Technotopians – advance the cause of virtualization through offering utopia of juvenile
power.
2. Cynical capitalist – who exploits virtuality for profit.
BODIES IN CYBERSPACE

The body occupies ambivalent location, played out in a number of ways.

Three kinds of cyber-body:
1. The posthuman
… persons of unprecendented physical, intellectual, and psychological ability, selfprogramming, and self-dening, potentially immortal, unlimited individuals. … overcome
the biological, nerological, and psychological constraints eveolved into humans … partly
or mostly biological in form but will likely be partly or wholly ostbiological – our
personalities having been transferred ‘into’ more durable, modifiable, and faster, and
more powerful bodies and thinking hadrware.
2. the cyborg
… a cybernatic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, … a creature of social
reality as well as a creature of fiction. …
3. the visible human
… human constructed using an array of medical imaging and computational
technologies.