cyberculture

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 cyberspace. The concept of cyberculture defines all the social-communicational space that is created through computer-mediated communications. 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.

History of the Concept

Since the evolving relations between computers, digital interfaces, and online networks entered the spheres of human expression and communication, various umbrella nomenclatures have been advanced as an attempt to situate and legitimize particular scopes of practice and academic research. In addition to cyberculture, these designations include Internet studies, multimedia, digital culture, new media, interactive media, computer-mediated communication, human–computer interaction, software studies, and cultural computing.

The foundations of cyberculture, as a concept and research domain, developed in the 1960s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cyberspace, as a mainstream term, is often attributed to novelist William Gibson as it appears in his 1984 book Neuromancer, in which Gibson describes an imaginary collective hallucination by means of connecting human consciousness to networked computers. Other science fiction writers whose work is associated with cyberculture—particularly, cyberpunk as a subculture—include Philip K. Dick, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, and Bruce Sterling. Cyberculture also is related to the notion of cybernetics, a term popularized in a 1948 work by Norbert Wiener that refers to mechanisms involved with information exchange and feedback between human systems and machines. This idea was further developed by Donna Haraway in terms of a cyborg discourse and conversation between human and machines, crucial to the development of science and technology studies.

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The information age is a consequence of the digital revolution, and cyberculture is its demonstration of vitality over the decades, from the invention of the telegraph to the widespread adoption of digital communication and the proliferation of the network society. In the 1980s, cyberculture began to leave the university context and research centers through the spread of personal computers. It was the moment when a subculture anchored to digital avant-garde, hackers, video games, and virtual communities emerged, although still very restricted to North America and Western Europe. It was only in the 1990s that cyberculture, as practice, consolidated with the beginning of what would become the generalization of the Internet and World Wide Web in the early 21st century.

Nevertheless, some subcultures remain active on the Internet. Cyberpunk is the best known of all, assuming itself as an antithesis of utopian visions of science fiction worlds and simultaneously as a space of dystopias in which the cyberpunk fights against artificial intelligence that controls the world. The connection with literature and cinema (e.g., the 1999 film The Matrix and its sequels) is a well-known emblem of the cyberpunk culture, and its metaphors are often pivotal in the concerns that arise over the control of large corporations over the population, government corruption, alienation, and technological surveillance. From this subculture emerged different cultural currents and types of cyberactivism, which can be defined as practices using digital tools on behalf of causes.

Cyberactivism

One of the earliest cyberactivism movements was PeaceNet, which began through email lists to promote international human rights discussions. In 1994, the left-wing Zapatista movement used the Internet to support actions against the Mexican government to achieve democratic management of their territory, direct participation of the population, and the sharing of land. The Zapatistas, considered the first informational guerrilla movement, used hacktivism, or manipulating computer systems or networks to promote a political ideology or social change.

The origins of hacktivism begin around the Zapatista movement, but the concept remained little known until 2003, the year that Anonymous began to emerge. Anonymous was a decentralized online community acting anonymously and in a coordinated fashion to promote Internet freedom and freedom of expression and to fight what it considered unjust government actions. It carried out several actions intended to have a direct impact on society, including protests against the 2009 presidential election in Iran and against the Tunisian government’s response to protesters in 2011. Anonymous released information online about alleged fraud in the Iranian presidential election in 2009 and about corruption in several Arab countries during the Arab Spring of 2010–2011. Social networks are also spaces where cyberactivism is increasingly present, namely through the indexing of content in information streaming through hashtags.

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The cyberculture movement has undergone extensive developments with the expansion of the Internet and network applications and has introduced a new form of culture. However, in contemporary times, cyberculture is no longer just a subculture or a culture of tribes; instead, it has surpassed definitions closely associated with the science fiction of the 1980s. It can now be defined as the sociocultural and political dynamics of digital technologies, which promotes a reformulation of social relations and the creation of communities in virtual environments, while at the same time fostering the emergence of new behaviors and social practices.

Cyberculture, as a concept, comes thus to describe and give meaning to the cultures and users’ interactions developed through computer mediation, including online but also in off-line virtual and hybrid worlds. As computer-mediated communication, cyberculture aggregates the symbolic patterns and representational structures in human–computer interaction, as well as its interdependent values, practices, and artifacts. As such, the inquiry and analysis of cyberculture has found an academic home in cultural studies. Cultural anthropology ethnographic methods have provided a strong foundation for the study of digital cultures, or the ethnography of cyberspace, also referred to as netnography.

Evolution of Cyberculture Studies

The first cyberculture studies were divided into dystopias and utopias and were anchored to science fiction. Technophobes advocated a social fragmentation that stemmed from the political and economic alienation created by technology. Technophiles supported the idea of democratizing widespread access to communication, arguing that technology could create sustainable economic progress, stronger democracies, and global solutions through a distributed intelligence network. Community and identity were two central lines of inquiry at this stage, followed by economic implications and the imagined construction of cyberspace, its design, and visual representation.

A transdisciplinary approach to cyberculture studies has been evolving since the 2000s. This approach has gone beyond the field of cultural studies toward highly eclectic approaches to the social construction of technology, from hardware and software development, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, to cybercities’ geography and nanotechnologies, the future of work, and Internet memes. Cyberculture research has made explicit the pivotal agency of Internet users, experts and nonexperts alike, in (re)creating culture through the use and domestication of digital media, on what has been termed as hacker culture, following its inception at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, since the 1960s. This transdisciplinary approach also translated into some academic criticism toward cyberculture studies, with scholars arguing for more comprehensive and specific designations such as web studies, new media studies, and eventually, digital media studies.

The development and dissemination of online social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram), as well as the availability and social appropriation of digital mobile devices (e.g., the smartphone) and creative open source software (e.g., nonlinear editing systems, previously available only to professionals) lent new forms and phenomena to a remix or read–write culture. Through this culture, derivative work—typically moving image and music production—is created as a collage of preexisting works and materials.

Social network analysis is a methodology often used for the study of digital cultures, as it is a multidisciplinary field that summarizes a set of relational methods for systematic identification and understanding of the connections between actors in a social structure. For example, it is applied to explain the social structure of a community, identify patterns of interaction, differentiate types of social relationships in social media, analyze communication flows and the connection between different online groups, and understand exchanges of communication flows from online and off-line communities.

Future Perspectives

Critical literacy is an essential tool for societies to understand the media and the world. However, globally, inequalities remain within and across societies in terms of access to the Internet and the technical skills of Internet users. In the era of algorithms, this issue is particularly problematic especially when the majority of users are on online social networks, where disinformation proliferates, often with the intervention of bots. This is a concern of contemporary society that demonstrates the influence of cyberculture in the off-line world.

The future of cyberculture inevitably involves technological and societal challenges. User experiences are increasingly immersive, interactive, and engaging through interface technologies, such as virtual reality that allows users to create simulations for different applications using different devices. Another transformative technology that is already revolutionizing the way of dealing with virtual information in off-line space is augmented reality. This technology brings virtual objects into the real world through applications installed on devices, which make possible the integration of additional data into off-line things.

The Internet of Things expands the technological revolution through the interconnection of physical objects used in everyday life and is associated with Industry 4.0, which allows the convergence of digital information from various sources. The Internet of Things enables a global connection that creates smart objects with various applications such as smart cities, smart health care, and smart homes. Another use of the Internet of Things is smart speakers: wireless speakers that are activated through a voice command device and have an integrated virtual assistant that offers interactive actions.

These smart devices use artificial intelligence and can control objects at home or provide different types of information. The cognitive, social, and algorithmic biases that emerge from technology evolution directly influence the social and political spheres. The manipulation of algorithms in digital platforms, the processes of datification, and intrusive technology are issues that have strong societal implications.

The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.