The blurs are liningThe blurs are liningCulture and Technology

The hypeThe hype

“cyberspace is probably one of the most universally over-hyped terms of the latter part of the twentieth century”. (Kitchin, 1998: ix)

"computing is not about computers any more it's about living." (Negroponte, 1995: 6)

“life in the real world is far more interesting, far more important, far richer, than anything you’ll ever find on a computer screen” (Clifford Stoll, 1995: 13)

The mythThe myth

“promises of the sublime” (Mosco 2004)

“decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing and empowering” (Negroponte, 1995: 229, 231)

Hacker culture i.e. bdfl, star trek, GNU, technological ideals

Balancing outBalancing out

Gartner Inc’s “hype cycle”

Myth still existsMyth still exists

Technology Technology DeterminismsesessesesssDeterminismsesessesesss

“research and development have been assumed as self-generating.” (Williams, 1974: 13)

VCR (better support) vs BETA (better format) as an example of technological determinism (Flew, 2008: 43)

“Difficulties in developing digital television in many parts of the world” as an example (Flew, 2008: 43)

Social DeterminismsesessesesssSocial Determinismsesessesesss

“If the effect of the medium is the same, whoever controls and uses it, and whatever apparent content he may try to insert, then we can forget ordinary political and cultural argument, and let the technology run itself.” (Williams, 1974: 131)

Thought experiment

A balanceA balance

“...behaviours and expectations in digital environments are not brand new phenomena...” instead he “aims to capture what is different and emergent about a culture whose basic elements have always been there.” Deuze

“...humans and machines are implicated in one another, rather than one influencing or directing the other...” Deuze (xxxx: 65)

Identity and relationshipsIdentity and relationships

Decentralised nature

MUDs as forms of identity creation

Social networks

“...cyberspace is to community what Rubber Rita [an

inflatable sex toy] is to human companionship.” (Lockard, 1997:

225)

Thought experiment

Identity and relationshipsIdentity and relationships

“...we are moving toward a culture of simulation in which people are increasingly comfortable with substituting

representations of reality for the real” (Turkle, 1995: 23)

“Baudrillard in particular suggest that the world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/Hyperreality)

“Slavoj Zizek identifies two instances of the Real; the abject Real, which cannot be symbolized, and the symbolic Real, a set of signifiers that can never be properly integrated into the horizon of sense of a subject.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_Zizek)

Technology and cultureTechnology and culture

“...computer-mediated communication fundamentally shifts the registers of human experience as we have known them in modern society...”

“...Time and space, body and mind, subject and object, human and machine are each dramatically transformed by practices carried out on networked computers.” (Poster, 2005: 136)

“...every act of communications... presupposes a signification system as its necessary condition.” (Eco, 1976: 136)

QuestionsQuestions

Techno-meritocratics

Hackers

Communitarians

Entrepreneurs

The blurs are liningThe blurs are lining

As the level of technology becomes more advanced, the issues surrounding “technology and culture” will inevitably become less specifically technologically focused