Cyberculture: It's Everywhere!

This past week, we had two readings, one being Auge’s book about Non-Places. But since I already touched on that in the last post when finding a non-place, I’d like to base this blog off the other short reading we had. In Jeff Rice’s book, Writing About Cool, we read Chapter 14, entitled Cyberculture. Rice writes about the extremely broad amount of media that form cyberculture, which includes websites, email, chat rooms, video games, cell phones, and instant messaging to name a few. Rice goes on to continue his discussion in a slightly different direction, but I think the more interesting idea that he just barely touches on in the beginning is that cyberculture is everywhere. It is so prevalent that he goes on to analyze differences between websites.

Rice gives two examples of websites to talk about cyberspace as hypertext, and I think it shows how important giving examples are. Theory often makes little sense when it is not adapted to real life. So, in relating how cyberculture is all around us, I have my own real life example. I recently got a Playstation 2, solely for the purpose of playing Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2007. I knew the game would involve playing golf, but it is unbelievable how many details you can have in regards to making your own golfer. Just look at this screenshot from the game of Tiger Woods. It is hard to tell if that is really him or not, which symbolizes how much technology is becoming reality. And on top of basically creating any type of golfer you want, you can then play a whole tour season in which you earn money and sponsorships. I think this really speaks to the reading by Sherry Turkle where MUDs became a place for people to express themselves. Video games are so much like that too. If, for example, I enjoyed golf, but was not happy being a male, I can almost live vicariously through a female golfer in the game and make “her” look how I’d want to look. Just so we’re clear, my character is a male, but one can see how people can create personas from this new technology.

I previously had a viewpoint from the Sherry Turkle article and ensuing discussion that there was absolutely nothing wrong with people being able to have an online persona. I wrote it off as everyone has different personalities for different environments. What I think I was failing to realize is that indeed there may be nothing wrong with having multiple personas, but there is harm to be done when you can so easily become consumed into one. After joining the 21^st century and playing video games a little, I realized you can get sucked up into the technology in a sense. I played golf on the game for 6 hours straight, not moving on the couch and drinking soda. This is something I am aware of and yet I didn’t stop playing, and I think to some degree technology in general has this effect. Most of us realize that we are surrounded by this cyberculture, that we get out of a class and immediately check our cell phones. Yet, no one does anything about it and I think that is a problem.

However, Rice brings up another interesting point at the end of Chapter 14, in which he talks about how some websites seem very ambiguous which is so different from typical writing that always has a clear message. Yet, he brings up how at one point, “American literature was classified as too popular or lacking in artistic merit” (153), but now it is an often required class. So, relating this idea to how consumed we are in the cyberculture of the world, maybe it is still too new and too unappreciated. 100 years from now, much of the technology that is consuming us today will not be scaring people anymore, it will just be the norm. The one thing I’m sure of though, is that the cyberculture that we currently live in is changing the world right now and there is no doubt that in the future the world will be different as a result. How it will change and whether the change is good or bad is a different story!

And as a final send off, I think it is absolutely astonishing in the reading where Rice said how William Gibson described the internet in 1984. Gibson described it as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation...” (144). He basically nailed it right on the head, so it makes you think that every time you read someone predicting future technologies, one of them might be exactly right!