The film festival for week 2 was quite enjoyable, and was a good way to reflect on some of the themes in the first set of readings. The cyberpunk genre instigated and still forms the basis of the whole digital futuristic vision which is still widespread today. I remember reading William Gibson’s trilogy in the early 90’s (when I wasn’t a computer user) and they described a future of zombie-like grid (internet/connectivity) addicts, a dark place where life had been supplanted by a technological representation of life. It didn’t sound like a nice place, but sounded more realistic than some other sci-fi worlds. Some of the shorts clips that we watched had a similar slant too and carried on this tradition. I don’t think that so far cyberspace has turned out to be so dark and desolate- of course you could argue that some elements are present- people plugged in and so addicted that they don’t really have a life (in the traditional sense), or all our thoughts and actions being monitored. The virtual spaces that have developed and which we inhabit so far are driven by a desire for social interaction and commercial activity (both replicating real life activity), and also what arises from the benefits of having information at our disposal- searching for ‘fun stuff’ and news etc. We are at a place now where a seemingly infinite world of information is literally at our fingertips, and I don’t think that this has proved to be as amazing and debilitating (and therefore making us surrender ourselves completely) as some thought it would. While the net has clearly established itself as the main source for finding information (which I suppose for people involves more ‘interaction’ rather than inhabiting a virtual space), I wonder where the virtual space will go from here.

It’s obvious that a divide exists between those that have and those that don’t, but there are also a lot of people who just couldn’t be bothered using these types of technology, even though they have become ubiquitous, cheap and easy to use. Is there a reaction to a technology that ‘colonises our everyday life’, in that people can/will start to turn away from it ?(I’m sure everybody knows people who’ve left Facebook for different reasons, and those that just hate the idea anyway) On the other hand, technology, by default, will always be developing. Sterne uses terminology like ‘pioneers’ and ‘frontier’ when talking about cyberculture- who knows if there will be a limit to the digital landscape for us to map, and what lies over the next digital horizon.

Hands’ reading described very well the ‘promise and threat’ of digital culture, which all ring true, and highlight the paradoxical nature of cyberspace, where many types of opposites coexist. Detailing ideas from both extremes is useful to make you think about these issues, but I don’t see one side or the other as coming to pass- they already co-exist to some extent. Some of the quotes that I took out of this:

‘contemporary culture has been technologized on a scale and with a speed that is wholly unprecedented’

‘geographic localization of a problem becomes of secondary importance compared with its symbolic impact on the planetary system’

‘culture circulates as information’

‘hardware to software to everyware’

‘for ..utopian commentators…. perceive new ..technologies as simply a technical fix for all the failings of western representative democracies’

Because of the scale and speed of these recent ‘unprecedented’ developments, it is an almost impossible task to describe and quantify digital culture. I did keep thinking about what people are actually using the net for as he described political activism and structures and what the net can afford them (and couldn’t get the idea of slactivism out of my head either). I linked earlier in the week to one of those ‘Hitler finds out..’ Youtube clips. What I found most interested (and funny too) was one of the comments beneath it on the day I saw it- ‘it’s crazy to think that a generation of kids will grow up thinking that Hitler was a Youtube star’. Maybe not completely true, but a perfect example of what the net means for authenticity, and the popularity of such clips shows where people spend their time online. Whereas the net provides a possible platform for decentralising government, making it local and global, allowing everyone a voice, watching silly youtube clips and chatting with friends is what it means to be online for the average user (a point that Mike Wesch also touched on in another link that I posted).

I liked the format the Bell paper took on tackling the notion of cyberspace- telling different stories from different angles, which give the broader picture. Some good definitions are quoted also- cyberspace as …’a new universe’…’ a common mental geography…a territory swarming with data and lies…a million voices and two million eyes..’. He also gives a good brief history of the development of the internet, something that I hadn’t thought about in a while- it’s military/cold war/space race origins. I think this had to inform the cyberpunk writers to an extent- that sense of impending dread and conspiracy, the dark shadows etc. There is always this man vs. machine/ virtual vs. real theme- will there always be this argument when technology is introduced into different areas- an unwelcome stranger, something that divides people? We see it with eLearning, the ongoing fear that teachers will be ultimately replaced by computers, and the view of the uninformed that eLearning means reading your coursework from a screen rather than listening to a lecturer.

Bells article also made me think about how business on the net has developed over the last few years. Pre-dot-com crash, web developers were like a valued and rare commodity- they could understand this new high tech, complicated medium, and were given loads of cash to build commercial sites as business discovered a new world wide market and jumped head-first into it. There was still a widespread ignorance of the web at this stage, by both the general public and companies, with business models which analysed emergent online commercial activity such as the ‘long tail’ or ‘Freeconomics’ only developing in the last few years. As Bell points out, increased commercial interest in cyberspace jeopardises the idea of it being a ‘democratic realm of universal access’, and ‘dromoeconomics’ just increases the various existing divides and shows up the ‘dot.com underbelly’.  One area relevant here is the whole adult entertainment industry online, something to which none of the readings really referred to in depth. Their business model would have to be the template for a lot of start-ups as critical elements include large money transactions, online security and legal issues, and they also account for a large proportion of where people spend their time online (although I did read maybe a year ago that more people spend their time on social networking sites now than adult sites- this statistic would also help visualise how popular adult sites are!)

My lifestream feeds this week reflected my thinking about some of the themes that have arisen in the readings and videos so far- the immensity of the cybeculture phenomenon, the conflicts and paradoxes, the idea of identity, the amount of different definitions of what this whole phenomenon gives rise to……I’ve also been getting into the swing of Twitter by installing Tweetdeck on my phone and work pc, so spend a lot of time reading tweets now too.

Tags: #ededc, #mscdystopia, digitalculture, mikewesch, week 2