Neuromancer - computers & society: fall 2011

cyberculture

and its
(dis)contents


comp 380: computers & society

w
hat is culture?


Traditions and customs; symbols;
transmission


Geography


Products


Values versus behavior


Subcultures


More?

what/where is cyberspace?

Cyberspace. A consensual
hallucination
experienced
daily by millions of legitimate
operators...A graphic 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
.

--
William Gibson,
Neuromancer
,
1984


in and between our computers but also in
and of the imagination

t
he stories we tell about the
world/online


material
stories: what
is it? what's its
history?


symbolic
stories: what
does it mean? what
does it say about us?


experiential
stories: what
happens to us
there
?

Michael
Benedikt
, 1991:
Naming and Shaping the
Space


1. Cyberspace: the tablet become a page
become a
screen become a world, a virtual
world. Everywhere and nowhere, a place
where nothing is forgotten and yet
everything changes
. (MB)


2
. The
etherialization

of the world we live
in...the concretization of the world we dream
and think in
. (MB)


Cyberspace should be magic. (MB)


Symbolic doing


World 3 (Karl Popper)


Benedikt’s

principles of
cyberspace design


Exclusion


Maximal exclusion


Indifference


Scale


Transit


Personal visibility


Commonality

Sherry
Turkle

and the Screen


Identity


Aliveness


Community



Liminality


Virtual social mobility

Maria
Bakardjieva


Theory should be shaped by our stories


User versus consumer


Types of human
-
technology relationship via
Don
Ihde
: embodiment, hermeneutic,
alterity

(background)


Everyday life and the
lifeworld
, where the
self is made


The home

The Singularity and the
posthuman


Material changes to the body: genetic
engineering, prosthetics, implants


The changing boundaries of the body


Alternative ways of thinking about the body:
a critique of the Enlightenment notions of
binary divisions and the integrated subject


Moving beyond Enlightenment
-
era
humanism to a new sense of identity and
possibility




Cyberfeminism


“Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our
fusions with animals and machines how not
to be Man, the embodiment of Western
logos.”
–
Donna
Haraway


Sadie Plant: The Internet is essentially
feminine. Why?


Sarah
Kember

critiques Plant. How? What
do you think?


Tim
Dant’s

notion of “assemblage
”