Internet Culture is the epoch that contemporary society has begun to inhabit, however, it can also be a fluid and complex medium that has many cultural meanings with little social understanding. Internet Culture cannot be as easily associated and linked to past specifications of culture that society has grown accustomed to. David Porter gives an interpretation of what Internet Culture is and the diverged sense of cultural significance that the Internet procures:
If the Internet can be understood as the site of any culture at all, it is not, presumable, culture in the sense either of an elitist enclave or of a homogeneous social sphere. The culture that the Net embodies, rather, is a produce of the peculiar conditions of virtual acquaintance that prevail online, a collective adaptation of the high frequency of anonymous, experimental, and even fleeting encounters familiar to anyone who has ventured into a newsgroup debate.
It is therefore difficult to ascertain what Internet Culture is and it is equally difficult to give an explanation of a new medium with such a heavy cultural significance. The Internet is changing the way society communicates, but this is not a new or contemporary notion. Erla Zwingle establishes the movement of society and tradition when he affirms that ‘Goods move, people move, ideas move and cultures change’. It is this that has the cultural significance in a continuously fluid environment like the Internet. However, to what extent the cultural significance has affected society and cultural infiltration is at this stage purely speculative with no foreseeable way of monitoring the effects that the Internet has.
As we enter the 21st century electronic media have become an imperative aspect of western societies daily lives. We use computers because they are easy, they buy us time and they give us entertainment. Internet Culture is an extension of the visual image that saturates our everyday lives. Perhaps this is why it is often defined as the extension of television or the natural evolution from the mediated role of the television. Sherri Turkle suggests that:
On any given evening, nearly eighty million people in the United States are watching television. The average American household has a television turned on more than six hours a day, reducing eye contact and conversation. Computers and the virtual worlds they provide are adding another dimension of mediated experience. Perhaps computers feel so natural because of their similarity to watching TV, our dominant social experience for the past forty years.
This suggestion also facilitates an understanding of how a communication evolution takes place and how new media is seamlessly adopted by mainstream mass society. Essentially the Internet is a way of amalgamating all of the mechanisms for essential livinginto one visually stimulating, easy to use, waste of time.
Whether or not there is an Internet Culture is questionable. Surely in order to grant a mode of communication its own cultural identity it is imperative that everyone within society has access to it and are able to identify with it. However, this is not the case and it is with this in mind that we begin to highlight some of the critical questions that are being raised regarding Internet Culture.
The Internet was created with liberation and democracy in mind. Howard Rheingold explains the contributing factor to the creation of the Internet within his text ‘The Virtual Community’:
The inexpensive public online service was launched because two comrades from a previous cultural revolution noticed that the technology of computer conferencing had potential far beyond its origins {…} and many of them wanted to provide it to as many people as possible, at the lowest possible cost.
It was not initially created as an entertainment mechanism or a commercial venture. However, what has become clear is that since the Internet’s development the meaning behind this medium has metamorphosed into a global capitalist venture, with many large trans-national corporations using the Internet to promote their global voice in a visual manner that is significantly aimed at the masses.
The Internet is a menagerie of information that has no real order or identity. It is many things to many people and with access and education anyone can have a voice and submit an opinion. Unfortunately, this can become confusing and frustrating when you are trying to search and select material of individual importance. What is questionable is how there can be a virtual community in an online environment. How can contemporary culture sustain virtual subcultures that ostensively reject society and its moral codes and yet still have strong correlations with real life cultural circumstances?
One of the key critical questions that has been raised about the Internet and the cultural factors that the Internet in essence redefines, is how can a subculture have the right to call themselves a virtual community? It is not so much that they are a group of individuals with a shared interest, but their fluctuating ability to float on and off the information superhighway in an apparently effortless fashion. Many inhabitants of the virtual world have different identities and persona that they role play within an environment that allows them to reject society and then at the drop of a hat return to the society that they were rejecting, with no obvious or known social implications.
The main staple of this virtual interaction and community building lies within a computer mediated communication environment called Multi User Dungeons, or MUDs that are fundamentally imagination-fuelled text based games. Sherri Turkle defines MUDs as:
All MUDs are organised around the metaphor of physical space. When you first enter a MUD, you may find yourself in a medieval church from which you can step out into the town square, or you may find yourself in the coat closet of a large, rambling house {…} MUDs imply difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity and fragmentation. Such an experience of identity contradicts the Latin root of the word, idem, meaning ‘the same’. But this contradiction increasingly defines the conditions of our lives beyond the virtual worlds.
The Virtual Community and the animosity of the MUD environment does not allow individuals to interact as their true selves. Even the logging-in procedure of a MUD encourages the individual to create a user identity and user name that is not their own. The MUD environment is fantasy personified. It allows the individual to experiment with characteristics such as transgender mutation, sexual promiscuity and violent behaviour that are not generally accepted in real life society and culture.
Internet Culture and community stems from the MUD user experience, one that rejects the real life of the individual in favour of fantasy and the indirect glorification of all that is immoral and inappropriate. However, this is a highly critical viewing of one aspect of community building on line there are many futurologists who believe that the use of MUDs and Bulletin Board Servers by individuals is in essence society reaching out for the public forums that are slowly being destroyed in real life. However, as this is an essay that is based on critical associations with Internet Culture the mention of utopian and optimistic views has been limited to a few lines.
Whether or not a community can be created within an online dimension is a question that is not easy to answer, being part of a community suggests that you are involved within that community to the point of saturation. Your very existence is defined by the fact that you live, breath and commit to the 24-hour routine of the guidelines of permissible actions that are administered within your society. Within the virtual community you are but a fleeing visitor, even if you contribute 80 hours a week to the MUD or virtual world you are still essentially using this environment as a means of escaping the real life world that surrounds your being.
Within his book ‘Imagined Communities’ Benedict Anderson suggests that nations only exist because of a common acceptance in the minds of the population. Society itself and the act of living amongst a community make it possible for the community to validate and immortalise its existence. Through this theory it is a given that only a group with a shared acceptance has the right to call itself a community. With this in mind it would mean that the Internet and the users of the networks associated with the Internet have a right to call themselves a community. The map that I have included reflects this theory as it shows the population of Internet users that are currently make use of facilities in the virtual environment (see figure one).
Figure One – One of the most recent maps that show the population of online users.
The use of the Internet and facilities that the Internet provides leads directly into the second critical issue that is currently being debated. The question of the Internet expanding the gap between the information ‘Haves’ and the information ‘Have Nots’ and how the increasing influx in e-commerce and information access is pointing the way to the Internet being the gateway to crucial everyday information.
The problem of ‘Have’ and ‘Have Nots’ within society and culture has been an ongoing critical issue for centuries. Since the development of Print Culture the ability to communicate effectively has been used as a power tool. Even in contemporary society you are labelled as disadvantaged if you are unable to communicate with the masses. Computer Mediated Communication is set to become the defining factor between the ‘Have’ and ‘Have Nots’. At the moment is you are not online you are not a member of the information superhighway. If you are not wired you are not involved. As more and more media begin to turn to the electronic forum many communication traditionalists are finding it hard to find a sense of place within the changing cultural standards.
However, it is important to investigate the root of the superhighways phenomenal advantage. Is the Internet progression manipulated or are you truly disadvantaged if you are not inline with the new codes of conduct in an increasingly electronic culture? After all as a society we have traditionally learned about new technologies and innovations from the more conventional communications media. Culture is not yet at the advanced development that one would think. Individuals rely heavily on instinctual aspects of communication development. You do not instinctively turn to the Internet to find out what is on television. The tendency is still to turn to newspapers and the television magazines. It is on reviewing this information that you may turn on you television and see a commercial or programme that has provided further information at their website. It is only at this stage that the ‘Have Nots’ may feel disadvantaged as they may be lacking access to home computing.
What has become clear is that society has become more involved with cultural change. Rather than change happening and the individual trying to catch up, it would seem that change is being provoked by the masses and access to new forms of communication is becoming a national agenda. As the Internet becomes more and more mainstream the ‘Have Nots’ within western society are demanding the access to the media involved with being wired.
Home computing is becoming cheaper and with cable and satellite hopping on the interactive bandwagon the line between the information elite and the masses is slowly being erased. However, it is not just having access that invokes knowledge. Society and Culture are slowly pandering to the easy answer to the complexity of computer mediated communication. The plug in and surf motto of many mainstream computer companies is a message that is as much misleading, as it is misguided. What Internet Culture is heading for is questionable. If the majority of individuals do not understand the common language of communication we will be heading for a ‘Big Brother’ type scenario were we are at the mercy of the computer programmers who understand the essence of computer programming languages.
The future of the information superhighway and Internet Culture should not be based on ease of its use, it should be fundamentally based on thorough understanding, but at this point this concept is not being incited. Howard Rheingold makes this notion a cultural incentive by suggesting:
We need a clear citizens’ vision of the way the Net ought to grow, a firm idea of the kind of media environment we would like to see in the future. If we do not develop such a vision for ourselves, the future will be shaped for us by large commercial and political power holders.
Whether or not the future of Internet Culture will be flourishing is inconsequential, however, the question of whether or not the Internet will be public or private is still being decided. Perhaps, what is more important to critically review is the question of whether or not the notion of power and control has already been answered for us, rather than by us.
Bibliography
Tapscott, Don Growing up Digital, the Rise of the Net Generation, McGraw Hill, 1998
Rheingold, Howard The Electronic Version of the Virtual Community,
Turkle, Sherri Virtuality and its Discontents Searching for Community in Cyberspace
Turkle, Sherri Who Am We?,
Wired Archive 4.01 – January 1996/Features
Zwingle, Erla National Geographic, Global Culture, August 1999, Volume 196, No. 2
Ong, Walter Orality and Literacy, The Technologizing of the World
Routledge, 1982
Crowley & Mitchell Communication Theory Today
Polity Press, 1994
Porter, David Internet Culture
Routledge, 1997
Slayden et al Soundbite Culture the Death of Discourse in a Wired World
Sage, 1999
Jackson, Peter National Geographic, Global Culture, August 1999 Volume 196 No. 2
Williams, Raymond Keywords, A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
Fontana Press, 1976
Anderson, Benedict Imagined Communities
Verso Books, 1991
Jackson, Peter – National Geographic, Global Culture, August 1999, Volume 196 No. 2
Williams, Raymond – Keywords, A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Fontana Press, 1976
Williams, Raymond – Keywords, A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Fontana Press, 1976
Slayden et al - Soundbite Culture, the Death of Discourse in a Wired World, Sage, 1999
Oral Culture was temporally biased as it favoured time, physical and social stability and oral communication.
Ong, Walter – Orality and Literacy, The Technologizing of the World, Routledge, 1982
Crowley & Mitchell – Communication Theory Today, Polity Press, 1994
Ong, Walter – Orality and Literacy, The Technologizing of the World, Routledge, 1982
By this I am referring to the Internet and the ability that it has to converge most aspects of traditional communication that include; speech, print, visual images and more recently voice interactive communication. Prior to the Internet we had individual media that allowed individuals to do certain tasks, but not all and not entirely interactively.
Porter, David – Internet Culture, Routledge, 1997
Zwingle, Erla – National Geographic, Global Culture, August 1999, Volume 196, No. 2
Turkle, Sherri – Virtuality and its Discontents: Searching for Community in Cyberspace,
I say essential as a majority of people would not be able to function properly without a television, a computer and a wealth of electronic gizmos that they assume make their lives easier, and I do not mean it literally.
Rheingold, Howard – The Electronic Version of the Virtual Community,
Surely there must be some repercussions associated with the new -found fluidity of the virtual world and the real world? Where do you draw the line between the real and the virtual? These are all questions that need to be reviewed, as I cannot imagine that the ability to have multiple identities is congruent with a healthy existence.
Turkle, Sherri – Who Am We? Wired Archive 4.01 – January 1996/Features,
Turkle, Sherri – Virtuality and its Discontents, searching for Community in Cyberspace,
Rheingold, Howard – The Electronic Version of the Virtual Community,
Anderson, Benedict – Imagined Communities, Verso Books, 1991
With this I am suggesting that individuals who could not read were subjugated. The elite were the individuals who were educated and subsequently acquired knowledge. Power struggles between the elite and the less fortunate have been historically documented. However the one thing that defines the struggle to achieve power is the mode of communication that is being adopted and configured.
Rheingold, Howard – The Electronic Version of the Virtual Community,
Tapscott, Don – Growing up Digital, the Rise of the Net Generation, McGraw Hill, 1998
Rheingold, Howard – The Electronic Version of the Virtual Community,