Transcript PowerPoint Presentation - Keywords in Popular Culture Analysis

Key Concepts
in
Critical Cyberculture
Studies
NOTE: Strangely enough, definitions are seldom
definitive.
Almost any important word has multiple,
sometimes conflicting definitions. These keywords
will, along with the “Glossary” in our course text
Web Studies, represent “working definitions” to
give us a common vocabulary for discussion.
culture
Culture is one of the most complex,
contested words in our language.
Culture involves at least three
components: what people think, what
they do, and the material products
they produce.
For our purposes: a culture consists of
the collection of stories people tell,
the actions they take, and the objects
they produce in order to give meaning
to their lives as members of a
particular group.
cyberculture(s)
Cyberculture is the collective name for all
the meaning making practices that take
place in and around the internet.
I use the term “cybercultures” in the plural
to note that this overarching culture can be
analyzed only when it is broken down into
smaller “subcultures.”
cyberspace(s)
“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced
daily by billions … A graphic representation of data
abstracted from the banks of every computer in the
human system” -- William Gibson Neuromancer (1984).
That the term “cyberspace” was coined by a science
fiction writer 10 years before the Internet existed, yet
has become a common term for describing it, reminds us
that part of the reality of the Net is that it is an imagined
space.
The imagined place in which cybercultural interactions
happen.
For our purposes, we will sometimes pluralize it to
“cyberspaces” in order to remind ourselves that imaging
this space as single, seamless one may be misleading.
subcultures
A “subculture” is a coherent, smaller collective
within a larger culture. There are ethnic
subcultures, religious ones, game playing ones
(Dungeons and Dragons) work-based ones,
political ones, fan subcultures, etc.
Cyberspaces are packed full of various
subcultures, defined by chat rooms, news groups,
MOOs and MUDS, favorite websites, fan sites, etc.
Some subcultures can be characterized as
“dominant,” others as “oppositional” or
“alternative” (when they explicitly or implicitly
challenge mainstream cultural values, forms,
ideas, or styles).
text
Any unit of meaning isolated for
the purposes of cultural analysis.
The “text” in a given analysis could be as small
as a single image on one web page, or as
large as the whole internet.
Web “texts” can include words, still pictures,
animations, video, audio, even the touch of a
keyboard. Analyzing web texts will mean
looking at one or more of these elements, and
often their various interrelations.
encoding/codes/decoding
Encodings are the meanings made by the
producers of texts
Codes are the material “signs” (words,
images, sounds) present in a
a text.
Decodings are the meanings made by audiences
Note: this does note refer to “computer code” in our
context, but rather to cultural coding via language, sound
and image.
ideology
1. Consciously held and systematic political ideas
(traditional defintion).
2. Unconscious or hidden tendencies to offer a
viewpoint that supports the self-interest of a
particular group of people.
Thus, the “ideology” of a “text” is its
unconscious or hidden political bias in favor of
one group over another.
ideological bias
All texts have ideological bias -- certain views
of how the world is or should be -- built into
them.
Sometimes that bias is intentional, but more
often it is structured into a text unconsiously.
Claims to pure objectivity or neutrality, or
claims that something is “natural” or
“unnatural,” are among the strongest forms
of ideological bias since they attempt to
remove the possibility of cultural debate.
hegemony
The process through which elite or dominant groups
gain consent to their rule from subordinate social
groups without force, physical violence or overt
coercion.
Usually this is done by convincing the subordinate
group that the dominant group “knows best” or is
acting in the “best interests” of the subordinate group
or that resistance is futile (inducing apathy is one of
the great tools of dominant social forces).
Hegemony is largely an unconscious, social process, not
a conscious conspiracy.
hegemonic processes
Hegemony is always in process, never fully achieved,
never complete. There is always some resistance, some
counter-hegemonic processes at work. Sometimes the
dominant forces use even this resistance to their
advantage, however, by pointing dissent as proof of free
choice, while continuing to dominate most social
institutions.
Hegemony is often achieved through saturation. It is not
that alternatives to the “mainstream” do not exist, but
rather that they tend to get drown in that main stream
amidst so many messages favorable to those with power
(it far easier, for example, for most Web users to find
mainstream websites than to find alternative ones
because of hegemonic control of portals).
Myth
Repeated stories that take on a central
pattern of significance in a culture by
linking many smaller stories together.
Myths are the narrative form of ideology,
the way ideology is turned into stories
that are taken for granted as truths about
the culture.
Myths are usually neither wholly “true”
nor wholly “false.” They are partial truths
made to seem like absolute ones.
Key social variables in
cyberculture analysis
Social class
Race/ethnicity
Nationality
Urban/Rural
Gender
Sexual orientation
Age
Political ideology
Techno-knowledge
gender & sexism
Gender: the system of meanings and representations
attached in a given culture to sexed bodies as
fixed or “natural” identities
Under U.S. cultural norms, gender is fixed as masculine
and feminine qualities attached to male and female bodies.
Sexism: the practice by which one gender is given
systematically greater social, economic, cultural and/or
political power over the other.
racism vs. prejudice
Where racial prejudice has to do with personal “attitudes,”
racism is a power relationship in which prejudice has been
“systematically structured into institutions”
(political, economic, social, and cultural)
It is possible to have “racism” without “prejudice”
when a no longer attitudinally racist group continues
to benefit from racist structures and institutions.
race & racism
Race is a socially constructed category by
which certain physical characteristics
common to most members of a group are
ascribed to all members and given positive
value (racial supremacy) or negative
value (racial degradation).
Race is a biologically insignificant fact
given great social significance.
Racism is a power relationship by which
racial prejudice is systematically
structured to the advantage of one group
and the disadvantage of another.
formation
A “formation” is a historically changing, but
relatively stable, structure of practices and
ideas by which social categories of identity
(racial, gender, class, sexuality) come into
being and become dominant for a time.
The term formation, as we will be using it,
was first used in association with race as in
“racial formation” (Omi and Winant). We
will generalize this idea to talk about,
gender formations, class formations, as well
as racial formations, among others.
Formations generally hide their historically
variable reality under claims to be the
natural order of things.
cultural competencies
Cultural competency refers to the degree of
knowledge of a given community sufficient
to understand and represent it adequately
and fairly.
Obviously, it is a relative concept since no
representation of a culture, subculture or
community can be perfect. Cultural
competency usually emerges from deep,
lived immersion in a culture, but may
sometimes be gained from serious,
sympathetic study from outside that
culture.
subject position
The socially structured positioning of an individual
vis-à-vis the wider culture according to the key variables
of race, class, gender, etc.
Production side: the “ideal receiver” of a text “encoded”
into that text.
(When a website is designed, who is consciously thought
to be the “target” audience, or who is unconsciously
assumed to be that audience.)
Audience side: the “actual social position” through
which a text is “decoded”
(Who actually uses a website, and how does their
social position shape how they use the site.)
Culture in Motion
The Process of Making Culture
Production
Process
"encoding"
Text
or
"code"
Reception
Process
"decoding"
Elements of a
Critical Cyberculture Studies
Production & Political Economic Analysis
Textual Analysis
Audience/Reception Analysis
Four Domains of
Critical
Cyberculture Studies
According to David Silver critical cyberculture studies analyzes
four main, overlapping, interacting areas:
1) Critical cyberculture studies explores the social, cultural, and
economic interactions which take place online;
2) Critical cyberculture studies unfolds and examines the stories
we tell about such interactions;
3) Critical cyberculture studies analyzes a range of social,
cultural, political, and economic considerations which encourage,
make possible, and/or thwart individual and group access to
such interactions;
4) Critical cyberculture assesses the deliberate, accidental, and
alternative technological decision- and design-processes which,
when implemented, form the interface between the network and
its users.
1) Critical cyberculture studies explores the social,
cultural, and economic interactions which take place online
What various motivations bring people online -work, play, sex, education, buying, selling,
meeting etc. -- and what happens to them when
they get there?
Who does what in cyberspace and to what end?
To what extent are their desires met?
To what extent are their desires changed?
What possibilities for personal transformation
exist and to what extent are they realized?
What possibilities for group tranformation exist
and to what exent?
2) Critical cyberculture studies unfolds and examines
the stories we tell about cyberspace and theinteractions
that occur there
How do the stories the culture tells about
cyberspace compare to what actual happens
in that space?
How do those stories in turn impact what
happens in cyberspace?
3) Critical cyberculture studies analyzes a range of social,
cultural, political, and economic considerations which
encourage, make possible, and/or thwart individual and
group access to such interactions
How should we define access to
cyberculture(s)?
How much and what kind of access is
desirable and for whom?
What barriers to access have existed in
the past and what barriers exist now?
What has been meant by the term “digital
divide” and how should that divide (or
those “divides”) be bridged or
eliminated?
4) Critical cyberculture assesses the deliberate, accidental,
and alternative technological decision- and design-processes
which, when implemented, form the interface between
the network and its users.
Who makes the hardware upon which
cyberspaces depend and under what conditions?
Who makes the software that shapes what can
and cannot be done in cyberspaces?
What “wetware” design decisions shape the look
of cyberspaces and with what cultural
consequesences?
What cultural ideas get built into the Web
“interface” and which ones get left out?