Critical Cyberculture Studies


Book Description

This work indexes the literature of the German Early and High Middle Ages according to geographical location. Separate articles investigate the major literary centers - such as Fulda, Regensburg, and Braunschweig. The compilation illustrates both the regional concentrations and interconnections of the period, providing for the first time a compact reference work for regional literary historiography.




Critical Cyberculture Studies


Book Description

This work indexes the literature of the German Early and High Middle Ages according to geographical location. Separate articles investigate the major literary centers - such as Fulda, Regensburg, and Braunschweig. The compilation illustrates both the regional concentrations and interconnections of the period, providing for the first time a compact reference work for regional literary historiography.




Critical Cyberculture Studies


Book Description

Starting in the early 1990s, journalists and scholars began responding to and trying to take account of new technologies and their impact on our lives. By the end of the decade, the full-fledged study of cyberculture had arrived. Today, there exists a large body of critical work on the subject, with cutting-edge studies probing beyond the mere existence of virtual communities and online identities to examine the social, cultural, and economic relationships that take place online. Taking stock of the exciting work that is being done and positing what cyberculture’s future might look like, Critical Cyberculture Studies brings together a diverse and multidisciplinary group of scholars from around the world to assess the state of the field. Opening with a historical overview of the field by its most prominent spokesperson, it goes on to highlight the interests and methodologies of a mobile and creative field, providing a much-needed how-to guide for those new to cyberstudies. The final two sections open up to explore issues of race, class, and gender and digital media's ties to capital and commerce—from the failure of dot-coms to free software and the hacking movement. This flagship book is a must-read for anyone interested in the dynamic and increasingly crucial study of cyberculture and new technologies.




Cyberculture Theorists


Book Description

Cyberculture Theorists is the ideal starting point for anyone wanting to understand how to theorise cyberculture in all its forms. It surveys a ‘cluster’ of works that explore the cultures of cyberspace, the Internet and the information society.




Distributed Blackness


Book Description

Winner, 2021 Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, given by the Popular Culture Association Winner, 2021 Nancy Baym Annual Book Award, given by the Association of Internet Researchers An explanation of the digital practices of the black Internet From BlackPlanet to #BlackGirlMagic, Distributed Blackness places blackness at the very center of internet culture. André Brock Jr. claims issues of race and ethnicity as inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. Distributed Blackness analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the meanings and performances of African American identity. Brock moves beyond widely circulated deficit models of respectability, bringing together discourse analysis with a close reading of technological interfaces to develop nuanced arguments about how “blackness” gets worked out in various technological domains. As Brock demonstrates, there’s nothing niche or subcultural about expressions of blackness on social media: internet use and practice now set the terms for what constitutes normative participation. Drawing on critical race theory, linguistics, rhetoric, information studies, and science and technology studies, Brock tabs between black-dominated technologies, websites, and social media to build a set of black beliefs about technology. In explaining black relationships with and alongside technology, Brock centers the unique joy and sense of community in being black online now.




From Counterculture to Cyberculture


Book Description

In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place. From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers. Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.







Cyberculture and the Subaltern


Book Description

Cyberculture and the Subaltern: Weavings of the Virtual and Real, edited by Radhika Gajjala, maps how voice and silence shape online space in relation to offline actualities. Thus, it weaves the virtual and real in relation to so-called old and new technologies using globalization and technology as the frame for examination. Implicit in this investigation is the question of how offline actualities and online cultures are in turn shaped by online hierarchies, as well as different kinds of local access to global contexts. This book reveals the logic of particular global-local directions that emerge within digital, transnational capital and labor flows. To this end, the contributors to this volume examine various sites and intersections through critical lenses enabled by conversations and writings in subaltern studies, affect theory, postcolonial feminist theory, critical cultural studies, communication studies, critical development studies, and science and technology studies. Contexts explored in this collection include microfinance online, handloom contexts from India and Africa in relation to development discourse, new technologies, and virtual world marketing. Through actual auto-ethnographic engagement, Cyberculture and the Subaltern reveals the interdependence of the economic, political, cultural, and social in the production of the subaltern online.




Artificial Intelligence in Cultural Production


Book Description

This book offers an in-depth academic discourse on the convergence of AI, digital platforms, and popular culture, in order to understand the ways in which the platform and cultural industries have reshaped and developed AI-driven algorithmic cultural production and consumption. At a time of fundamental change for the media and cultural industries, driven by the emergence of big data, algorithms, and AI, the book examines how media ecology and popular culture are evolving to serve the needs of both media and cultural industries and consumers. The analysis documents global governments’ rapid development of AI-relevant policies and identifies key policy issues; examines the ways in which cultural industries firms utilize AI and algorithms to advance the new forms of cultural production and distribution; investigates change in cultural consumption by analyzing the ways in which AI, algorithms, and digital platforms reshape people’s consumption habits; and examines whether governments and corporations have advanced reliable public and corporate policies and ethical codes to secure socio-economic equality. Offering a unique perspective on this timely and vital issue, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in media studies, communication studies, anthropology, globalization studies, sociology, cultural studies, Asian studies, and science and technology studies (STS).




Present and Future Paradigms of Cyberculture in the 21st Century


Book Description

Cyberculture is a particularly complex issue. It is seen as a fantastic meeting point of classic philosophers with postmodern theorists, politicians with community engineers, contemporary sophists with software engineers, and artists with rhetoricians. Today, cyberculture is identified highly with new media and digital rhetoric and could be used to create a comprehensive map of modern culture. Present and Future Paradigms of Cyberculture in the 21st Century is a comprehensive research publication that explores the influence of the internet and internet culture on society as a whole. Highlighting a wide range of topics such as digital media, activism, and psychology, this book is ideal for academicians, researchers, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and students.