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Digital Kultur Cyberkultur: historie og metoder
Digital Kultur
Cyberkultur: historie og metoder
Dagens menu
• Historie: digitale medier (+Wei)• Cyberkultur vs digital kultur• Historie: litteratur (+Silver)• Defining the discipline: Fornäs• Case: hypertext (the dangers of rhetorics)• Inspiration: walkman
Historie
• Sharing Info (www is born)– Browsers, links, personal webpages, email, chat
• Nineties business boom– Hyperdesign, graphics, 3D, multimedia
• 2000 dot-com crash• Back to low-profile: blogs, user generated
content• Google ranking• Today? Wei
Cyberkultur vs Digital Kultur
• Cyberkultur has a weight:– Postmodern– Mythical– A product of late modernity
• Digital Kultur is more inclusive– Sees computers both as a product and a
producer of culture/communication media– Avoid technophilia and technophobia– Avoids technological determinism, social effects
are complex- A digital culture canon? Silver
Defining the discipline
Fornäs
Case 1: hypertext
The dangers of rhetorics
hypertext= text + links
- The “Sirens” Chapter in Ulysses, by James Joyce
some properties of hypertext
• Hypertext users have to take action/decisions in order to advance through the text.
• Hypertext lets users perceive processes instead of only finite results.
• A hypertext's multilinear structure can be used to convey meaning.
(Tosca, 2000)
Ideology
• Embodiment• Liberation• Canon• Education
the embodiment problem
“Hypertext incarnates the notions of intertextuality of Julia Kristeva, Michael Bakhtin’s emphasis on the diversity of voices, Foucault’s idea of power-nets, and the idea of nomad thinking in a rhizome after Deleuze and Guattari” (Landow, 1994: 17)
“just as Barthes and Foucault’s observations about the death of the author, Derrida’s about textuality, Kristeva’s about intertextuality and so many others, the fusion of the creative and discursive modes simply happens in hypertext” (Landow, 1994: 59)
the embodiment problem
“What makes them difficult writers, he insists [Bolter], is their self-conscious absorption with the act of writing itself and the difficult relationship between narrator, text, and reader, because their print texts all work strenously—and ultimately unsuccessfully—against the medium in which they were conceived. (Douglas, 1992: 60)
liberation
“the link simulates the connections in the mind of the author or reader” (Slatin, 1990)
“We are faced with a medium that promises to increase the dynamic nature of reading exponentially with texts that actually, physically change from reading to reading, with a range of choices and reading decisions that seem to offer readers an autonomy undreamed of in their experiences of print narratives.” (Douglas, 1992)
meanwhile... in real life...
• Hypertext as marketing buzzword• Hypertext as structuring principle for web
architects + usability experts• Hypertext as near-synonym with WWW• Plenty of educational, journalistic, personal...
examples of “non-linear thinking”• Hyperfiction limited to a few postmodern
experiments unknown by the general public
gaps and lost chances
• Stressing metaphors of dispersion, infinity, neverending text, disolution of the author, reader as author.
INSTEAD OF...
• Metaphors of organization (encyclopedias, newspapers, database), readers as searchers, strong author control, collaboration.
lessons learned• There is a fine line between inspiration and colonization
(heavy weight does no favours)• Old theories help with metaphors and methods: drop
them when they don’t help• Don’t be afraid of questioning dogmas: don’t perpetuate
mistakes
• Don’t reinvent the wheel everytime• Develop a common understanding and vocabulary
• Integrate theory and practise: what is it actually out there?
• Do more studies of specific works
• Doing Cultural Studies, by Stuart Hall et.al.
Inspiration: Walkman
main pointsWalkman as object doesn’t have meaning per se but we can find it in the way it is represented:
- link to identity
- typical (modern) cultural artifact
- studying representation we see all the other themes in operation
Media are important because through them culture is “produced, circulated, use or appropriated” (23)
Advertisement is not only about reflecting cultural identities but mostly about constructing identities through representation. We don’t buy things totally unconsciously, we identify to some small degree.
Du Gay , Paul, Stuart Hall, Linda James, Hugh Mackay and Keith Smith. 1997. Doing Cultural Studies: The story of the Sony Walkman. London: Sage.
the circuit of culture
Til næste gang
• Læs:– Benedikt, Michael. ”Cyberspace. First Steps” (pdf i
email)– Flichy,Patrice. The Internet Imaginaire. (pdf i email)
• Skriv 1 side: a good story of a personal encounter with technology, ”i.e. The day I hit ”reply all” and sent a message to my boss critizicing him”, ”my chatroom fake persona”
(inspiration topics: Telecommuting, customized mobile phones ringtones, internet banking, gameboy, ipod, messenger, online dating, email etiquette, your first computer, word processing, your laptop, your pda, using google, your mouse, facebook, your wallpaper, online buying, virus, spam, newsgroup flaming…)
