[Air-L] What is web culture?
Greg Williams
greg at lexiphanic.com
Thu Jan 17 23:38:05 PST 2008
I'm more of a lurker here but I thought I might try to weigh in on
this "web culture" thing. Pardon any incoherence, it's been a long
week and this is mostly stream of consciousness.
As I understand it, "web culture" is a misnomer. The term seems to
have been created to describe that slightly different way things seem
to occur online when compared to related offline experiences, but I
think this is all barking up the wrong tree.
Cyberspace (in this instance, AKA the Web, the Internet) is a virtual
world extension; it's an extension of our real world. Saying that
there is a unique culture in cyberspace is the same as claiming that
there is a unique culture in your toolshed.
Culture is something produced, carried, consumed, displayed, etc, by
the people that occupy a space, not the space itself. Therefore, there
isn't a "Web culture", but the cultures of the people interacting with
one another within the Web. They may have different tools available to
communicate and share that culture, but I don't think that those tools
beget a culture in their own right.
e.g. "Web culture" didn't produce LOLcats, "bored teen culture" (or
something like that) did. The ease of sharing LOLcats online is what
made them popular.
Hope this helps...
Greg Williams
e-: greg at lexiphanic.com
P.S. Apologies if I'm on the wrong track! :)
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