[Air-L] What is web culture?

[Denise N. Rall]

--- Julian Hopkins <j at julianhopkins.net> wrote:

> Actually, I don't think there really is such a thing
> as 'web culture';

Like Julian, I'm not sure about 'web culture' but it
seems that this topic is usually framed as the
discussion of the unique (or similar) characteristics
between offline and online communities - online
communities having special attributes that could be
considered as part of their 'culture' These cultures
are variously known as: online communities,
cyberculture, internet culture, and web culture.

While that is slightly ducking the question, once one
has worked through all the online community
literature, does anything remain to describe the
"culture" of the web? Others have in the past
suggested that the protocols of TCP/IP and etc. have
triggered particular reasons that the web is the way
it is - Elijah weighed in on this once.

Ah - if culture is tied to human attributes alone,
then it's the online community culture that your
looking for, and in the literature, it is found
everywhere - but a good place to start would be the
classics - 
Levy, S. (1984). Hackers: Heroes of the computer
revolution. New York, Dell.
Jones, S., Ed. (1997). Virtual Culture: Identity and
communication in cybersociety. London, Sage.
Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community:
Homesteading on the electronic frontier. New York,
Harper Collins.
Hafner, K. (2001). The Well: A story of love, death
and real life in the seminal online community. New
York, Carroll & Graf Pub.

and Turkle, and etc.

For different ways that web cultures evolve:

D. Schuler and P. Day. (eds) 2004. Shaping the network
society: The new role of civil society in cyberspace.
Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

Porter, D., Ed. (1997). Internet culture. New York,
Routledge.
	
Miller, D. and D. Slater (2000). The Internet: An
ethnographic approach. Oxford, New York, Berg Press.
	
Smith, M. and P. Kollock, Eds. (1999). Communities in
Cyberspace. London, Routledge.

Wellman, B. and C. Haythornthwaite, Eds. (2002). The
internet in everyday life. Oxford, Blackwell
Publishing.

Bakardjieva, M. 2005. Internet society: The internet
in everyday life. London: Sage.

Weinberger, D. (2002). Small pieces loosely joined: A
unified theory of the web. Cambridge, MA, Perseus
Publishing.

Gauntlett, D., Ed. (2000). Web.studies. London,
Arnold.
	
etc.

For a paper that's not often cited, but a real attempt
IMHO to pin down what cyberspace could be
ontologically:

Strate, L. (1999). "The varieties of cyberspace:
Problems in definition and delimitation." Western
Journal of Communication 63(3): 382-412.
	
For a book that describes some interesting theory:

Bell, D. (Ed.). 2007. Cyberculture theorists: Castells
and Haraway. London: Routledge.

plus the Castells as mentioned.

I believe aoir has a bibliography of online
communities somewhere much more extensive than this,
as this question has been posed many times.

Cheers, Denise



 

Denise N. Rall, PhD
Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA 
Tues: Room T2.17, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 Mobile 0438 233 344 
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/esm/staff/pages/drall/
Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK
http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html


      Make the switch to the world's best email. Get the new Yahoo!7 Mail now. www.yahoo7.com.au/worldsbestemail