[Air-L] What is web culture?

[elw at stderr.org]

> 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.


Great thoughts, Greg.

To riff off of this a little...

Web 'culture' serves as a counterpoint to the normal operation of our 
culture.

Through the web - through its technical affordances, whatever - we see 
things about our own f2f, day to day culture that we might not otherwise 
be aware of.

Certain principles of our 'culture' are less inviolate and more flexible 
than we typically admit; certain things about the web or digital life

(lolcats is a great example, i think... everyone loves kitties, mostly, 
and making them say mocking or offensive things is a *hilarious* display 
of our common, warped sense of humor... does anyone seriously *not* enjoy 
the occasional lolcat?)

happen to provide convenient contrasts against our normal expectations of 
others, their behavior, the nature of interpersonal communication, etc.

This makes for great fun, or for great irritation.  Depending on our 
individual level of mental flexibility.


[Side track:  an interesting predecessor sense of this can be gleaned from 
thinking about 'hacker culture' in the US vs. Europe in the late 80s / 
early 90s;  in the US, things have had a tinge of libertarian idealism and 
'rights'

(MIT, and the greater Boston area, right in the middle 
throughout... Boston probably has the strongest set of 'commons' events of 
any point on this half of the globe...)

very much tied to our national history and identity;  in, say, Germany, 
strong practical and engineering influences led to a population that truly 
loved and celebrated the Amiga, loved Linux early on, and built the KDE 
desktop out of essentially dreams and big ideas... amazing stuff, those 
Germans.

Culture definitely in the mix - at least at the level of stereotypes - 
producing interesting reflections in the medium of computing and its 
artifacts.]


--elijah



> 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! :)
> _______________________________________________
> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/
>