Cultural Differences and Cyberculture

Cultural Differences and Cyberculture
In concluding our readings on critical cyber cultural studies, my attention is drawn to the introduction. In introducing the readers to critical cyber culture studies, David Silver notes that the field of Internet study is relatively new stretching back only fifteen years, and that the time is ripe for deeper and a more critical examination of culture studies of the Internet. In doing so, he draws attention to the fact that the Internet being a relatively new field has much to borrow from cultural theory and cultural studies. With that as a backdrop, reading the section on cultural differences in/and cyber culture, one would expect that the individual contributors would anchor their articles in established cultural theoretical precepts in generating new cultural theories for the Internet. This would have served two purposes. First, it would have made it easier for unsophisticated readers like me who are unfamiliar with works of other critical cultural researchers to provide some contexts and some basis to draw references and arrive at conclusions. Second, most of the contributors deal with different aspects of cyber culture and provide different trajectories for exploring further. Thus, there are several promising routes to be taken but unfortunately reading this collection of well–informed articles leaves the reader with the feeling of loose disjointed ends hanging free. It does not provide a cohesive or a unifying framework for looking at cyber culture and definitely does not provide for the development of theory, which would further the development of the field of critical cyber cultural studies.
Three different researchers, Phillips, Schaap, and O’Riordan, study three different aspects of online gender identity within three different contexts. In Cyber Studies and the Politics of Visibility, David J. Phillips investigates the issue of online sexual identity through a three pronged autobiographical research project. He examines how his sexual identity as a gay man causes him to reframe his scholarly investigations about online identities as being about visibility and identity rather than privacy and surveillance. His three-pronged research project aims to understand historically and empirically how individuals and sub-cultures negotiate the meaning of context, place, and identity. The second prong aims at exploring the various technologies of visibility and identification. And the third prong investigates the link between the technologies and their role in mediating social and historical practices. For Phillips, an individual’s sexual identity is the site and object of economic and political struggles. There occurs a continuous vital redefinition and realignment of identities and relations. According to him, sexual identities not only help in organizing physical and virtual space but they also help in organizing the relationships themselves. Since this is just an autobiographical project, which never takes off, his observations about, sexual identity of gay men remains unexplored and unproven.
Schaap in Disaggregation, Technology, and Masculinity, deals with problem of mainstreaming masculinity. In his view, the normative view of masculinity in most gender studies on the Internet rightly appears problematic from a feminist or a queer point of view but it may also be problematic for the regular heterosexual men too. The construction of the conventional heterosexual white male can be restrictive for the regular male since the conventional male’s aggressiveness is equated with violence in video games or his non-communicativeness and technological “obsession” is likened to geekiness or nerds. This representation is surely not all encompassing and may be true in very small cases.
O’Riordan in Gender, Technology, and Visual Cyber culture examines femininity through an analysis of a simulated newsreader Ananova. According to her, the desire to produce perfectly friendly and contained women and perfectly friendly and contained technology through simulations marks the desire to realize the technology and the female in control. Her question is what implications these simulations have in the equation of power relations. She urges researchers not to dismiss simulated figures as insignificant through a discourse of animation but investigate their objectification within the cultural context.
Thus, we have three different approaches on gender identity on the Internet and their implications within different cultural contexts. I was hoping the contributors or the editors would either provide a meaningful framework for the explanation of the differences or reconcile the differences through some unifying concept. I would agree with David Silver’s opening comments that the bad news is we have a long way to go in developing and understanding critical cyber culture studies and the goods news is that the work in this area has began.

New Media Campaigns

It is undeniable that information technologies have come to play an increasingly important role in contemporary political campaigns and in all likelihood, their role in future political campaigns is going to increase rather than diminish. Howard’s methodology of ethnographic immersion in exploring the dynamics of political communication on the Internet moves beyond media effects to expose the power of the political consultants whom Howard, 1996 recognizes as the power brokers mediating the political communications between the citizens and the political leaders. The important question is what implications this changing equation of power has for citizenship and the notion of democracy where values and ideologies of the architects of technology define how to conduct political campaigns on the Internet. The political consultants have no scruples in surreptitiously mining confidential data or buying it from political data vendors. Political preferences have been reduced to information bits stored in relational databases mined through unsuspecting people’s personal confidential data. What this data therefore, represents is not the political preferences of the voter but his “data shadow, the political personality deduced from the data about the voter” (p.189). Moreover, like all probabilistic models, the political preferences or choices deduced from these stolen or proprietary data are at best predictive never truly indicative of the true opinions. Few might argue however, that research conducted through traditional survey methods is also not completely free or without their biases but the probability that the data obtained through conventional survey methods is more closer to their true political preferences is much higher.
In discussing the role of the community of e-political consultants, Howard does not discuss the role of other competing sources of information such as interest groups, advocacy groups, individual bloggers, journalists, many of whom have their own independent blogs, or other independent organizations that provide alternative views in countering the effects of the community of e-political consultants. Howard’s interpretation of e-political consultants invests them with more power than they probably exercise This outlook may not represent the whole picture since it does not take into consideration the other interactions that are simultaneously occurring for instance, the voter interacting with other sources of information. It assumes that the voter is a passive receptor of messages as hypothesized in the hypodermic needle theory. In the absence of concrete data on the contribution of narrow casting, a service provided by the consultants, in determining the success of political campaigns it would be pre-mature to state that the e-political community has become very powerful. In addition, factors such as the quality and the subsequent analysis of the data by the e-political consultants should also factor in determining the power of the e-political consultant community.
The grand notion of the e-political community that the Internet will revolutionize the democratic participation by improving the quality of democratic deliberation and participation seems like a whitewash. The Internet has afforded the developers of information technology greater latitude in controlling information. This is evident by the redlining technique that Howard describes that political consultants use to target the most likely voters. Thus, narrow casting and redlining information might serve to be inimical to the ideals of democratic participation. This is not to say that the Internet has not improved the democratic deliberation but the results have not been as spectacular as envisioned. In all likelihood, the Internet will have greater impact on the generation Yers or the generation dotcomers, as the newest generations are variously called. Born into the internet environment they would not be shy of using the Internet. As more and more human transactions shift to the Web sphere, it is not improbable to assume that future elections will be fought on the Web sphere and the Internet may have a greater impact in deciding the outcome of election campaigns. Another assumption here is that the people of the coming generation would be aware of the manipulations of the e-political consultants and would be able to make true contributions to the democratic processes.

Social Capital, Community, and Content

It is remarkable that women have caught up to men in being online. The question that comes foremost to my mind is what could be the probable reason for the closing in of the gap between the men and the women? Can we draw a causal relationship between the feminization of content and the rise of women Internet users? It is arguable that online shopping (transactions) could account for the increase in a greater number of women accessing the Internet. Since the only categories where women lead men are health and medicine and religion (Fallows, 2005). Could it be that the differential rate of adoption of technology has evened out? Furthermore, the Internet has been gendered through its social use and more importantly through its design. Shade, 2004, points out that the absence of a substantial number of women in the computer technology workplace has contributed to more male-friendly computer hardware and software designs. She however, does not advance any explanations or reasons for women catching up on men. She provides an array of descriptive statistics on how men and women differ in their use of Internet, with women tending to use the Internet more for bonding and men more for bridging roles, but fails to provide any implications that these findings might have.
Foot and Schneider, 2004, in examining crisis communication on the Web immediately after September 11 call to action the bridging role of the Internet in communicating within a dynamic environment across a multi-dimensional set of relationships. Their focus is on social mobilization through online structures during a crisis. They enumerate the different functions that the Internet fulfils during the crisis but do not provide any information on which functions helped in garnering the maximum mobilization. Foot and Schneider note that since the credibility of the source is important during a crisis, news media will retain their dominance as the content provider of choice. In my opinion, this equation may change with Internet news media or bloggers growing in power. It is another matter that they might be co-opted by the big media organizations.
With online journalism, making its presence felt more strongly, the dynamics for producing and disseminating news on the Internet has created new challenges. According to Dessaeur, 2004, these implications may include news audiences becoming more fragmented and a loss of economic credibility for some of the Internet news organizations. The news audiences may shrink in numbers but unless the news sites are content specialized, the fragmentation would be just about the numbers and not perspectives, As for the economic concerns about internet news organizations not being financially viable, most likely we will see greater collaborations or hyperlinking between online news sites or a few big Internet news organizations similar to the one observed in print and broadcast world. The journalists, however, will have to put on different hats, multitask, and contribute across different platforms. Online journalism is still evolving and to predict its future implications would be a matter of conjecture however, the manner in which it is progressing does provide sufficient insights of what to expect. We will just have to wait and see in which direction it evolves.