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.