Re: [Air-L] What is web culture?
Actually, I don't think there really is such a thing as 'web culture'; anything done online is intricately connected to the actor's offline cultural context, and therefore to postulate a separate 'internet culture' is mistaken, IMO. However, viewing online behaviour as subcultural has its merits, and there are perhaps clusters of behavioural patterns that make sense to analytically separate. I'm still thinking through this issue a lot, so I don't have any firm ideas I'm afraid, but I can suggest a couple of resources. Castells, Manuel. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. * Chapter 2 is called "The Culture of the Internet", and he does a good job tracing various practices, and says the following: - Definition of culture: "a set of values and beliefs informing behavior... collective construction that transcends individual preferences" (36-7) - "Internet culture... four-layer structure: the techno-meritocratic culture, the hacker culture, the virtual communitarian culture, and the entrepreneurial culture" (37) Postill, John. "Localising the Internet: Beyond Communities and Networks." Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University, UK, 2007. 20/9/2007 <http://jpostill.nomadit.co.uk/articles/postill_localising_net.pdf>. * He argues for the use of the concept of field to understand internet specific behaviour, which is useful I find. The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (http://jcmc.indiana.edu/) is also a good place to go to, if you haven't already. Hope that's some help. Julian ++++++++++ Blog: www.julianhopkins.net Skype: julhop IM: jfprhopkins@hotmail.com ------------------------------ Message: 5 Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 12:13:43 -0600 From: "Hall, Richard H." <rhall@mst.edu> Subject: [Air-L] What is web culture? To: <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Message-ID: <C3B253F7.18810%rhall@mst.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" 1) How would you define web culture? 2) How is it unique, in comparison to other cultures? 3) What are some good/classic resources on the web describing and defining web culture? ... Thanks ... Richard -- Richard H. Hall Professor and Program Director, Information Science and Technology Missouri S&T http://mst.edu/~rhall
--- Julian Hopkins <j@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
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