What is web culture?
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
IMO, questions 1 and 2 are pretty much the same. I personally don't think the web is a categorically different type of culture, but I've run into a lot of debate with that angle before. Regarding number 3, hard to ignore http://icanhascheezburger.com/ ;) Not to thread hijack, but just to throw this out there: http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-attacking-noise-in... I found that entry fascinating, and I think the implications of this curious innovation are quite valuable to a discussion on "web culture." Hall, Richard H. wrote:
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
I think there is another question before these: Is the web an artefact of our culture, or does it constitute a culture in itself? These are fundamental constructs that define much of the debate about the web. Christine Hine's book Virtual Ethnography has an early chapter that discusses these concepts and the effect they have on our conceptions of 'the internet'. Annatte Markham's boook Life Online is also seminal in this area. M-H On 16/1/08 5:13 AM, "Hall, Richard H." <rhall@mst.edu> wrote:
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
Hi all, Culture is a concept, so we can describe it the same way we describe cultures in general (in terms of values and artifacts) although it is rather like describing human (or world) culture. The Web in itself presents a variety of different spaces, each of them with its own set of characteristics. Is bloggers culture the same as Facebook culture? There is probably some overlap, but number of people will embrace one, but not the other. As someone pointed out, Web is an artifact, although we can still talk about the culture of Internet users, who are similar to other cultural groups that are identified on the bases of the activities they do (a specific music culture, soccer culture etc) rather than national/ethnic upbringing. Additionally, if we consider web an artifact, than we have to keep in mind that its content is created by people of different cultural (national/ethnic) backgrounds that will be reflected in the web content and interaction. Someone mentioned once to me that the Web user culture can be described in the terms of Hofstede's cultural dimensions (low power, high individualism, masculine, etc.) but I have never found an actual citation to that research. If anybody seen a study discussing web culture from this perspective, please let me know. Best, Ewa Callahan Assistant Professor of Communications Quinnipiac university -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Hall, Richard H. Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2008 1:14 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: [Air-L] What is web culture? 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 _______________________________________________ The Air-L@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/
I guess, even after all the helpful and interesting replies, I'm still not at all clear as to what "web culture" would be. It may be that my understanding is too fritzed up by too many years with Hall and Hofstede - see Jose's most recent reply. But I'm also missing the basic element: what do we mean by "culture"? U.S. anthropologists quietly dropped this term from their conceptual vocabulary sometime back, because despite a century of observation and theoretical debate, no working definition seemed to emerge that couldn't be undermined one way or another. I'm not quite ready to go that far ... but in the meantime, some additional resources and an advert 1) a special issue of JCMC was devoted to "Culture and Computer-Mediated Communication: Toward New Understandings" - exploring both the ways in which Hofstede and Hall could be used to some effect in analyzing online communication from a cultural perspective, as well as their limits and failures (Jose is more than right). the introduction can be found: Ess, C., and Sudweeks, F. (2005). Culture and computer-mediated communication: Toward new understandings. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(1), article 9. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue1/ess.html No, that's not the advert ... Forgive my inability to resist noting: At the upcoming CATaC'08 conference, Jose Abdelnour-Nocera and Connie Kampf will chair a panel provisionally titled "Beyond Hall, Hofstede, and 'culture', understanding diversity from the top-down to the bottom-up and back!" I'm absolutely confident the panel will be first-rate, and pretty darned sure that those interested in matters of culture and the web will find it inspiring and ground-breaking. hope this helps, - charles ess
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
participants (5)
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Callahan, Ewa S. Prof. -
Charles Ess -
Conor Schaefer -
Hall, Richard H. -
mhward