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Gómez-Diago (2012) Cyberspace and Cyberculture. In Kosut, M. & Golson, J.
Geoffrey (Eds). Encyclopedia of Gender in Media. SAGE reference publication.
Hardcover ISBN: 781412990790
Cyberspace and Cyberculture
These concepts work as metaphors for covering not just the multitude of types of
communication and contents developed by fusing the Internet with a variety of devices,
but also their users/producers and the values that are being built on line. The prefix
“cyber”, means piloting or governing and comes from the word cybernetics, defined by
Norman Weiner in 1948 as the science of control and communication in the animal and
the machine. Cyberspace approach the skeleton of Internet by comprising the new
communication media, from its infrastructure to its social use, while Cyberculture
embraces the set of practices, attitudes, modes of thought and values that grow along
with the Cyberspace. By keeping in mind the interplay between these concepts,
interactions between technology and culture become apparent.
Cyberspace
This term was coined by William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer (1984), where he
envisioned it as a graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every
computer in the human system. Simply explained, by referring to new medium of
communication which arose through the global interconnection of computers,
cyberspace describes the non-physical field created by computer systems and the users
who navigate and nourish it.
Each day, more people access to the Internet. According to Internet Usage
Statistics, the number of users has grown 444, 8 per cent since the year 2000. Most of
the internet users are from Asia (42, per cent), followed by Europe (24, 2 per cent) and
North America (13, 54 per cent). The rest of users are distributed between Latin
America/Caribbean (10, 4 per cent), Africa (5, 6 per cent) and Oceania/Australia (1 per
cent). At the time of the writing of this entry, the penetration of Internet in the world is
of 28, 7 per cent. Therefore, in a world population of 6,845,609,960 persons, there are
1,966,514,816 internet users.
Without forgetting that a high number of people do not have a role in the
cyberspace, the spread of wireless communication technology around the world is
provoking a surge of horizontal networks of interactive communication, whereby
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millions of people share messages both synchronous and asynchronous, via e-mails,
chats, sms, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, wikis, and the like.
Women have been part of cyberspace for many years and for different reasons,
among them; maintaining and establishing relationships, as concluded a research carried
in the year 2000 by Pew Internet Institute and as it is expressed in a investigation
conducted by Brian Solis in 2009, where was found that devices as facebook, flikr,
friendfeed, doc stoc, myspace.com or twitter are more used by women than by men.
People by being part of networks, by acceding to the huge and diverse content
available on the Internet can share ideas and information for facing different situations.
Furthermore, by being online it is possible to achieve actions as buying, studying for a
degree or searching for a job. These facilities offer both, women and men more
autonomy, affecting the performance of genre and therefore, making possible the
betterment of the situation of women in several issues. Thus, women who live in
isolated regions, can now access to information and to opportunities that, without the
resources which conform and build the cyberspace, would be not possible.
Understanding gender as a dynamic concept, therein, under constantly
redefinition by the meanings that people provides to it, through its performance in
different contexts; we become aware of the role that new technologies and their users
have in the construction of the gender. Because of the easiness for establishing and
mantaining communication, the conception of gender which each user has can be
broaden by interacting with others who have similar or vastly different attitudes,
behaviors and customs.
Apart from the possibility to do several tasks by being online, improving the
management of the time and permitting to meet different objectives, without being
limited by the characteristics of the living place, cyberspace is also an arena for
dialoguing and for enforcing meanings. The inexistence of national/local boundaries in
this environment encourages and facilitates the performance of conversations between
people who belong to pretty different cultures.
Cyberculture
Cyberculture comprises a set of technologies, material and intellectual, practices,
attitudes, modes of thought and values developed along with the growth of cyberspace,
a non place where people from several places, with pretty different cultures, values of
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all sorts and habits, coexist and communicate. Cyberculture has utterance by practices
included but not limited to global sharing, distributed creation, social networking,
streaming, mass collaboration, collaborative assessment, social bookmarking or cloud
computing. These routines encourage commitment, participation and empathy; making
us irrevocably involved with and responsible for each other and provoking that
experiences lived on cyberspace have an influence into ourselves, by changing the way
we think, the form of our communities, and our very identities.
By using social networks, by accessing virtual worlds, by publishing their ideas
on blogs or websites, people share their thoughts, allowing others to know and to
integrate them. Therefore, users who are far away geographically, can be closer by
sharing a message through the multiple tools or devices available.
Pierre Levy situates the core of Cyberculture in the fact that it embodies a new
universality not based on the fixity and independence of signification, but built and
extended by interconnecting messages through virtual communities, provoking the
continuous renewal of the meanings and the performance of a Collective Intelligence,
whereby people share their individual expertise in order to meet shared goals and
objectives.
Though seem adequate consider new technologies as a resource to develop
dialogues between cultures more easily in comparison with physical world, it is needed
bear in mind that many people are not engaged in the Cyberculture not just because they
are not users of the Internet but because in the countries where they life, there are
restrictions to access to determinate contents. Thus, empirical research carried out by
OpenNet Initiative in 2006, has found evidence of technical filtering in twenty six of the
forty countries which were analyzed, being “women rights”, one of the categories
subject to this internet filtering. Although cyberculture, that is, users, generate its own
resources to face situations as the denied content by designing tools which allow people
to access to the websites which are forbidden where they live, this research cited puts in
evidence the interplay between virtual and physical world and, therein makes is visible
the fault of considering technology as an entity which has effects on society and the
suitability of adopting an approach which covers the multitude of human agents who
variously invent, produce, use and interpret technologies.
Cyberculture is thus in feedback with habits and ways of behaving performed in
physical life. Both dimensions are constantly interacting, provoking that their
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differences seems to be more slight each day, not just because all cultures, people,
organizations and enterprises want a place on the construction of the cyberculture but
because the widespread of tools and devices which allow us to have ubiquitous
connectivity, making possible that the web is present in our physical world, in our
pockets, in the our cars, etc.
The possibilities that women and men have for communicating, for creating
groups related to their interests, or for claiming regarding issues they are concerned
about, makes cyberculture pretty different in comparison with the broadcasting one,
where few people had voice. Different ideas and types of content have now visibility
and more people can access to several resources which satisfy their varied interests. The
pursuit of gender equality has a role in the cyberculture in its ongoing construction by
women and men form different places of the world, who are communicating their ideas,
showing their thoughts and sharing their experiences.
See Also: Audience as producer with new media; Empowerment; McLuhan; New
media; Social media.
Further Readings
Brian Solis, “Revealing the people defining social networks.” Available online at:
http://www.briansolis.com/2009/10/revealing-the-people-defining-social-
networks/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter (accessed October 2010)
Donna Haraway. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century.” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature. New York; Routledge, 1991
Internet Usage Statistics. “World Internet Users and Population Statistics in the world”
Available online at: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm (accessed October
2010)
Manuel Castells. “Communication, power and counter power in the network society,
International” Journal of Communication, (v.1, 2007). Available online at:
http://www.itu.dk/stud/speciale/specialeprojekt/Litteratur/Castells_2007%20-
%20Communication%20power%20in%20the%20network%20society.pdf (accessed
October 2010)
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Marshall Mcluhan, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. New York: New
American Library, 1964
Patrice M. Buzzanell, Hellen Sterk and Lynn H. Turner. Gender in Applied
Communication Contexts, California: Sage Publications, 2002
Pew Research Center. “How women use the Internet to cultivate relationships with
family and friends.” Available online at: http://www.pewinternet.org/Press-
Releases/2000/Tracking-online-life-How-women-use-the-Internet-to-cultivate-
relationships-with-family-and-friends.aspx (accessed October 2010)
Pierre, Lévy. Cyberculture. University of Minnesota Press, 2001
Ronald Deibert, John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, Jonathan Zittrain, eds., Access Denied:
The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.
http://opennet.net/accessdenied
Sherry Turkle. "Looking toward cyberspace: Beyond grounded sociology. Cyberspace
and identity" Contemporary Sociology (v.28/6, 1999)
Tom Bruneau, Empathy, in Encyclopedia of Communication Theory, Thousand Oaks,
California: SAGE publications, 2009
William Gibson, Neuromancer, New York: Ace Science Fiction, 1984
Gloria Gómez-Diago. Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sciences of Communication (II) at
the Rey Juan Carlos University.
