Cyber culture

Cyberculture is the culture that has emerged, or is emerging, from the use of computers for communication, entertainment, and business. Since the boundaries of cyberculture are difficult to define, the term is used flexibly, and its application to specific circumstances can be controversial. It generally refers at least to the cultures of on-line communities, but extends to a wide range of cultural issues relating to "cyber-topics", e.g. cybernetics, computerization, the digital revolution, and the perceived or predicted cyborgization of the human body. It can also embrace associated artistic and cultural movements, such as cyberpunk and transhumanism or as it is now called Humanity+. The term always incorporates at least an implicit anticipation of the future. Cyberculture encompasses the human-machine social and cultural levels involved in what is popularly known as cyberspace (a neologism invented by the cyberpunk author William Gibson). It is a wide social and cultural movement closely linked to advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs), their emergence and development and their rise to cultural prominence between the 1960s and the 1990s. Early cyberculture (from the beginning of the 1960s to the first half of the 1990s) developed outside the cultural and social mainstream (or in a kind of dialectical relationship with it). This early cyberculture produced its own representations of an emerging world of advanced information and communication technologies. Contemporary cyberculture can be understood, on one hand, as a set of cultural practices enabling us to deal with new forms of information, and, on the other hand, as a set of NGOs, civic activities and subcultural social groups forming a discursive opposition to the governmental and commercial interests in ICTs. The field of cyberculture studies examines the topics explained above, including the communities emerging within the networked spaces sustained by the use of modern technology. Students of cyberculture engage with political, philosophical, and psychological issues that arise from the networked interactions of human beings by humans who act in various relations to ICTs.