Resumen Las nuevas tecnologías de la información van creando una nueva cultura que se denomina como cibercultura o ambiente digital, que incluye las tecnologías, las formas sociales de la producción tecnológica y las nuevas simbolizaciones y metáforas de la existencia de los hombres. Se presentan así algunos interrogantes fundamentales de inicio: ¿Cómo debe la iglesia responder a la nueva cultura virtual o cibercultura?, ¿Cómo se reflexiona teológicamente sobre la cibercultura?, ¿Cómo puede la iglesia usar el ciberespacio para hacerlo?, ¿Qué se (...) está haciendo en este campo de la ciberteología? Se analizan las posibilidades y límites de una reflexión llamada ciberteología, con base epistémica y comunidad académica todavía incipientes, pero que con una teología colaborativa puede aportar a la reflexión teológica del siglo XXI donde hay problemas graves para resolver desde la fe, como son la transmisión de la experiencia, la corporalidad y la presencia, el desafío a la autoridad y la solidaridad.The new technologies of the information are creating a new culture that is known as cyberculture or digital environment, which includes the technologies, the social forms of the technological production and the new sjmbolizations and metaphors of the existence of the humankind. There are some fundamental questions in beginning: How should the church respond to the new virtual culture or cyber-culture? How we reflect theologically on cyber-culture?, how can the church use cyberspace to do evangelization?, What it is doing in this field of the cyber-theology?. There are analyzed the possibilities and limits of a reflection called cyber-theology with epistemic bases and still emerging academic community, but that with a collaborative theology can reach to one theological reflection for the 21st century where there are serious problems to solve in the believing community, such as the transmission of the experience, the body and the flesh, the challenge to the authority, the physicality and the presence, and solidarity. (shrink)

Macek (2004) highlighted a typology of current concepts of cyberculture. Four different concepts were identified, which are spans utopian, information, anthropological and epistemological concepts of cyberculture. Macek (2004) also highlighted four different periods of the cyberculture and its impacts on netizen. The very first foundations of cyberculture originate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) at the turn of the 1950s and the 1960s. Early cyberculture reached its peak in the late 1970s and in the (...) 1980s. Early cyberculture originates in the American hackers’ subcultures. The second period of cyberculture can be broadly set to the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. The beginning of the third period was characterised by a significant transformation at all the levels of early cyberculture, a shift that was related to the accelerated spread of microcomputers and to the development of public computer networks. This fourth period begins at the end of the 1980s and ends in about the middle of the 1990s. (shrink)

This book shows that cyberculture has been a long time coming.In Prefiguring Cyberculture, media critics and theorists, philosophers, and historians of science ...

The impact of Cyberculture, of digital devices on young people as extensions of the body, can be seen in terms of the decreasing structuring of thoughts and information, increasing impulsivity in perception and action, and the development of more primitive defense mechanisms. These adverse impacts result in the feeling of isolation and devaluation, frustration of present and uncertainty of the future, exteriorization and floating identities, mimetic and adhesive identifications, less cohesion of the self, and decreasing tolerance of the other. (...) This paper focuses on the following themes: Symbiosis versus syncretism: The affirmations of symbiosis. The dilutions of syncretism. Synopsis: Too much syncretism, too little symbiosis. Lack of a deeper co-construction of knowledge, more lasting, and sustainable. Lack of increased more independent personal cognitive deepening. Lack of ability to be alone. Causality and free will: Symbiotic versus syncretic causality. Conclusions: Cyber-selfs—either distributed or not at all? (shrink)

The object of the study is the culture of digital society, the subject is the ontological foundations of culture. The aim of the research is to reveal the ontological problems of cyberculture, which becomes the basis for a digital society with a virtual nature. In the modern world, the impact of digital technologies on human life has acquired an irreversible scale. The changes affected not only socio-economic relations, but also affected the sphere of personal relationships, information perception and cognitive (...) processes of the individual. People are spending more and more time on the Internet, using social networks, using applications. We can talk about a new stage in the development of human civilization, the culture of which has its own special features. In this study, the culture of digital society is considered from a philosophical and ontological point of view. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that cyberculture is in the stage of its formation. Digital society is changing, Internet technologies are developing, new applications are appearing. All these processes require philosophical reflection and scientific analysis. A special contribution of the author to the study of the phenomenon of cyberculture and the ontologization of the culture of digital society, which has its own distinctive features, namely crisis, virtuality, technology. The main conclusions of the study are that cyberculture, the culture of communities based on the use of advanced information technologies, is postmodern in nature. The further development of digital technologies gives a chance to a person to overcome the limitations of the individual nature of the personality, but at the same time there is a great danger of losing generic features and ceasing to be a person in the classical sense. (shrink)

T h i s article examines the ethical implications of the desirefor disembodiment situated in the texts and technologies of cyberspace. The article is divided into 2 parts. The first traces the conceptual history of dualism, demonstrating its exclusive cultural politics and investigating the socio-political consequences of encoding this metaphysical information in contemporary media technology. The second part examines the material conditions of new communication technology, arguing that the issue of access reduplicates in practice the exclusivity of dualism. The article (...) concludes by investigating the ethical implications of employing dualistic metaphysics as a legitimizing narrative of media technology and cyberculture. (shrink)

(1999). Ontological anarchy, the temporary autonomous zone, and the politics of cyberculture a critique of hakim bey. Angelaki: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 115-128.

Resumen: Presentamos una recuperación del espíritu humanista en la corriente estética del arte de medios de las ciberculturas. Para mostrar el giro cultural hacia el neorrenacimiento, hacemos un recorrido por los conceptos que fundan el humanismo clásico y que aproximan el arte contemporáneo a la racionalidad tecnológica y mediática. Este artículo revisa el encuentro del hombre consigo mismo, las subjetividades del arte y la expresión en el paradigma de las nuevas tecnologías, la ciencia y la creatividad, así como la renovación (...) de una emergente epistemología visual que desplaza la concepción moderna de obra de arte, de la figura del artista y del lugar del espectador.: We present a recovery of the humanistic spirit in the current aesthetics of the media art in the cybercultures. To show the cultural shift towards Neo-Renaissance, we tour the concepts underlying the classical humanism and contemporary art closer to technologic and mediatic rationality. This article reviews the meeting of man with himself, the subjectivities of the Art and the expression in the paradigm of new technologies, science and creativity, as well as the renewal of an emerging visual epistemology that moves the modern concept of the work of art, the figure of the artist and the place of the viewer. (shrink)

This article argues that while modes of scholarship stressing structural insights into the digital divide and ethnographic insights into online communities each give us important information about current uses of the internet, for the sake of a unified social justice principle it is necessary to interpret these forms of knowledge in terms of what could be. Marx’s formula ‘the development of each as a condition for the development of all’ is put forward as the principle of a socially-just internet actualized (...) from the ground up. It is argued that the most rapidly emerging and important form of constraint upon ‘the development of each’ is the for profit online social media industry in which moments of human communicative creativity become packaged as commodities for commercial purposes. Creative, cultural agency becomes an imposition rather than a liberation as represented in the industry ideology. It is argued therefore that groups that use the internet for serious play – the use of avatars in virtual worlds is discussed as an example – present us with a form of online subjectivity that is rising in importance as a form of cultural agency inasmuch as the play component is premised upon the rejection of pre-packaged forms of agency. Support for a socially-just internet would thus mean supporting the online communities formed in this process. Thus the argument is put forward that the importance of serious online play groups is not due to their potential for forming communities per se but is rather due to their potential for resisting the imposition of agency. Inasmuch as online communities in the midst of such groups can bolster that goal, they can represent the development of human capabilities in a way that expands the theme of social justice. (shrink)

In the article physicality's phenomenon is revealed as a contradictory and topical issue of socio-philosophical discourse. The consideration of the theoretical-philosophical and psychological definitions of physicality made it possible to disclose it as an attribute of human-morphemes and the integrity of anthropo-being. Attention is focused on body-transformations in conditions of cyberculture and the main boundary forms of human body-modifications are determined. Physicality is defined through the prism of socio-cultural practices as a way of preserving social man and the main (...) means of individual self-identification. The representation of spiritual filling of physicality is carried out helping of its symbolic-attributive codes of interaction with culture. Physicality is considered as a visualization, a realization of the spiritual existence of man and the substratum of man's creative potential.. After all, man's life values, empathic abilities, motivational attitudes, ideas and vital signs are formed through his physical deformations and psychosomatic states into a person. Person's estrangement from natural development, turning into an immortal and not needing a reproductive update leads to a crisis of humanity and an anomie of universal values. After all, such phenomena of human relations as love for children, the unfolding of oneself through the understanding of others and the definition of fragility and not the infinity of human existence, and generate humanity. And these humanistic attitudes shape the meaning of human life in its content. If this sense-determining physicality's layer of is eliminated, man's existence is jeopardized. The solution of this issue is demanded by modern society without delay and only practical philosophy can offer solutions to it. Physiosophy or samosofia is a new direction of modern scientific knowledge about the spiritual and cultural senses of body and its physiological influences on this process. Excluding physicality – we eliminate materialization's substrate of conscious and cultural sphere of man, deprive the person of his spiritual expression of filling, his symbolic-attributive algorithm of interaction with culture. (shrink)

The present text has as a main goal to discuss the relations between childhood and contemporary culture. More so, that the social space the children occupy in the cyberculture became a very contradictory one: for in one hand we see such children with a natural inborne expertise; and on the other hand, we see them as unprotected and fragile beings. The line of reasoning we intend to partake with the reader, begins initially with the data research of the production (...) of arguments on the children´s relations with the internet that go around their daily routine and the researches of academical and official nature. On a second instance, we look into the market´s discursive production in order to observe how the making of sites, targeted speciffically to childrens, relates itself with prerrogatives of such specialized knowledge. At last but not at least, we show a philosophical approach of such speeches sustained metaforically by the homeric narrative and Franz Kafka’s reading of Ulisses’encounter at the mermaid’s island. Through this path we intend to analyze tendencies that emerge from the production of knowledge about childhood and cyberculture and, altogether, to think on the ethical and methodological chalenges that such subject imposes to childhood’s researchers. (shrink)

Routledge (New Media and Cyberculture Series), July 2007.

An examination of new forms of alienation in our never-off, plugged-in culture—and a clarion call for a “conspiracy of estranged people.” We can reach every point in the world but, more importantly, we can be reached from any point in the world. Privacy and its possibilities are abolished. Attention is under siege everywhere. Not silence but uninterrupted noise, not the red desert, but a cognitive space overcharged with nervous incentives to act: this is the alienation of our times... —from The (...) Soul at Work Capital has managed to overcome the dualism of body and soul by establishing a workforce in which everything we mean by the Soul—language, creativity, affects—is mobilized for its own benefit. Industrial production put to work bodies, muscles, and arms. Now, in the sphere of digital technology and cyberculture, exploitation involves the mind, language, and emotions in order to generate value—while our bodies disappear in front of our computer screens. In this, his newest book, Franco “Bifo” Berardi—key member of the Italian Autonomist movement and a close associate of Félix Guattari—addresses these new forms of estrangement. In the philosophical landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, the Hegelian concept of alienation was used to define the harnessing of subjectivity. The estrangement of workers from their labor, the feeling of alienation they experienced, and their refusal to submit to it became the bases for a human community that remained autonomous from capital. But today a new condition of alienation has taken root in which workers commonly and voluntarily work overtime, the population is tethered to cell phones and Blackberries, debt has become a postmodern form of slavery, and antidepressants are commonly used to meet the unending pressure of production. As a result, the conditions for community have run aground and new philosophical categories are needed. The Soul at Work is a clarion call for a new collective effort to reclaim happiness. The Soul at Work is Bifo's long overdue introduction to English-speaking readers. This Semiotext edition is also the book's first appearance in any language. (shrink)

In this lively and accessible study, David Lyon explores the relationship between religion and postmodernity, through the central metaphor of 'Jesus in Disneyland.' Contemporary disciples of Jesus have used Disneyland for religious events, whilst Disney characters are now probably better known throughout the world than many biblical figures. But this book cautions against seeing it as a simple substitution. Rather, Lyon shows how this metaphor reveals highly innovative and potentially enduring features of contemporary spiritual quests. In the West, many religious (...) institutions have declined in social significance, but what Lyon calls the religious realm, including faith and spirituality, is flourishing in multifarious forms. Throughout the text he examines a wide variety of religious and para-religious behaviour, exploring its relation to issues of identity, cyberculture, consumer culture and social theories of time. Lyon's stimulating use of contemporary case studies illuminates the interconnections between religion and postmodernity in a world where holy wars are waged in cyberspace, New Age self religions resonate with new identity quests, and Pentecostalism sparks globalization from below. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars in the sociology of religion, sociology of culture, social theory, religious studies and theology.. (shrink)

This new Encyclopedia of Postmodernism is structured with biographical entries on all the key contributors to the postmodernism debate, including Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieum, Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas and Wittgenstein. Providing an all-encompassing and welcome addition to the field, the Encyclopedia contains entries on foundational concepts of postmodernism which have revolutionized thinking in every intellectual discipline. This new Encyclopedia is the first to provide comprehensive A-Z coverage of the key individuals and concepts of postmodernism. The 300+ entries include: * African (...) American studies * Roland Barthes * binary opposition * Buddhism * comparative literature * cyberculture * death of God * Gilles Deleuze * desire * digital culture * end of history * globalization * grand narrative * improvisation * jouissance * logocentrism * metalanguage * sadism * theatre arts * trope * visuality * Cornell West * and much more. Fully cross-referenced and indexed, with suggestionsfor further reading. (shrink)

Feminist theorist and philosopher Donna Haraway has substantially impacted thought on science, cyberculture, the environment, animals, and social relations. This long-overdue volume explores her influence on feminist theory and philosophy, paying particular attention to her more recent work on companion species, rather than her "Manifesto for Cyborgs." Margret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick argue that the ongoing fascination with, and re-production of, the cyborg has overshadowed Haraway's extensive body of work in ways that run counter to her own transdisciplinary practices. (...) Sparked by their own personal "adventures" with Haraway's work, the authors offer readings of her texts framed by a series of theoretical and political perspectives: feminist materialism, standpoint epistemology, radical democratic theory, queer theory, and even science fiction. They situate Haraway's critical storytelling and "risky reading" practices as forms of feminist methodology and recognize her passionate engagement with "naturecultures" as the theoretical core driving her work. Chapters situate Haraway as critic, theorist, biologist, feminist, historian, and humorist, exploring the full range of her identities and reflecting her commitment to embodying all of these modes simultaneously. (shrink)

Donna Haraway's work has transformed the fields of cyberculture, feminist studies, and the history of science and technology. Her subjects range from animal dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History to research in transgenic mice, from gender in the laboratory to the nature of the cyborg. Trained as an historian of science, she has produced a series of books and essays that have become essential reading in cultural studies, gender studies, and the history of science. The Haraway Reader (...) brings together a generous selection of Donna Haraway's work. Included is her "Manifesto for Cyborgs," in which she famously wrote that she "would rather be a cyborg than a goddess." Other selections are taken from her three major works, Primate Visions, Modest Witness , and Simians, Cyborgs and Women , as well as some of her more recent writing on animals. For readers in cultural studies, feminist theory, science studies, and cyberculture, Donna Haraway is one of our keenest observers of nature, science, and the social world. This volume is the best introduction to her thought. (shrink)

Welcome to the fifth issue of Humanist Studies &the Digital Age entitled Networks and Projects: New Platforms in Digital Humanities. The sections Perspectives and Interventions are devoted to the publication of a selection from the proceedings of a colloquium held at Brown University in the Spring of 2015. These first two sections are presented and introduced by Massimo Riva in his essay on Scholarly Networks and Collaborative Practices. The third section of this issue, Projects, is presented by Crystal Hall in (...) her introduction, Italian Studies and Digital Humanities: Research Outcomes. In the brief notes of my Editorial, I reflect on the idea of “network” as conceptual framework and privileged space of knowledge engaging with Pierre Lévy’s work, and I anticipate the topic of the sixth issue of this journal that will be published in 2019. (shrink)

Published in Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro (eds), _Prefiguring Cyberculture: an intellectual history_ (MIT Press and Power Publications, December 2002). Please do send comments: email me. Back to my main publications page . Back to my home page.

Depuis une vingtaine d'années, l'oeuvre de C. E. Shannon semble être l'objet d'un relatif oubli dans l'ensemble disciplinaire nommé en France « Sciences de l'information et de la communication ». Cet article essaie d'en saisir les raisons, après en avoir rappelé le succès. Il plaide pour une relecture épistémologique du fameux schéma de la mesure d'information de Shannon. C'est ainsi que le « nombre de bits », terme à peu près incompréhensible du côté des sciences humaines, peut se voir donner (...) un sens et être appréhendé comme le nombre de questions pour identifier un objet. Ceci permet alors de considérer que l'élaboration shannonienne pourrait constituer un matériau fondamental pour la cyberculture, entendue comme réflexion sur notre rapport informationnel au monde physique et social.For twenty years, the work of CE Shannon seems to be the subject of a relatively neglected in all disciplinary named in France "Information Science and Communication." This article tries to understand the reasons, after having recalled the success. He argues for a reinterpretation of the famous epistemological schema information measure of Shannon. Thus the "number of bits", a term almost incomprehensible side humanities, can be given a meaning and be understood as the number of questions to identify an object. This then allows to consider the development shannonienne could be a fundamental material for cyberculture, understood as a reflection of our informational report to physical and social world. (shrink)

We can reach every point in the world but, more importantly, we can be reached from any point in the world. Privacy and its possibilities are abolished. Attention is under siege everywhere. Not silence but uninterrupted noise, not the red desert, but a cognitive space overcharged with nervous incentives to act: this is the alienation of our times....--from The Soul at WorkCapital has managed to overcome the dualism of body and soul by establishing a workforce in which everything we mean (...) by the Soul--language, creativity, affects--is mobilized for its own benefit. Industrial production put to work bodies, muscles, and arms. Now, in the sphere of digital technology and cyberculture, exploitation involves the mind, language, and emotions in order to generate value--while our bodies disappear in front of our computer screens.In this, his newest book, Franco "Bifo" Berardi--key member of the Italian Autonomist movement and a close associate of Félix Guattari--addresses these new forms of estrangement. In the philosophical landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, the Hegelian concept of alienation was used to define the harnessing of subjectivity. The estrangement of workers from their labor, the feeling of alienation they experienced, and their refusal to submit to it became the bases for a human community that remained autonomous from capital. But today a new condition of alienation has taken root in which workers commonly and voluntarily work overtime, the population is tethered to cell phones and Blackberries, debt has become a postmodern form of slavery, and antidepressants are commonly used to meet the unending pressure of production. As a result, the conditions for community have run aground and new philosophical categories are needed. The Soul at Work is a clarion call for a new collective effort to reclaim happiness.The Soul at Work is Bifo's long overdue introduction to English-speaking readers. This Semiotext edition is also the book's first appearance in any language. (shrink)

The focal point of my article is the work of biohackers: mainly Josiah Zayner, whose activism as a biohacker, as an artist and a public figure offers an interesting lens through which one can explore the contemporary genetic imaginary and our changing and varied approach to genetic engineering. The framework for this description is set by an analysis of cultural representations of contemporary science and technology, both in documentaries and in works of fiction. In the article, I trace and analyse (...) the ways in which biohackers’ activity is involved with the earlier ideas of cyberculture, most notably with the notion of biological life as information (possible to edit or ‘hack’) and to the image of a ‘hacker’. I recall the popular phrase of ‘playing god’, often quoted in relation to genetic imaginary, mainly as a warning against excessive interventions within nature. The phrase and the warning itself seem to have become insofar more important, as the scale of possible interventions had been raised by the advancement of genetic engineering. Finally, I discuss the relation of art and science in Zayner’s activity, within a broader context of relevant images of artists and scientists and their role within the changing realities of contemporary life. The article does not pretend to fully analyse or even describe the modalities and implication of biohackers’ activity. Its main goal is to shed more light on the current changes in collective imagination related to the rapid development of biotechnology and its cultural understanding. The public presence of biohackers, and especially Zayner’s activity, provides new visions of human agency in nature and of relation between art, science and social practice. (shrink)

Analising the relationship betwen religion and communication, many options open whole range of possibilities of reflection about the theme. In this case, the relationship proposed is betwen virtual media and the religion, specifically groups and religion moviments of the Catholic Church. We live a reality that, in virtual world, we have the oportunity to be receptors and, mainly, contents producers. In this dynamism, is very important to know and to understand how this communication process happens. It is commum find in (...) various digital social medias, in religion context, groups and moviments marked for a way that keep the teachings and doctrines. For this specific public, the Christian teaching practise is more important than the biblic formation or the faith deepening. It is present in cyberspace like a unique way to arrive to holiness. The virtual communication medias become a ideal space in holiness ideology condution proposed by many groups and conservative moviments, become the so important communication relation process in a bit dialogical ambient between the many and diferent opinions. This way, for the first explanation about research thematic, we show a historic about the communiction process, the communication media evolution and the so known ambient in contemporaneity: the virtual ambient. We approach the ciberculture, the space where was created a culture from the virtual communicative actions and how this reality dialogues with the religion. Then, we show a brief schedule about the Opus Dei, the special facts in development of this conservative institution of the Catholic Church and your presence in virtual communication media. Finnaly, we point the challenges that can be found in contemporaneity, for exist a dialogical process in groups and conservative moviments of the Catholic Church, in virtual ambient, once this is the space where the most moviments and groups are presents, transmitting your messages. In support of the research, either in Religion Science or in Social Communication, we use the bibliographic consultation method whose sources are books, thesis and publications. (shrink)

This book introduces the critical concepts and debates that are shaping the emerging field of game studies. Exploring games in the context of cultural studies and media studies, it analyses computer games as the most popular contemporary form of new media production and consumption. The book: Argues for the centrality of play in redefining reading, consuming and creating culture Offers detailed research into the political economy of games to generate a model of new media production Examines the dynamics of power (...) in relation to both the production and consumption of computer games This is key reading for students, academics and industry practitioners in the fields of cultural studies, new media, media studies and game studies, as well as human-computer interaction and cyberculture. (shrink)

In a interview concerning the Internet and cyberculture, communications professor Nobert Bolz was asked how he prepares his children for a world in which the authority of experts is in competition with emerging lay communities of knowledge production, such as Wikipedia. Bolz replied: “I try to constantly hammer in that they should read books. I just always say, read books, otherwise you'll belong to the losers. This is the only objective for educating my own children that I've given myself—with (...) only modest success.” With regard to his students, however, Bolz added: “On the other hand, when I see my own…. (shrink)

Man is a "homo theologicus." The dominion of the cyberculture is determining the oblivion of the Sacred in a new fashion, creating fictional transcendences that replace traditional reality with cyberconstructions. We aim to show how man is essentially a theologal being and how the Byzantine notion of ϑέωσις (deification) as expressed in sacred arts can be a way of preserving human essence from its alienation in the fictional transcendences of cyberbeing. We approach cyberculture as a process of ontological (...) desubstantiation via artificial "intelligence" and virtual reproductions. We explain the dual phenomenon of the implanting of a decentered, networked techno-hedonism and the spread of the "avatar syndrome" as a cyber-disease that inhibits in man his responsibility to be real. By contrast, we underscore the importance of the fact that in cyberbeing the "enchantment before beings" as anticipation of radical freedom is especially safeguarded. While the modern aesthetic is mostly deprived of mystic origin and transcendental telos and proves useless against cyberbeing's desubstantiating power, Byzantine aesthetic as an ontological healing way can contribute to the de-oblivion of human essence. This implies that sacred Byzantine arts as aesthetic therapy open the horizon in which man experiences his essence as perpetual bliss in the meaning of Being. (shrink)

Comparing the ways in which the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio and the Australian cybernetic performance artist Stelarc criticize or defend technological cultural practices, this article argues that Virilio's ambiguous responses to avant-garde art highlight his key ideas far move clearly than his single-minded critique of 'termninal' mass-cultural practices - without any relationship to art - in Polar Inertia and Open Sky. Virlio's The Art of the Motor attacks the strategies of 20th-century technological avant- gardes for their apparent eugenicist and (...) fascist sympathies, but Virilios more recent interviews in Cyberrnonde and Voage d'hiver defend the ways in which the pre-technological avant-gardes resist the realist perspective of photography, and argue that the technological arts should offer similar resistance to the impact of cyberculture. Whereas Virilio concludes that such technological 'resistance' is probably impossible, Stelarc's recent research identifies exceptions to Virilio's rules. (shrink)

Theoretical response to technical development tends to come in two overall forms: that technology is either transparent or opaque to society. The transparency thesis lays its cards directly on the table: technology is essentially neutral and has merely instrumental relation to the social. The opacity thesis suggests that technology is not essentially neutral, but has effects of its own on social life. This thesis itself subdivides clearly into two: those who denigrate and those who celebrate the effects of technology. The (...) former category is the one that has been most filled by philosophers and theoretically-minded social commentators, and includes, among others, Heidegger's analysis of technology, the Frankfurt School and Max Weber. The latter category is associated primarily with two movements, of dubious socio-political sensitivity: futurism and North-American techno-libertarianism. Far from contesting the premise of the transparency arguments, these views still think of technology as instrumental. It's just that instrumentality is regarded as a problem by denigrators, whereas sheer increase in prosthetic capacity is regarded as a blessing by the celebrators. (shrink)

How is knowledge produced and used in cyberspace? David Hakken--a key figure in the anthropology of science and technology studies-approaches the study of cyberculture through the venue of knowledge production, drawing on critical theory from anthropology, philosophy and informatics (computer science) to examine how the character and social functions of knowledge change profoundly in computer--saturated environments. He looks at what informational technologies offer, how they are being employed, and how they are tied to various agendas and forms of power. (...) This book will be essential for both social scientists and cultural studies scholars doing research on cyberculture. (shrink)

In this paper the contemporary practices of human genomics in the 21st century are placed alongside the digital bodies of the 1990s. The primary aim is to provide a trajectory of the biodigital as follows: First, digital bodies and biodigital bodies were both part of the spectacular imaginaries of early cybercultures. Second, these spectacular digital bodies were supplemented in the mid-1990s by digital bodywork practices that have become an important dimension of everyday communication. Third, the spectacle of biodigital bodies is (...) in the process of being supplemented by biodigital bodywork practices, through personal or direct-to-consumer genomics. This shift moves a form of biodigital communication into the everyday. Finally, what can be learned from putting the trajectories of digital and biodigital bodies together is that the degree of this communicative shift may be obscured through the doubled attachment of personal genomics to everyday digital culture and high-tech spectacle. (shrink)

(A chapter in the book edited by Ine Gevers, Robot Love: Can We Learn from Robots About Love?) Similarly to the method employed by Marx in his analysis of the capital and to de Saussure’s structuralist explanation of language, I suggest we conceive the categories in question as materially conditioned while resulting into full abstraction in the process of analysis. Thus, instead of theorising in terms of the anthropologically (and philosophically) conditioned phantasm of a “digital subjectivity” or a “cyborg self,” (...) let us radicalise and absolutise the concepts of the material and the ideal (or the mind understood in opposition to the material), arriving to physicality, regardless of whether organic or synthetic, and the automaton of signification as our main two categories of analysis. Therefore, let us also note that the category of “automaton” implies we are not dealing with a form of cognition but rather of language or signification. It is through operation with these categories that we shall postulate the sociopolitical and economic relevance of the cybernetic development for the post-human society and for the post-humanist self. The statement just made refers to a de facto political project, and it is impossible to arrive to results that would represent a fundamental change in relation to the humanist history of civilization/s without resorting to philosophical concepts. (shrink)

O impacto do ciberespaço com as novas formas de produção, circulação e consumo de informação tem sido tão grande a ponto de reconfigurar a vida e o pensamento como tais? Educação, cultura, toda construção dos espaços antropológicos e até a maneira de se comunicar com o sagrado se vêem afetadas por essa interrogação que nasce do confronto do humano com a internet. O artigo vem examinar criticamente a resposta de Pierre Levy; um dos primeiros intelectuais a responder a essa complexa (...) interrogação, confrontando-se em poucas páginas a sua posição e a de outros críticos teóricos, definindo o espaço da produção do virtual como um novo plano de realidade a partir do qual se devem discutir os parâmetros de uma nova maneira de se comunicar com o sagrado. Não há respostas, mas sim, muitas perguntas. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: The Fall of Baltar The Transhuman Temptation… Really! The First and Last Temptations of Baltar “There Must Be Some Way Out of Here” Notes.

Promotion of interculturality as a model of diversity management that is more respectful of the full enjoyment of the rights and freedoms of all citizens in real and effective equality conditions has ceased to be a utopia to become a reality, thanks to the social and-cultural relations that are taking place among equals belonging to different cultures through Cyberspace that constitutes, together with education, the new paradigm of interculturality in the Digital Age. Intercultural dialogues and exchanges taking place in this (...) context are born of feelings and emotions as intense and enriching as those that take place in real life, insofar as they emerge from the essence of personal identity, of one’s own ideology or conscience; And are governed, in most cases, by the regime of freedom that characterizes the digital culture, to act according to their own ideas, convictions or beliefs. (shrink)

O presente artigo pretende discutir o processo de formação de identidades sociais online nos ‘mundos virtuais’ - nossa hipótese é a de que a presença do que Salen e Zimmerman (2003) chamam de ‘círculo mágico’ exerça uma força mediadora que singulariza o processo de criação de identidades sociais, de modo a tornar tal particularização algo digno de atenção pelos estudos da cibercultura.

Este ensaio tem como objetivo problematizar o papel da internet como agente de difusão de informação, ferramenta produtora de conhecimento e cultura. Os processos participativos em rede, as comunidades virtuais, colocam em evidência as tensões entre um antigo modelo calcado em estruturas de poderes centralizados, e a emergência de uma ordem dispersiva e fragmentária na dinâmica social. É nesse contexto que surgem as polêmicas em torno do Marco Civil da Internet, nosso objeto de estudo. A instauração do Marco Civil, deu (...) lugar à concepção e busca de regulação da internet como patrimônio coletivo. Nosso objetivo é analisar o Marco Civil, no quadro das politicas de promoção do acesso à internet, através de um diálogo entre comunicação, ética e filosofia, questionando seus princípios fundamentais quanto ao pluralismo e a diversidade cultural, a fim de produzir uma reflexão fundamentada sobre os eixos reguladores deste projeto de Lei. (shrink)

Las comunidades en línea han sido vistas como una nueva esfera social que coadyuva al surgimiento de procesos democráticos de forma más rápida y óptima, de lo que sucede en las relaciones del mundo físico. Sin embargo, los alcances y características de estas interacciones sociales aún están por verse. El propósito de este documento es discutir hasta qué punto la acción de los individuos en estas comunidades difiere del funcionamiento tradicional de cualquier comunidad ¿Hasta dónde los espacios virtuales cumplen con (...) las aspiraciones y promesas con las que han sido investidos? Un primer punto versará sobre las complejidades del establecimiento de comunidades en línea, para después pasar a determinar la forma en que se establecen las normas en estos espacios. Por último el trabajo se enfocará al estudio de caso de una comunidad virtual argentina denominada Taringa! (shrink)