Cyberculture concepts and development

¶ … Subsuming the heterogeneity of the Internet to a homogenous whole is a reductive move. Furthermore, it risks making the unsupportable conflation of the Internet user with their textual output." (Bassett, et al., 2002, p. 234)

The digital age -- the online era -- has been evolving for over twenty years now but keeping tabs on the technologies and cultures related to this brave new electronic world requires thorough and innovative research. The emphasis in this paper will be on the "cities" and the people who live and work with digital technologies in those "cities" -- albeit the technologies that bring the information age to the cities will also be a pivotal part of this research. The research covers a wide swath of theories and strategies in terms of developing digital communication that links seamlessly with myriad lifestyles and business needs. Mobile phone cultures, the pervasiveness of online services and information, the mobility and instant communication that is a product of the digital age -- these issues and more will be approached. Also reviewed will be scholarly studies of ethics in cyberspace, the dangers of cyber attacks, and the future of Cybercities.

The Academic Literature

Christine Boyer -- truly a cybercity pathfinder -- and her book Cybercities.

It is very difficult to conduct any research about Cybercities without coming across the name Christine Boyer. She was a pioneer, so to speak, in describing and analyzing Cybercities and the social, psychological, and practical realities of this new emerging city that has no clogged auto traffic, no drive by shooters, and no skid row drunks spewing forth obscenities to innocent passers by. Indeed, urban historian and noted scholar Christine Boyer writes in her book Cybercities that computing is not so much about computers any longer; computing is about living (Boyer, 1996 p. 5). This is a book that was published fourteen years ago, and yet the research and intelligent narrative seems nearly as fresh as though it was written just a couple years ago.

In her book she writes eloquently about the profound impact that digital technologies have on the search for knowledge, information, and solutions to real world problems. There is also a danger, Boyer warns, of withdrawing from the world because of the powerful grasp that cyberspace has on individuals, especially those with investigative, curious minds.

The deeper one gets into the world of cyberspace the more reality becomes "immaterial"; and Boyer insists that when users become transfixed in front of their computer screens, they risk "becoming incapable of action in a real city plagued by crime, hatred, disease, unemployment, and under-education" (Boyer, inside flap of her book).

Boyer, as any scholar delving into a complicated, technical subject would do, begins her book of essays at the beginning, the early launch of the genesis of cyberspace. It was the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that lit the match that later started the fire of what we know today to be cyberspace. As for the machines that came along, it started with an idea, a project, and then a mainframe; later personal computers (PCs) arrived and after PCs developers put laptops in the hands of millions. Indeed Boyer's book is something of a ground floor resource, given that it was written 14 years ago, albeit Boyer introduces essays that have foresight, insight, and a sense of the dramatic power that the information age is bringing through constantly advancing, evolving technologies that are creating this virtual and stunning Cybercities.

Boyer quotes from Walter Benjamin, who recalled that the newspaper, the periodical, the magazine, they all offered good information but they do not today provide a "contemplative reception of information" (Boyer, 1996, p. 7). Those information sources required that the reader develop a "new set of interpretative processes for selecting, connecting subordinating, and comparing items taken from a set of fragmented data" (Boyer, p. 8). In other words, the mind was given the task of filtering, sorting, prioritizing and even managing the media. Today those tasks are handled by a MacBook, an iBook, a HP or DELL. Today computers are challenging users to develop "new modes of perception" in order to receive, criticize, evaluate, absorb and "produce new combinations of information" (Boyer, p. 9).

Boyer draws an analogy between the computer's matrix of data management and the city. There are spaces of "disjunction" between the columns and the rows of various data entries. Those entries represent the "forgotten spaces, the disavowed places, and the bits eradicated because of the noise and redundancy they generate" (Boyer, p. 9). But the precise form of the matrix brings to the city an order, a systemic order, that can conceal the "heterogeneous nature" of the city and the "disjunctive positions we hold within" the city. Boyer's point is that there is indeed an analogy between the matrix of the computer -- virtual reality -- and the space of the city.

The point of this research is to flush out scholarship on the subject of cyberspace and the cities that are evolving within the virtual structures that technologies have created. In Boyer's frame of mind, the machine is to modernism "what the computer is to postmodernism." In a postmodern world of crowded, polluted, noisy and violent cities, the computer's binary logic of various command protocols, "scanning techniques, information stacks, and data interfaces," allows the alert user to provide a pathway to a new world model -- and guide the way in which users "form or pattern the city" (Boyer, p. 10).

James Castiglione (Cyberspace Addiction): What Boyer doesn't discuss in her book is the temptation that cyberspace presents, and the inherent danger therein, of obsessive dependence on cyberspace and on various cybercity venues as places of refuge and comfort. The fact is that the inappropriate use of the Internet can lead to "adverse educational outcomes" (Castiglione, 2007, p. 358). It is fair to believe that the concerns of 2007 -- as pointed to by James Castiglione, professor of Chemistry and Physics at Kean University in New Jersey -- could not have been expected to be viewed in 1996, even by a visionary such as Boyer. That said, Castiglione refers to the "growing concern" among educators, administrators, librarians and healthcare professionals that high school and college students in particular are become so "Internet dependent" that there is increasing evidence of "academic impairment" (Castiglione, p. 359).

The cybercities venues that are visited by millions of college students in their daily lives offer "online role-playing games" (ORPGs), interesting Web sites, email, legitimate research assignments, word processing, chat rooms, entertainment resources, gaming, and more. The problem, Castiglione writes, is that there are "distinct possibilities" for "potential negative outcomes" such as: "craving or compulsion"; "loss of control"; and "persistence in the behavior despite accruing adverse consequences" (Castiglione, p. 362).

"Repetitive motion injuries"; "social isolation"; "interference with appropriate eating habits" and nutrition; and "decreased physical activity leading to obesity" (Castiglione, p. 361). But just what is "Internet addiction"? Castiglione insists that the concept of Internet addiction requires careful review and in fact the Internet itself in not something users can be addicted to. But the Internet can be an "enabler" of addictive behavior "and not the direct cause" (p. 361).

Certainly it is unfair to lump frequent users of cyberspace into a group known as "addicted" or "obsessed"; however, a study (Kubey et al. 2001) referenced by Castiglione involving 572 college students -- in which the students indicated "heavy recreational use of the Internet" -- showed "social isolation" and "sleep disturbances" along with a "decline in academic performance" (Castiglione, p. 362). One issue that keeps coming into focus for those concerned with college students' overuse of cyberspace is that everywhere one goes on many of today's universities and colleges the wireless Internet is available. The library, dorms, classrooms, study areas, labs -- even sitting outside of a wired building a student can log on. The widely dispersed availability of online resources makes college campuses cybercities in their own right.

Meantime, Boyer writes that in cyberspace no longer does an individual simply observe an image; the individual peers into the computer screen and is "immersed in these representations" Boyer writes (p. 46). The human eyes penetrate the boundaries of virtual images, and while "moving around inside of them" the eyes become "intimately involved in their dislocating powers" (p. 46). The challenge that the alert person, the scholar, the learner, the savant in 7th grade and the senior citizen face is to "understand both the nature of these new media experiences and the composite reality they create" (Boyer, p. 46).

The Cybercities Reader -- Stephen Graham

The Cybercities Reader brings together a remarkable collection of thinking and commentating on what a cybercity might be, or is, depending on how deeply the reader is involved in Graham's favorite topic. The book ends up to be "less an analysis of the particularities of the cybercity," writes critic Jonathan Rutherford, than a "highlighting of the many ways in which technologically mediated dynamics have been and are being enrolled in everyday urban life" (Rutherford, 2006, p. 697). Rutherford goes on to submit that Graham's narrative is more about the city within a city (cyberspace), in "all its forms and functions," than it is about the utopian of "dystopian visions of technology" that some authors have alluded to.

As for Graham's book, in the Introduction he explains that he has put together a book with a myriad of inputs from scholars in several technology-related fields; and, in publishing this 2004 classic he intended to "transcend the Anglo-American domination of recent English-language debates on ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) and cities" (Graham, p. 23). In other words, there are competent authors and journalist in Europe, South and East Asia, Latin America, Australia and elsewhere that have worthy scholarship to share.

What Graham's book accomplishes, according to Graham's assessment (p. 22), is to take the "hybrid" concept of "cybercity" to lay out in clear narrative the "inseparable fusion of relations that are mediated by ICTs with those that are mediated between human presence, and movement, within and between urban places" (Graham, p. 22). He says at the outset, and proves throughout the book, that his intention is to place emphasis on the ways that that the use and experience of "knowledge and technology…now blur seamlessly into the political economies, and experiences, of place in an internationalalising capitalist society" (p. 22).

Graham takes a page out of Joanna Zylinska's book (see "Micro-spaces of the everyday" later in this paper) when he asserts that today's cities are "combined ensembles" of cyberspace and real time space. They "recursively interact and mutually constitute each other," he goes on. Separating the cybercity from the bricks and mortar city "makes no sense," Graham raves on page 18. "One is not 'virtual' whilst the other is 'real' [but rather] cities, bodies, physical flows and ICT exchanges are socially shaped in combination, in parallel -- together" (p. 18). ICTs aren't just something we can look forward to in the future. The contemporary city of today is being built around ICT "traffic and infrastructure," he insists (p. 18).

Graham can make these assertions because he has done his homework and he has a knack for putting together phrases that are philosophical; "…Whilst there is no doubt that ICTs can act as 'prostheses' to extend human actions, identities and communities in time and space, it does not follow that the human self is 'released from the fixed location of the body, build environment or nation'. Rather, the self is always somewhere, always located in some sense in some place, and cannot be totally unhoused" (p. 18). But he follows these kinds of passages with pragmatism; for example, on page 18 Graham insists that ICTs have "now moved from the status of novelty to rapidly diffuse into all walks of life…they are now increasingly ubiquitous -- even banal."

The author also asserts that while the new media and digital technologies are stunning and offer unprecedented access to information and communications, they do not fully trump what has been invented in the past. Quite the contrary, Graham writes (p. 11); "We are not experiencing some wholesale, discreet break with the urban past, ushered in by the impacts of new technology." Rather, he continues, we are today experiencing a "complex and infinitely diverse range of transformations where new and old practices and media technologies become mutually linked and fused in an ongoing blizzard of change."

Critic Rutherford has mostly good things to say about Graham's book, albeit he takes serious issue with the ending of the book; two American consultants have proposed deploying a "blanket high-tech surveillance and military systems across the world as a central weapon in the 'war on terror'" (Rutherford, p. 698). Supposedly this would prevent another attack like those of 2001 in New York and Washington, D.C. And this system would basically spy on everyone in order to "filter out" dangerous persons and groups. Yes, Graham rejected this idea, and yet Rutherford blasts Graham's "…sheer belief in moral impassivity towards the socio-political and military power of such technologies." For Rutherford, those final pages ends the book "on a deeply depressing note" albeit it does reinforce the argument put forward earlier in the book that there must be a tandem approach when it comes to urban socio-cultural and technological dynamics and practices vis-a-vis Cybercities.

Reading Neuromancer -- Daniel Punday -- Poignancy and Possibilities

Daniel Punday is a professor in the Departments of English and Philosophy at Purdue University. He notes that when William Gibson basically originated the term "cyberspace" for his 1884 novel Neuromancer, he was only seeking a practical way to solve specific narrative issues. Gibson found that using cyberspace allowed "for a lot of moves, because characters can be sucked into apparent realities" (Punday, 2000, p. 194). Gibson found that a writer can use cyberspace to place characters in "any sort of setting or against any backdrop" the writer wishes to embrace. And so a new concept was launched and Gibson found that the concept of cyberspace was a way of "manipulating traditional narrative elements to product new effects" (Punday, p. 194).

Taking Gibson's narrative strategy, and his concept of cyberspace as a place where characters can be moved like chess pieces in and out of the "real" world, one can see that online users can use cyberspace to move themselves in and out of virtual worlds and reality worlds and in the process re-invent conventional thinking just as Gibson re-invented conventional narratives. Philosophically and psychologically there are avenues within cybercities that open the door to creative and practical changes in society -- through research, interpretation, metaphor, analogy, and organization according to non-traditional thinking.

This is the door to perception and Punday does not critique Gibson's novel by simply responding to the narrative innovation and powerful entertainment value. Punday sees within Gibson's approach to cyberspace the hope of producing a "fundamentally new kind of social space and very different ways of understanding human identity" (Punday, p. 195). He's not alluding to Facebook or MySpace when he alludes to "social space"; instead, Punday is talking about a virtual community located in a multi-use dungeon (MUD). Punday is referring to a place with many individuals connect and each of them create "characters" that move through the "virtual" place. Players ask questions, ask directions, congratulate one another when a specific action presents a worthy accomplishment -- and "Gibson's writing allowed us to discover a surprising truth about cyberspace's original conception: as a means of social interaction it does not exist to create new identities or simply to destabilize all identity" (Punday, p. 212).

While MUDs have the effect of turning the user's attention back to "the narrative construction of the social interaction in this space and to the fact that this play arises from the duality between player and character" (Punday, p. 212). Punday concludes his essay by basically thanking Gibson for helping alert, progressive individuals see that one of the essentials of cyberspace / cybercities is that it offers "…the ability to reveal how this dialogue is being constructed as and from narrative" (p. 213).

This is not by way of putting down traditional uses in the cybercity world -- like online conferences, marketing, and serious scholarly research -- but rather Punday's point (213) is that "we need to foster an appreciation of the kind of narrative play that Gibson describes." The kind of play that Gibson innovated with the release of Neuromancer can be "extremely effective" because it will reveal "stereotypes and bring cultural narratives into conflict with one another." This kind of "intertextual narrative play within cyberspace" could help revitalize social and educational uses of "online discourse" (Punday, p. 213).

Mapping cyberspace.

Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchen set out in 2001 to "map cyberspace" in a book -- that is, to attempt a fine-tuning of the concept of space and how people interacting in Cybercities (cyber cultures) use that space. On page 19 the authors point to the argument that cyberspace is replacing "rapidly disappearing public spaces with new social spaces" and that in the process somehow citizens are ducking out of the natural world into the quiet, hidden world of cyberspace. Another concern they address is that with the continuing emergence of more and more technologically sophisticated ICTs implications of a loss of privacy and confidentiality are coming into the fore. Is this becoming a "surveillance society"? Dodge acknowledges that many personal financial records, credit cards and more are available online for professional hackers, and these issues need attention. The whole notion of whether or not cyberspace is a public space is mapped thoroughly in this book, and Dodge (Dodge, et al., 2001, p. 19) believes that because users in Cybercities have "very few legal rights" (p. 19).

The point Dodge makes on page 29 summarizes the theme of this book. "…Space is not a neutral and passive geometry, but rather is continuously produced through socio-spatial relations" and the relationship between "space, spatial forms and spatial behaviour is not contingent on 'natural' spatial laws, but is the spatial product of cultural, social, political and economic relations" (Dodge, p. 29). The definition given by Dodge on page 29 puts space into the proper perspective vis-a-vis Cybercities and cyber culture. "Space is not essential, but is constructed and produced. As such, space is 'constituted through social relations and material social practices." One doesn't have to be majoring in physics to know that there is value in treating space as "socially produced" because space in cyberspace is not like space-time physics; cyberspace is space that is divided up and socially charged for use by humans (Dodge, p. 29).

Gibson's Innovation Changed the World

The concept presented by Dodge -- cyberspace is "socially charged for use by humans" -- leads into Charles De Lint's viewpoints in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Even though Gibson was not himself a technically competent or "geeky" person (he wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter), it goes to prove that while "research will always be an indispensable tool, imagination still remains the most vital component of good storytelling" (De Lint, p. 28). And when Gibson coined "cyberspace," De Lint continues, he inspired "countless men and women" who did have computer skills to "try to bring his vision to life" (p. 28). De Lint steps out on a cybercities limb when he states: "Without the inspiration of Gibson's work to spark the imaginations" of programmers and technicians "the world as we have it today might well be a different place" (De Lint, p. 28).

Gibson Opened the Cyberspace Door to e-business

Christopher Barnatt, a senior lecturer in Computing & Organizations at Nottingham University Business School (UK) asserts that things in the business community really changed when William Gibson published Neuromancer and hence, introduced the word "cyberspace" to describe the "consensual hallucination of an abstract, electronic world that humans could occupy across computer networks" (Barnatt, 2004, p. 79).

Barnatt insists that Gibson's innovative novel created a "radical change in the way" businesses thought about their customers and how customers think about electronic business activity. Basically Gibson single-handedly offered future computer scientists with a "new and reassuring linguistic home" (Barnatt, p. 79). Barnatt asserts that the conceptual birth of cyberspace offered to "technological visionaries somewhere to conduct their studies" (p. 79). And so for businesses, once groupware (such as Lotus Notes) had been developed -- facilitating communication between "two or more remote human beings" -- the world of marketing and selling online took off like a rocket. Barnatt's praise of Gibson may seem a bit inflated, but looking back at the development of business models in the 1990s -- and the seamless, user-friendly online models today like amazon.com and eBay, et al. -- Gibson's enlightened science fiction certainly played more than a passing role.

Strategies for Online Communities.

The changes in how people form social communities is certainly one of the most profound manifestations of Cybercities. The availability of new technologies and indeed the creation of cyberspace and Cybercities has "contributed to changes in how people for social communities," according to Kent D. Miller and colleagues writing in Strategic Management Journal (Miller, et al., 2008, p. 305). In fact, Miller shows research that indicates Cybercities have created a situation where there is a "declining participation in fact-to-face communication" between people.

The cybercity is in fact a community that is "highly accessible and efficient" when it comes to "evaluating and adjusting one's own thoughts and actions" in response to input from "socially relevant peers within a community" (Miller, p. 305). The focus of this scholarly article is on how online forums (in cyberspace), using aliases, can manipulate, promote, or undermine product sales. Social learning processes linked with product promotional strategies have a definite affect on the "evolution of demand" within online communities (Miller, p. 306).

Because Cybercities can create destinations for interaction around "narrow shared interests," Miller explains, and because those strategies are not costly to the corporation, the strategies in cyberspace "enable the formation of interpersonal ties" that provide a wealth of information and social support to both the company and the online visitor. it's all about the marketing of products, and alert, cyber-savvy companies can use their own paid staff or volunteers to go into the Web sites where that company has products displayed. Those individuals then make postings where available; the postings "do not just signal product quality," Miller continues on page 307, the postings "…shape the evaluative schema that participants bring to purchase decisions and consumptions experiences."

Yes, cyber communities share information, but they also provide the "norms and values" that consumers use to judge the value and quality of products, Miller explains (p. 307). The peer support and social identity that emerges within Cybercities is often a more prominent motivation for participation in Cybercities than "information-seeking," Miller asserts, and he is probably correct, at least in part, in that assumption. There is also a strong attraction to cyberspace because it has become a place for problem solving, for instruction, and more, according to Miller on page 307: Indeed, the cybercity near you is a place for "self-discovery" a place to "maintain interpersonal connectivity," for "social enhancement and entertainment."

Of course all of these attractions in Cybercities are well-known to users and to social scientists that have done their homework, but when it is explained in a marketing context, it opens the door to additional knowledge and understanding of the power of digital technology. Demand for a product tends to evolve as a function of "comments about the product posted to online forums" (Miller, p. 308). The science and math that went into this research by Miller reflects that fact that opinions posted online "are only deemed worthy of consideration and possible adoption if they are expressed by a proportion of the community's members that surpasses an individual's threshold level" (Miller, p. 308).

Researching consumers in virtual worlds.

Taking Miller's research regarding cybercity marketing strategies in a somewhat different direction, Miriam Catterall and Pauline Maclaran suggest that corporate attempts so "instigate customer communities" tend to be motivated more from "a desire to provide easier company-to-customer (one-to-one) contact" as opposed to "consumer-to-consumer" contact. But in Cybercities there are also customers who form their own "virtual brand communities" and those communities are independent from "any company control or association" (Catterall, 2001, p. 229).

Those consumer-created Web pages built around a particular brand are not always in favor of that brand, as well-heeled cybercitizens can attest to. To wit, there is the "Anti-Amway" site, the "Boycott Nike" and "Boycott Best Buy" as well. Companies like McDonald's and Starbucks have numerous negative consumer-created sites. In other words, while cybercity architecture built by corporations is there for marketing product and spreading the word through user posts, ordinary citizens / consumers can use the same technology to coax other potential consumers not to buy products or use services by those same corporations. Meanwhile the field of "cyber ethnography" has recently emerged, and it has become a useful tool for sociologists to use when researching the cyber culture and all the communities that thrive there (Catterall, p. 230).

Healthcare virtual communities.

An article published in 2008 covers the growing interest that consumers have not only in healthcare per se, but in learning about their personal health issues. "Patients are increasingly seeking online advice and information," and in so doing they are participating in "virtual communities" (Misra, et al., 2008, p. 321). The research in this article in the International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing identified four distinct segments of "virtual community users" who seek healthcare information: tourists, minglers, devotees, and insiders. "Over time, community members build trust, relationships, and commitments," Misra writes, and these consumer behaviors potentially can have "powerful impacts on e-healthcare organizations" because healthcare groups and corporations rely on relationship marketing, customer loyalty, and the image (branding) of their services (Misra, p. 323).

Whereas just a few years ago there were just a handful of cyber sources for reliable healthcare information, today there is an abundance of those Web sites. In fact, the newest trend in cyber community access to health information is for several healthcare-related corporations to band together and build one virtual community. To wit, MedUnite.com is actually a consortium of six major corporations: Aetna, CIGNA, WellPoint Health Systems, Oxford Health Plan, Foundation Health Systems and PacificCare Health Systems (Misra, p. 322). It would seem to bode well for the consumer to have access to a cybercity that offers the combined professional resources of respected healthcare companies.