Internet Culture Free Essay Example

Perhaps this is why it is often defined as the extension of television or the natural evolution from the mediated role of the television. Sherri Turkle suggests that: On any given evening, nearly eighty million people in the United States are watching television. The average American household has a television turned on more than six hours a day, reducing eye contact and conversation. Computers and the virtual worlds they provide are adding another dimension of mediated experience. Perhaps computers feel so natural because of their similarity to watching TV, our dominant social experience for the past forty years.

12 This suggestion also facilitates an understanding of how a communication evolution takes place and how new media is seamlessly adopted by mainstream mass society. Essentially the Internet is a way of amalgamating all of the mechanisms for essential living13into one visually stimulating, easy to use, waste of time. Whether or not there is an Internet Culture is questionable. Surely in order to grant a mode of communication its own cultural identity it is imperative that everyone within society has access to it and are able to identify with it.

However, this is not the case and it is with this in mind that we begin to highlight some of the critical questions that are being raised regarding Internet Culture. The Internet was created with liberation and democracy in mind. Howard Rheingold explains the contributing factor to the creation of the Internet within his text ‘The Virtual Community’: The inexpensive public online service was launched because two comrades from a previous cultural revolution noticed that the technology of computer conferencing had potential far beyond its origins {.

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} and many of them wanted to provide it to as many people as possible, at the lowest possible cost14. It was not initially created as an entertainment mechanism or a commercial venture. However, what has become clear is that since the Internet’s development the meaning behind this medium has metamorphosed into a global capitalist venture, with many large trans-national corporations using the Internet to promote their global voice in a visual manner that is significantly aimed at the masses. The Internet is a menagerie of information that has no real order or identity.

It is many things to many people and with access and education anyone can have a voice and submit an opinion. Unfortunately, this can become confusing and frustrating when you are trying to search and select material of individual importance. What is questionable is how there can be a virtual community in an online environment. How can contemporary culture sustain virtual subcultures that ostensively reject society and its moral codes and yet still have strong correlations with real life cultural circumstances?

One of the key critical questions that has been raised about the Internet and the cultural factors that the Internet in essence redefines, is how can a subculture have the right to call themselves a virtual community? It is not so much that they are a group of individuals with a shared interest, but their fluctuating ability to float on and off the information superhighway in an apparently effortless fashion15.

Many inhabitants of the virtual world have different identities and persona that they role play within an environment that allows them to reject society and then at the drop of a hat return to the society that they were rejecting, with no obvious or known social implications. The main staple of this virtual interaction and community building lies within a computer mediated communication environment called Multi User Dungeons, or MUDs that are fundamentally imagination-fuelled text based games. Sherri Turkle defines MUDs as:

All MUDs are organised around the metaphor of physical space. When you first enter a MUD, you may find yourself in a medieval church from which you can step out into the town square, or you may find yourself in the coat closet of a large, rambling house {… } MUDs imply difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity and fragmentation. Such an experience of identity contradicts the Latin root of the word, idem, meaning ‘the same’. But this contradiction increasingly defines the conditions of our lives beyond the virtual worlds.

16 The Virtual Community and the animosity of the MUD environment does not allow individuals to interact as their true selves. Even the logging-in procedure of a MUD encourages the individual to create a user identity and user name that is not their own. The MUD environment is fantasy personified. It allows the individual to experiment with characteristics such as transgender mutation, sexual promiscuity and violent behaviour that are not generally accepted in real life society and culture.

Internet Culture and community stems from the MUD user experience, one that rejects the real life of the individual in favour of fantasy and the indirect glorification of all that is immoral and inappropriate17. However, this is a highly critical viewing of one aspect of community building on line there are many futurologists who believe that the use of MUDs and Bulletin Board Servers by individuals is in essence society reaching out for the public forums that are slowly being destroyed in real life18.

However, as this is an essay that is based on critical associations with Internet Culture the mention of utopian and optimistic views has been limited to a few lines. Whether or not a community can be created within an online dimension is a question that is not easy to answer, being part of a community suggests that you are involved within that community to the point of saturation. Your very existence is defined by the fact that you live, breath and commit to the 24-hour routine of the guidelines of permissible actions that are administered within your society.

Within the virtual community you are but a fleeing visitor, even if you contribute 80 hours a week to the MUD or virtual world you are still essentially using this environment as a means of escaping the real life world that surrounds your being. Within his book ‘Imagined Communities’ Benedict Anderson suggests that nations only exist because of a common acceptance in the minds of the population. Society itself and the act of living amongst a community make it possible for the community to validate and immortalise its existence.

19 Through this theory it is a given that only a group with a shared acceptance has the right to call itself a community. With this in mind it would mean that the Internet and the users of the networks associated with the Internet have a right to call themselves a community. The map that I have included reflects this theory as it shows the population of Internet users that are currently make use of facilities in the virtual environment (see figure one). Figure One – One of the most recent maps that show the population of online users.

The use of the Internet and facilities that the Internet provides leads directly into the second critical issue that is currently being debated. The question of the Internet expanding the gap between the information ‘Haves’ and the information ‘Have Nots’ and how the increasing influx in e-commerce and information access is pointing the way to the Internet being the gateway to crucial everyday information. The problem of ‘Have’ and ‘Have Nots’ within society and culture has been an ongoing critical issue for centuries. Since the development of Print Culture the ability to communicate effectively has been used as a power tool20.

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