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Leah P. MacfadyenThe University of British Columbia, Canada

Copyright © 2006, Idea Group Inc., distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI is prohibited.

INTRODUCTION

Computer-mediated communication between hu-mans is becoming ubiquitous. Computers are in-creasingly connected via high-speed local and wide-area networks, and via wireless technologies. Highbandwidth interaction is increasing communicationspeed, offering the possibility for transmission ofimages, voice, sound, video and formatted data aswell as text. Computer technologies are creating thepossibility of entirely new interfaces of human-machine interaction, and entirely new virtual “spaces”for human-human interaction. As a collectivity, thesenew spaces of communication are known ascyberspace.

Human-human interaction is the foundation ofculture. Vygotsky and Luria’s (1994) model of cul-tural development highlights the need to consider theculture(s) of cyberspace (“cyberculture(s)”) in anyexamination of computer-mediated human commu-nications, because it invokes both the communica-tive and behavioural practices that humans employas they interact with their environment.

BACKGROUND

Vygotsky and Luria (1994) propose that humanbeings use multiple psychological structures to me-diate between themselves and their surroundings.Structures classified as signs include linguistic andnon-linguistic mechanisms of communication; struc-tures classified as tools encompass a wide range ofother behavioural patterns and procedures that anindividual learns and adopts in order to functioneffectively within a culture or society. Together,signs and tools allow individuals to process andinterpret information, construct meaning and inter-act with the objects, people and situations theyregularly encounter. When these elaborate mediat-ing structures, finely honed to navigate a specific

environment, encounter a different one, they canmalfunction or break down completely.

In the context of the Internet, human beings donot simply interact with digital interfaces. Rather,they bring with them into cyberspace a range ofcommunicative and behavioural cultural practicesthat impact their ability to interact with technologyinterfaces, with the culture of the virtual spaces theyenter, and with other humans they encounter there.Their individual and group cultural practices may ormay not “match” the practices of the virtual culture(s)of cyberspace. Some investigators have gone as faras to suggest that the sociocultural aspects of com-puter-mediated human interaction are even moresignificant than technical considerations of the inter-face in the successful construction and sharing ofmeaning. This article surveys current theories of thenature and construction of cyberculture(s), and of-fers some brief thoughts on the future importance ofcyberculture studies to the field of HCI.

KEY DEBATES INCYBERCULTURE STUDIES

Perhaps the most striking feature of the body ofcurrent literature on cyberculture is the polarizationof debate on almost every issue. A few authorsexamine these emerging paradoxes directly. Fisherand Wright (2001) and Poster (2001) explicitly com-pare and contrast the co-existing utopian anddystopian predictions in discourse surrounding theInternet. Lévy (2001a), Poster (2000), and Jordan(1999) go as far as to suggest that the very nature ofthe Internet itself is paradoxical, being universalizingbut non-totalizing, liberating and dominating, em-powering and fragmenting, constant only in itschangeability. Most writers thus far have tended,however, to theorize for one side or the other withinpolarized debates, as will become evident next.

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The Culture(s) of Cyberspace

Utopia or Dystopia?

While not explicitly espousing technological instru-mentalism (an assumption that technology is “cul-ture neutral”), a number of writers offer utopianvisions for the so-called Information Superhighway.Such theorists predict that the emancipatory poten-tial of Internet communications will help to bringabout new forms of democracy and new synergiesof collective intelligence within the Global Village ofcyberspace (Ess, 1998; Lévy, 2001a, 2001b; Morse,1997).

Their detractors argue that these writers ignorethe reality that culture and cultural values are inex-tricably linked to both the medium and to language(Anderson, 1995; Benson & Standing, 2000; Bijker& Law, 1992; Chase, Macfadyen, Reeder, & Roche,2002; Gibbs & Krause, 2000; Pargman, 1998; Wil-son, Qayyum, & Boshier, 1998) and that cybercul-ture “originates in a well-known social and culturalmatrix” (Escobar, 1994, p. 214). These theoristsmore commonly offer dystopian and technologicallydeterministic visions of cyberspace, where money-oriented entrepreneurial culture dominates (Castells,2001), which reflects and extends existing hierar-chies of social and economic inequality (Castells,2001; Escobar, 1994; Jordan, 1999, Keniston & Hall,1998; Kolko, Nakamura, & Rodman, 2000; Luke,1997; Wilson et al., 1998), and which promotes andprivileges American/Western cultural values andthe valorization of technological skills (Anderson,1995; Castells, 2001; Howe, 1998; Keniston & Hall,1998; Luke, 1997; Wilson et al., 1998).

These and other thematically polarized argu-ments about cyberculture (such as “Internet as locusof corporate control” versus “Internet as new socialspace” (Lévy, 2001a) or “Internet as cultural con-text” versus “Internet as a cultural artifact”(Mactaggart, 2001) are evident in the philosophicalarguments underlying work listed in other sections ofarticle.

Modern or Postmodern?

A second major division in theoretical discussions ofthe nature and culture of the cyberspace is thequestion of whether the Internet (and its associatedtechnologies) is a modern or postmodern phenom-

enon. Numerous writers frame the development ofInternet technologies, and the new communicativespace made possible by them, as simply the contem-porary technical manifestation of “modern ideals,firmly situated in the revolutionary and republicanideals of liberty, equality and fraternity” (Lévy,2001a, p. 230). Emphasizing the coherence of cur-rent technologies with ongoing cultural evolution(s),Escobar (1994) discusses the Western cultural foun-dations of technological development, and Gunkeland Gunkel (1997) theorize that the logic ofcyberspace is simply an expansion of colonial Euro-pean expansionism. Castells (2001) sees cybercul-ture as emerging from an existing culture of scien-tific and technological excellence “enlisted on amission of world domination” (p. 60). Orvell (1998)pointedly argues that “debates about postmodernityhave evinced a kind of amnesia about the past” (p.13) and claims that cyberspace and virtual realitytechnologies are continuous with the Romantic imagi-nation as it developed in the 1830s and 1840s.Disembodiment, he argues, is not a new product ofthe modern age, but was the “triumph of the Roman-tic imagination” (p. 16).

More recently, other writers have begun to envi-sion the cultural sphere of cyberspace as radicallynew, postmodern, and signifying a drastic break withcultural patterns of community, identity and commu-nication. For example, Webb (1998) suggests thatthe frontier metaphors of cyberspace symbolize apostmodern shift from human/territorialized to non-human/deterritorialized computer-mediated environ-ments. Poster (2000) claims that Internet technolo-gies have actually brought into being a “second orderof culture, one apart from the synchronous exchangeof symbols and sounds between people in territorialspace” (p. 13). He predicts that the cultural conse-quences of this innovation must be “devastation forthe modern” (p. 13), and (2001) reformulates for thiscontext the propositions of postmodern theoristssuch as Foucault, Heidegger, Deleuze, Baudrillardand Derrida who challenge modernist notions ofprogress, definable “authentic” selfhood and theexistence of absolute foundations for or structuresof, knowledge (for a short review of postmodernthought see Schutz, 2000). Poster argues effectivelythat postmodern perspectives on life and culture thatgo beyond old notions of fixed social structures may

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