culture

This page considers culture in digital environments. 

It covers -

• introduction
• overviews
• centres
• cultural portals
• philosophical studies
• the digital cornucopia
• shopping
• other pleasures

     introduction

[under development]

     overviews

Preceding pages of this guide have pointed to some of the more interesting writing about culture and the internet. Three other resources are Internet Culture (London: Routledge 1999), edited by David Porter, The Cybercultures Reader (London: Routledge 2000) edited by David Bell & Barbara Kennedy and Sara Kiesler's Culture Of The Internet (Mahwah: Erlbaum 1997). 

     centres

For big c Cyberculture - or just 'culture' with a dash of the digitals - explore the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (RCCS) and the Center for Digital Discourse & Culture (CDDC). 

     cultural portals

The Commonwealth Department of Communications, Information Technology & the Arts sponsored the very expensive but sadly unimaginative Australia's Cultural Network (ACN), since repackaged as the Culture & Recreation Portal. What might have included innovative exhibitions involving numerous institutions - breaking down the traditional demarcations - ended up as an parochial version of Yahoo!

     philosophical studies

We've noted masterpieces of dot com baroque such as de Kerckhove's strange The Skin of Culture: Investigating The New Electronic Reality (London: Kogan Page 1997) and The Architecture of Intelligence (Boston: Birkhauser 2001). 

For a walk on the wild side consult Jonathan Rosen's The Talmud & The Internet (New York: FSG 2000) - a sort of 'How Proust Can Change Your Life' for the digitally perplexed - or the gutsier The Internet: A Philosophical Inquiry (London: Routledge 1999) by Gordon Graham.

The latter for us is more impressive than the uneven On the Internet (London: Routledge 2001) by Hubert Dreyfus - a splash of Merleau-Ponty, a strong dose of Kierkegaard, add some information theory and voila - and David Weinberger's faddish Small Pieces Loosely Joined - A Unified Theory of the Web (New York: Perseus 2002).

James O'Donnell's incisive Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1998) is of value in thinking about virtuality, ideas and writing.

     the digital cornucopia

[under development]

     shopping

[under development]  

     other pleasures

[under development]

Profiles on this site explore other pleasures/diversions such as -

• Blogging (Web logs)
• Dating, 'Virtual Worlds' and other online social spaces
• Online Adult Content (with the associated guide on Censorship)
• Online Gambling
• Messaging, given that chat and email have arguably provided greater pleasure to more people than access to MP3 recordings or woolly jumpers from an etailer.

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