Imagination and Culture: What Is It Like Being in the Cyberspace?

Abstract

New information technologies are constructing living and working environments that people often find disorienting. This can be seen as a general effect of the introduction of new artifacts that disrupt preexisting routines and destroy the previous distribution of work. Communities have to cope with unprecedented environments by developing imagination as a cultural resource, allowing them to make sense of the ambiguous situations created by new computer technologies. New computer artifacts alter not only the social fabric of the communities in which they are adopted, but also the kind of relations that tools once had with human minds. Both processes-the appearance of uncharted environments and the emergence of an "intimate" technology-emphasize the function of semiotic mediation involved in artifact use. Making sense of new environments (such as shared virtual environments designed to support distant coworking) means making them part of the sociocultural network that maintains "real" communities and reconfiguring in imaginative ways the existing sociocultural networks.