Abstract
This study examines the techno-journals and futuristic zines such as Boing Boing inscribe a kind of textual prologue for cyber-culture. They are valuable in themselves because they forge a much-needed connection between late print culture and the new cyberspatial network, formatting the matrix of this social space in ways that begin to define it. Wired magazine, for instance, participates in a cultural dialogue concerning issues of network privacy, governmental regulation, and censorship. Wired also sponsors HotWired, its online counterpart, where participants can exchange information, chat with live guests, and buy, sell, or trade computers and software products. Boing Boing, while differing from Wired in their hyperbolic presentation, share the techno-journal's fascination with "New Edge" culture, which includes, in addition to a hacker-like obsession with computers, technological phenomena such as raves, body alteration, smart drugs, and techno-spiritual movements. Because the communications revolution has brought about a phenomenological change in our perceptions of lived experience. These publications could be said to provide a type of public service by offering interfacing media that connect the user-friendly world of print with the phenomenon of cyberspatial networking. Yet, for all of their cutting-edge potential as links to the democratizing venues of cyberspace or as media for constructing alternative cybertextual practices, many of these techno-journals remain disturbingly vested in the politics of late capitalist culture. This includes heralding the new technologies in what amounts to an almost nostalgic longing for the ultimate "metanarrative"—pronouncing technological libertarianism and combining social consciousness with rampant consumerism.
Highlights
Abstrak: Penelitian ini mengkaji jurnal-jurnal tekno dan zona futuristik seperti BoingBoing yang menuliskan semacam prolog tekstual untuk budaya siber
Though early representations of cyberspace denied sexual difference by positioning the Net as a "gender-neutral zone", recent scholarship has focused on issues specific to gender difference(s) within various postmodern technologies
Allucquere Rossane Stone offers a feminist interpretation of gendered technologies by deconstructing the act of penetrating the screen, an act which she attributes to the heterosexual male user who empowers himself by incorporating the surfaces of surfaces of cyberspace into himself
Summary
A feminist analysis seems required, at the very least, to call into question these cultural assumptions, if not to (re)name the politics. Linda Hutcheon writes, Unlike metaphor or allegory, which demand similar supplementing of meaning, irony has a evaluative edge and manage to provoke emotional responses in those who "get" it and those who don't, as well as in its targets and in what some people call its "victims."...The "scene" of irony involves relations of power based in relations of communication.5 Given such a description, it seems necessary to question the evasive nature of such ironic rhetoric within the context of patriarchal techno-journals, for, in Goffman's instance, magazine is the same publication that prints its subscription cards over images of topless, fethized women. This disparity between rhetoric and reality has the most devastating consequences for women, we are usually structured at the bases of operations, so that one has to ask to what extent women are disempowered socially through their representation in sexist media, but to what extent they are disenfranchised from a communications market that is tied to the fastest growing technologies in the world
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