Internet Culture Research Articles

Meatspace is Cyberspace: The Pynchonian Posthuman in <i>Bleeding Edge</i>

This article examines Thomas Pynchon’s indirect critique of utopian posthumanism in Bleeding Edge by analyzing the deleterious effects that an emerging Internet culture has on the novel’s characters. By seeping into every aspect of their lives, embedding itself in their minds, and becoming a prosthetic consciousness, the Internet has transformed the characters into posthumans and altered their subject positions within a technological global capitalist culture. Contrasting the novel’s take on the posthuman with the posthuman theories of Donna Harraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Robert Pepperell, Rosi Braidotti, David Roden and Seb Franklin, I argue that, while the dominant utopian strain in posthuman theory imagines the advent of posthumanism as an opportunity for liberation from the sexism, racism, and colonial oppression that are enabled by the positing of the classical humanist subject, Pynchon demonstrates that because the Internet technology that brought about the posthuman condition is controlled by governments and corporations, it has become just one more lost chance at freedom that was converted into an instrument of increased control and surveillance. Reading Bleeding Edge against William Gibson’s prototypical posthuman novel Neuromancer, I also contend that while Gibson, despite challenging the ontological primacy of meatspace over cyberspace, keeps the two realms separate, Pynchon, who borrows Gibson’s terms, shows that cyberspace has already merged with meatspace. As a result, Maxine Tarnow, the protagonist of Bleeding Edge, has nowhere to run in her attempt to find a provisional refuge for herself and her family.

Adapting from the Internet: Cultural adaptation in Teh Internet is Serious Business

Abstract This article argues that the Internet today constitutes a social and cultural space, holding within it a culture distinct from that of the physical world with its own customs, morals and beliefs. Taking as a case study Tim Price’s Teh [sic] Internet is Serious Business, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in September 2014, it will use Patrice Pavis’ ‘hour-glass’ model to carry out a textual analysis of this adaptation of the factual story of the formation of online activist groups Anonymous and LulzSec for presentation within the theatrical form of contemporary Britain, a narrative which has become one of Internet Culture’s major cultural myths.

Pedagogical Assumptions Via the Internet Culture

The pervasion of digital technology through our lives is part of a broader set of phenomena. More and more we speak now of the network society, knowledge and learning. In fact, the networks have come into our lives, permeating our daily relations with their presence. New integrations have risen between men and networks capable to create the evolution, to change the forms of our knowledge into new learning contexts. Technology makes grading easier, lesson planning easier, provides access to additional information and resources, saves time, and helps the learner expand his or her learning opportunity beyond the classroom walls (Technology in Education Consortium, 2014; Nye - McConrville, 2007). In such a learning community, teachers and students in the role of diversity, skills and participatory methods, collaborate on the construction and reconstruction of knowledge as well as the exploitation of the sense of life experiences. The interaction that the teacher assumes is the function of priority organizer of educational environments with an appropriate learning and a conscious participation. These concepts shape the basis of treatment of the paper for the presenting, authors together with their vision and generalize from contemporary literature that emphazise the role of internet culture in education

Author's rights in the digital age

Author's rights and copyright law have gone through quite a few changes in the 'post-print' culture of binary systems, digital formations and techno-practices. Technological development supports new concept of author's rights by promoting free internet and digital market, as well as new contemporary experience of culture that is being rooted in digital technology, mass communication and the world of multimedia and virtuality. Though computer and digital technology have served both authors and users in various ways, they have also served as a very fertile ground for sharing copyrighted content thus leading to numerous copyright infringements and conflicts with the copyright law. The aim of this paper is to identify and analyze the ways in which computer and digital technology have given rise to new trends in the production (e.g. remix culture) and consumption (e.g. peer-to-peer file sharing technology) of culture, but also to determine how new forms of distribution, use and sharing of digital content changed and shaped the perception of authorship in the 21st century. In order to analyze the dynamic, nature and structure by which new digital and networking technologies are affecting the concept of authorship and author's rights and to test the consistency of previously established hypotheses, we conducted a survey amongst general public. Altogether 535 questionnaires were completed. Data was analyzed using SPSS tool and quantitative method of analysis. In the analysis special attention was given to both, the concept of authorship in the digital environment and the concept of peer-to-peer file sharing technology as not so new, but still very popular networked architecture for distributing, using and sharing digital content.Results have shown that most of the respondents use peer-to-peer file sharing technology to access, consume and/or share different cultural content (e.g. movies, music, books, etc.) while violating the rights of copyright holders. That is one of the main reasons why copyright holders and creative industry constantly find new ways to fight peer-to-peer networking technology, especially commercial file sharing, thus sometimes restraining cultural production and even technological development. This leads to conclusion that this new dynamic, decentralized and distributed networked environment grounded in digital democracy and participating culture of prosumers asks for new legal initiatives and solutions. The research shows that the basic understanding of authorship and the right's of authors and other creative workers in the context of Internet culture and digital media hasn't changed a lot, but, by reason of new available digital means of production and tools of consumption, users attitudes, habits and practices towards them have. To resolve this conflict, law needs to find new mechanisms

Interim Regulations on the Administration of Internet Culture

Interim Regulations on the Administration of Internet Culture

The pop culture expressed in K24: Shakespeare in chaos

K24, first staged in 2005, was built around a story of an ensemble rehearsing Romeo and Juliet. Based on the American TV drama formula, K24 was performed in six episodes, each of which lasted one hour and at the end of which kept the audience in suspense. By using references to Japanese Internet culture and former Taiwanese Shakespearean adaptations, this production appropriated, mimicked, and deconstructed Shakespeare’s text as well as popular culture. The wave of popularizing and localizing Shakespeare began in Taiwan in the 1990s to celebrate the newly claimed freedom and artistic expression of cultural diversity. K24 employed this postmodernist tradition to parody Shakespeare. The Chinese pronunciation of this play title was punned to sound similar to the English word, chaos. The chaos (K24) responded to the consequence of democratization, paying tribute to the interaction of Shakespeare and Taiwan over the past two decades. It also demonstrated the ways in which Shakespeare was negotiated to remain appealing among the young generation in a new era of globalization and glocalization.

Bosch through New Media Art and video art: an experimental relationship

In the twenty-first century New Media Art is showing a huge interest in various works by Hieronymus Bosch. Whether to reproduce his works in motion, allow the viewer to plunge into the paintings or to get inspired —more or less freely— by his creations, many proposals have found in their panels a starting point to develop their own worlds and fantastic environments. After thorough research, we propose in the present paper a journey through some of the most relevant works inspired by Bosch, framing them in the current reality, in the new communication systems, in Internet culture or in the existing relationships between art and artificial intelligence.

On Privacy and Security in Social Media – A Comprehensive Study

Social networks have become a part of human life. Starting from sharing information like text, photos, messages, many have started share latest news, and news related pictures in the Media domain, question papers, assignments, and workshops in Education domain, online survey, marketing, and targeting customers in Business domain, and jokes, music, and videos in Entertainment domain. Because of its usage by Internet surfers in all possible ways, even wee would mention the social networking media as the current Internet culture. While enjoying the information sharing on Social Medias, yet it requires a great deal for security and privacy. The users’ information that are to be kept undisclosed, should be made private.

Dance on its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies ed. by Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot (review)

Reviewed by: Dance on its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies ed. by Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot Ariel Nereson DANCE ON ITS OWN TERMS: HISTORIES AND METHODOLOGIES. Edited by Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013; pp. 456. Since the mid-1990s, dance studies has integrated with other disciplines, including performance studies, visual studies, cultural studies, and others. The 1997 volume Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance set a standard for this kind of interdisciplinary work, and others—Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader (2001) and The Routledge Dance Studies Reader (2010)—have sprung up in response to the field’s increased visibility in academia. In their new collection, editors Melanie Bales and Karen Eliot aim to re-center dance studies onto dance itself: onto movement and its phenomenal and material qualities. They argue that dance studies’ interdisciplinary forays, while rich and provocative, have compromised the study of dance on its own terms: “[i]n their eagerness to adopt theoretical language from other disciplines, dance scholars have lost fluency in their own language” (4). This language emphasizes familiarity with particular schools of movement analysis and notation, allowing for scholarship that springs from dancing itself rather than beginning with external concerns about the body as a site or sign. Dance on Its Own Terms provides great depth in terms of modeling strong, dance-centered scholarship, but represents a fairly narrow range of dance itself. The editors divide the volume’s sixteen chapters into three sections that emphasize, respectively, spectatorship and reconstruction, physical/kinesthetic dance histories of particular figures, and methods of dance notation. Section 1 begins with Karen Eliot’s analysis of canon formation in British ballet circa World War II, including her timely reminder that “the mechanics and politics of canon formation … do not operate uniformly across the disciplines” (13). Ann Dils’s reflective chapter on restaging the challenging Jean Cocteau/Darius Milhaud farce Le Boeuf sur le Toit (1920) for a contemporary college audience provides a clear analysis of race and gender issues within the work, and also a model for imagining our pedagogical practices alongside our artistic ones. Deborah Friedes Galili offers the highly useful notion culture of reconstruction, terminology that frames her investigation of the “institutional structures and artistic and scholarly discourses” that determine reconstruction practices across geographies (67). Betsy Cooper convincingly demonstrates that the Production Code Administration’s censorship assessments about the “decency” of a dance in Golden Age Hollywood films were linked to a high art/popular entertainment binary that reified balletic movement, even if those choreographies [End Page 586] technically violated the code. Harmony Bench reads Beyoncé’s viral “Single Ladies” choreography (2008) as a negotiation of gender and sexuality within internet culture, offering an exemplary integration of a dance-centered perspective (movement analysis of the choreography itself and its lineage) with contemporary theoretical concerns (kinesthetic transfer through digital media). In section 2, Catherine Turocy’s strong essay on how dancers (and scholars) in the present might enter into the spatial world of Baroque dance includes an invaluable series of exercises for readers and dancers that demonstrates the Baroque understanding of space, physicality, and aesthetics. Bales’s own excellent chapter in this section, a comparative movement analysis across three different interpretations of pas de deux (Marius Petipa, George Balanchine, and William Forsythe), connects movement itself across the three dances and to disciplinary questions in dance criticism and history in rich and compelling ways. Carrie Gaiser Casey examines the shape of maternal relationships between Anna Pavlova and her ballerinas through a feminist lens, arguing that we acknowledge the contradictions inherent in these relationships “as an integral part of dancer experience” (226). Geraldine Morris carefully parses the collaborative strands of Frederick Ashton’s 1937 ballet A Wedding Bouquet (music by Gerald Berners, text by Gertrude Stein) to argue for an integrated analysis of movement, music, and literature. In her Laban-based analysis of Anna Sokolow’s 1945 solo Kaddish, Hannah Kosstrin performs vital recovery work, tracing the evolution and adaptation of the choreography through several dancers, including Sokolow herself. Finally, Jessica Zeller focuses on the uniquely American pedagogy of ballerina Rochelle Zide-Booth to provide a useful overview...

BUDAYA INTERNET: PERKEMBANGAN TEKNOLOGI INFORMASI DAN KOMUNIKASI DALAM MENDUKUNG PENGGUNAAN MEDIA DI MASYARAKAT

The emergence of The Internet as a new communication medium has been associated with conflicting claims about the rise of new pattern of social interaction. The idea of virtual communities advanced by the pioneers of social interaction on the Internet. High Internet usage can eventually lead to new social problems, the example problem is excessive use of electronic communication to personal that is reducing the forms of interaction between personal communication, even very unusual we find out personal information to someone published in general use social media status even tough that is very personal problems. Conclusion from the research are: First, the use of Internet-based media in excess will cause a lot of problems ranging from addiction, behavioral changes to crimes cyber world. Second, the Internet culture developed at this time because there is a synergy created from four cultures in it, namely, Technocratic, Hacker, Virtual Communitarians, and Entrepreneurial. Third, Media Education or training in using the media becomes very important to foster media literacy.

Tapping into user habits to create a strong digital presence

This paper discusses the evolution of social media, user habits and how to create an online brand presence. It describes the structure of the global social media accounts for one of the world’s top three confectionery brands, KitKat®, as well as the importance of understanding and embracing internet culture. It also considers the importance of brand tone of voice, understanding a brand’s audience online and the benefits of experimenting with new formats and apps, and looks at the growing culture of immediacy and the changing digital landscape.

Peer Review in Transplantation.

Peer Review in Transplantation.

Connectivity and Convergence: A Whimsical History of Internet Culture

The authors construct a timeline of critical events leading up to today’s highly networked and interconnected world with its ubiquitous social media technologies. The current state has been influenced by advances in media, technology, military defense, and commerce. One trend that stands out in this timeline is the increasing rate of change. There are more innovations today than at any time in human history. It also becomes apparent that the companies that will survive are the ones that are sensitive to changes in the competitive environment and can adapt. The companies that value creativity and diversity, including diversity of ideas, in their hires are the ones most likely to thrive.

Chapter 4. Internet Cultures as Collaborative Creation of Value

Chapter 4. Internet Cultures as Collaborative Creation of Value

Nationalist Netizens in China: Online Historical Memory

The Chinese government is currently performing a delicate act of balance: attempting to foster a healthy nationalism among the young generation in China while, at the same time, having to deal with the at times rather loud and uncompromising expression of this nationalism online. By examining examples of online debates on issues of national interest; in this case the Spratly Islands and the animosity between a Chinese and a Japanese child, this article discusses the use of historical imagery in online historical debates and demonstrates a linkage between the version of Chinese history promulgated in the so-called patriotic education campaign and the rhetoric used online. Even though the viewpoints expressed in the two debates vary widely, the central theme of how to deal with China’s past plays a strong role in both debates. I argue that though the Chinese government has been rather successful in promoting this reliance on a certain historical perspective to understand present day China’s place in the world, the online nationalist expressions take on a life of their own partly due to China’s very special internet culture.

Internet literature in China

Since the 1990s, Chinese literary enthusiasts have explored new spaces for creative expression online, giving rise to a modern genre that has transformed Chinese culture and society. Ranging from the self-consciously avant-garde to the pornographic, web-based writing has introduced innovative forms, themes, and practices into Chinese literature and its aesthetic traditions. Conducting the first comprehensive survey in English of this phenomenon, Michel Hockx describes in detail the types of Chinese literature taking shape right now online and their novel aesthetic, political, and ideological challenges. Offering a unique portal into postsocialist Chinese culture, he presents a complex portrait of internet culture and control in China that avoids one-dimensional representations of oppression. The Chinese government still strictly regulates the publishing world, yet it is growing increasingly tolerant of internet literature and its publishing practices while still drawing a clear yet ever-shifting ideological bottom line. Hockx interviews online authors, publishers, and censors, capturing the convergence of mass media, creativity, censorship, and free speech that is upending traditional hierarchies and conventions within China--and across Asia.

Learning to Circumvent the Limitations of the Written-Self: The Rhetorical Benefits of Poetic Fragmentation and Internet ‘Catfishing’

One of the most complex relationships we have to convey as humans is the written identification of that which we call the self. Despite the fact that we are multifaceted beings, contemporary lingual limitations often force the perception of the individual as a definitive entity through three fundamental normative communication standards: authority, authenticity and moral accountability. This essay examines the resulting paradoxes of writerly identity in relation to these constructs, and simultaneously proposes that the way to rectify such issues is to embrace disparate identity performances of writings past and present.Using research from multiple disciplines, including sociolinguistics, literary theory, and composition studies, this essay asserts that there is a great deal to be learned from the practices of two unlikely genres of written communication— Specifically, it draws a parallel between current internet culture and poetics, as the phenomenon of “catfishing” (or creating and portraying complex fictional identities through online profiles) parallels earlier Modernist acts of fragmentation through poetry. Therefore, this paper argues that although their motives may differ considerably, both endeavours are useful rhetorical performances in that they provide a practical framework for circumventing common lingual identity traps. Ultimately, it suggests that these unconventional perspectives of the “impersonal” in and through writing can help us to (re)approach the methodology of lingual identification and those written performances of the self (professional and everyday) that may not properly serve us.

The Internet Imaginary: Between Technology and Technique

The Internet Imaginary: Between Technology and Technique

The iTunization of pop

This article explores the cultural consequences of music on iPhone, iPad and iPod, a context in which youth today use the same digital and online iTunes platform to download, play, store and organize music. iTunes, coupled with smartphones (either iPhones or Android phones) and the availability of other social network sites (e.g. Facebook, YouTube) constitute a set of ready-made tools for young people to connect themselves with music, which serves as a common interest for networking under the context of a new internet culture. In other words, former massmediated music choices are being replaced by the selective choices of peers, who can now use the available platforms and new music technologies to locate their own musical tastes. Based on systematic in-depth interviews and analysis of lists of songs provided by interviewees, the article argues for a process of iTunization—a term describing the cultural phenomenon in which youth of the same cohort store and share much the same music resources, with these resources being quite stable over time.

The networked practice of online political satire in China: Between ritual and resistance

Online political satire is an important aspect of Chinese Internet culture and politics. Current scholarship focuses on its contents and views it primarily from the perspective of resistance. By reconceptualizing online political satire as a networked practice, this article shifts the focus of analysis from contents to practice. Five types of networked practices of online political satire are identified and analyzed. Practices which mainly fulfill social functions are referred to as ritual satire and distinguished from explicitly political practices. The article thus shows that online political satire has multiple meanings and uses. Its proliferation in Chinese digital spaces results from the complex and interlocked conditions of politics, technology, history, and culture.