Page 10 - Cyberculture and New Media

‘Until Something Else’ – A Theoretical Introduction

Francisco J. Ricardo

The present volume presents an array of essays branching from the
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scion of cyberculture . In breadth, they address individual disciplinary
problems, but read collectively, they illuminate the sweeping and defining
significance of cyberculture, no longer distinct from what is implicit to
culture in the framework of post-industrial society. With technology as its
supramedium, “cyberculture” is the contemporary and transpicuous
paraphrase of what the term, revolving around a new industrial model in the
late 19th century, “culture” implied to Ferdinand Tönnies. His role in modern
sociology, centering on the idea of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, is of
particular significance as marker for the turning point at which cyberculture
diverges most dramatically from prior cultural architectures. Sensing
something beyond the constrictions of positivist thinking, Tönnies felt the
distance denoted between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft as precisely what,
by 1887, the publication year of the book whose title announces these two
terms, appeared to presage major adhesions for social groupings in modern
society. In the pole indexed by the Gemeinschaft, commonly translated as
community, lies the conceptual inventory of subjective and intrinsic
motivations for collective assembly and bonding, while, opposing this
specific vitality, Gesellschaft, “society”, denotes the much more instrumental
type of gathering that familiarly attends to ad hoc aims: paid labour, civic
responsibility, and motives of capital. Cyberculture’s primary challenge to
theory turns on the refutation of this boundary, and, consequently, the
merging of community and society, dispassionately or otherwise, into a
single historical event. But as these poles derive from entirely divergent
impulses, they reconcile with singular experience only by the strategy of
overlay that signals the contemporary structuration of desire and its
expressions through the standard lens and language of existing media, which
replace geographical location as the principal condition for assembly,
intersubjectivity, and assent. Since this overlay of realms, of expression and
media, is motorised by a continual codification of the terms of each domain
through waves of technological innovation and obsolescence that permeate
contemporary actions, sensibilities, and disciplines, we might look to any of
these for an example of this codification through the anxiety that arises from
the stylised manufacture of the archaic and the destruction of memory.
It is thus to the extent that culture’s ample retinue of actions are
incrementally recoded into the collimation called cyberculture—as a course
through what follows the age called modernism—that we might expect to
view sweeping acts of convergence reflected on any number of historical
examples. These illustrate something like the regularities and patterns of the