Топик: Net Culture

Sergei Golubev

Narva Humanitaargümnaasium

Year 11

Net Culture as a young culture

There’s nothing much real than the real freedom. Like a soul from the nowhere enters a body, the body like vessel transmits the soul trough it - right to the centre of cyberspace. So it's full cycle.

Christian Kirtchev

Research objectives

The main objectives of my research are to get to know what the net culture (cyberculture) really is and to observe the role of the countries which have an influence on it.

To accomplish this, the following steps will be made:

to give a concept about the net culture and its environment on the whole;

to describe the history, main trends and distinctive features of the net culture;

to reveal pluses and minuses of it, in comparison with the human culture;

to examine the ideas and opinions discussed by the people who research this topic, and

to make an analysis of the theoretical problems existed in the subject matter.

The methods of carrying out the research are:

to read the materials like reports, lectures and essays about the net culture from all available information sources including the Internet and library;

to discover the environment of net culture penetrating into the culture itself with the use of chats, electronic bulletin boards (BBS), IRC-channels, forums, newsgroups and other communication possibilities presented in the culture;

Expected results

broaden our understanding of other cultures as well as of the culture we belong to;

to show probable future of our world upon establishing of net culture justifying on my own predictions and on the scrutiny of the scientific theory, to state my own viewpoint on the topic.;

demonstration of how the new technologies can influence our lives in order to keep people well informed and confident in the things awaiting them in the coming years;

explanation on the wide perspectives of eliminating many barriers with the new young developing cultures arrival.

The state of research in the field

The end of XX century was marked by the entry of essentially new means of mass communication in the life of people – the global Internet network. Internet has become an integral component of information space in postmodernism societies, and its value grows steadily every year. The global network creates conditions for formation of virtual communities, generates new types of text formats, erases borders between the states, eliminates distances separating people and, finally, builds around itself the specific form of the culture - cyberculture.

Research

Cyberspace

Although The United States of America, Great Britain and Europe are located on different continents, however, Internet consolidates those geographically distant places and brings them together, making them as a single whole. Talking about the Internet and the environment for the net culture, both being inseparable, this global network itself represents a non-hierarchical structure, a system without any central item supervising information streams. Being put into words by father of cyberpunk William Gibson - a global network is “collective hallucination” (William Gibson 8), a cyberspace, outside which there are no those points (cities, museums, libraries, etc.) which we virtually visit, but only lines exist - the liaisons connecting Web-pages demanded by us.

The virtual world in which there is a person as a result of merge computer graphics with an opportunity of direct influence on events, it is accepted to name a cyberspace. This term appeared in 1985 in William Gibson's science-fiction novel “Neuromancer” for the first time, where it is used for the description of universal electronic meditation in which billions of people coexist. In opinion of the conducting researcher in the given area, Francis Hammit, the cyberspace is a sphere of the information received by means of electronics. As Vadim Emelin in his “Global Network and Cyberculture” said, “The Internet is nomad space - an inhabitancy of nomads, and similarly to a map, cannot be made in frameworks of any structural or generating model” (Vadim Emelin 5).

Rhizome

As a key category for the philosophical analysis of the global network Internet we use a concept "rhizome" - specific concept of a postmodernist discourse. The given term has been borrowed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari from botany. The first two principles of the rhizome are the "principles of connection and heterogeneity" (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 3). These principles require that any point of a rhizome system can be connected to any other point. The rhizome can be broken off in any place, but despite of it, it will renew the growth either in an old direction, or will choose new one.

It is appropriate to mention here about the history of the global network creation. It takes the beginning in the days of Cold War - the project of the Internet was developed by the American militaries with the purpose to provide the greatest viability of control systems in case of nuclear attack. Their idea was in the following: important data was located not in one place, but dispersed and duplicated on cross-connected remote computers. Thus militaries tried to avoid fatal failure of control systems: if in case of an attack there would be efficient even with one of the computers - the data which had spared on it would allow to give a command about assault and battery of "impact of requital". From above-stated it is clearly visible, that the early Internet possessed anti-hierarchical structure, which fully satisfied the requirement of heterogeneity of connections in rhizomorphic designs.