Cyber Culture

Let me propose a hypothesis. The date is some 1990 year, pre-technology advancement and you have a disability. For whatever reason you have been restricted to your home because of your disability. With only basic aids to help you live your life, you may feel restricted and bound by it.

With less than 40 days left till the World Cup kicks off on June 11th this year we can only imagine what sort of visitors we can expect and how will they access their information on the event. Everything is now available online from booking tickets, planning transport and planning accommodation. But if you want to skip all of that administration you could always just watch the matches on the television.

With advancements in web based interaction there is a wider platform to interact anonymously, at least to a certain extent.

I earlier discussed the concept of avatar use and this week I want to delve into an aspect of that: how web users use their option to be 'faceless' to offer their opinion or interact with other users and how this impacts on our culture.

After recently watching “behaviours in e-Learning” by Ray Jimenez I realised that in under a session of three minutes I had suddenly learnt something new, something for free and all from the comfort of my office space.

It seems e-Learning is evolving rapidly and that more and more people are being educated as a result. With e-Learning on the rise and more and more reliable sources available online for users to substitute their face-to-face learning, we should consider how this impacts on our culture. Specifically in terms of how we have changed our learning habits and in turn what the effects are both positive and negative.

After recently watching the 2009 film Surrogates , I realised how pervasive the idea of avatars are becoming in pop culture.

Before I start blogging about cyber culture I would like to pose a hypothesis.



If by the 2020 we all have daily access to the internet and various new technology making use of it, will we have a different cultural life-style to what we experience in this day and age?


Consider for a moment how we experience and partake in our various cultural lifestyles today.


Will our text lingo progress into a completely different dialect to the point that we wold need an aged linguist to sift through our 'new' language to find any proof that our traditional one even existed?


Additionally, maybe our iPhone accessories on clothes of today, will develop to the point where we only where clothes that accommodate our mobile devices.


After all of this, we should wonder if we'll even need clothes aside from a 'generic overall' since we may be spending all our time in a posturepaedic, 'lazy boy' chair living our cultural lives vi-cariously through avatars online.


These are all futuristic examples but we can use them to demonstrate, on a less extreme scale, how we are rapidly becoming members of a cyber-culture as opposed to our traditional ones.


In the period of running these entries, I shall address all these issues in attempt to provide an informative blog on cyber culture.