‘Cyberculture’, a frequently used term, suggests something about the sort of culture we are dealing with: it is a culture in which machines play a particularly important role. Nobody who has heard the term is unaware of the other constituents of that culture: other than communications networks, programming, and software there are also the issues of artificial intelligence, virtual reality, artificial life, and the human–computer interface. The works of fiction that gave a cultural context to the computers, such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1986), Richard Kadrey’s Metrophage (1989), Pat Cadigan’s Synners (1991), and Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985), or the films that provided its characteristic images, from Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner (1982, 1992) to the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix (1999), routinely not only play out plots concerning computers and computer media but also explore the construction and politics of artificial life (Bladerunner), the complexity and technological resources of organic bodies (Neuromancer, Matrix), and even, with Cadigan’s (1991) famous online stroke, the indissociability of biological and technological systems: hence the ‘syn-’ part of her title. As such fictions make often shockingly clear, cyberculture thus marks a threshold at which concepts, theories and practices stemming from cultural and media studies confront concepts, theories and practices stemming from the sciences notably from biotechnology, robotics and AI research, genetics and genomics.
Driving through this heady mix of concepts and traditions is, the extraordinary pace of contemporary technological change. Our newspapers now routinely announce some new marriage of biology and technology in the form of intelligent prosthetics, implant technologies, cloning, and so on, while people are suffering new physical (repetitive strain injury) and psychological disorders (in-tray anxiety, information sickness) as a consequence of the ubiquity of computation. Cyberculture, then, consists in a mass of new technological things, a wide range of imaginative fictions that have, as it were, seeped through the screens so that they may seem like realistic descriptions of our bewildering everyday lives.
Moreover, it brings the theories and practices of the sciences into direct contact with those of cultural and media studies. Accordingly, it has given rise to questions concerning which of these traditions is better suited to characterize the emergent culture: popular science books vie with works in media studies, philosophy, cultural theory, and so on, over how precisely to characterize the seemingly unprecedented mix of culture and technology that is cyberculture. All involved in this contest seem beset with a certain theoretical anxiety, so that the flow of ideas, fictions, concepts and technologies has become seemingly inexhaustible. Such anxieties, and the sudden confluence of culture and technology that fuel them, are not, however, new. The fictions, sciences and philosophies, alongside the sweeping changes.
For more on the fictions surrounding cyberculture, (McCaffery, 1992):
One reason why this is so by revisiting the McLuhan–Williams problematic concerning electronic technology (particularly television) and its impact on culture, and the ensuing marginalisation of questions of media and technological determination, of media and technology as environments for human action, and so on
The extent of the ‘extensions of man’ in everyday life during the Industrial Revolution, were beset by a similar range of problems, and suffered a similar sense of cultural disorientation. So too, the rise of clockwork mechanisms, and the aggressively materialistic theories that accompanied them, upset the sense of humanity’s place in the natural and divine order, changing medicine and psychology into branches of mechanics.
Indeed, as far back as the first century AD cultures were awash with hypotheses and experiments concerning bringing machines to life. In many other parts of the book we have sought to understand new media as subject to control and direction by human institutions, skill, creativity and intention in broadly the same terms as we have always assumed traditional media to be. But, in turning to the phenomenon of cyberculture, and the histories that feed it, we will be meeting other traditions of thought, some of surprising longevity, and their contemporary manifestations which do not always sit comfortably alongside this humanist emphasis. This being the case, no full account of the culture of new media can be given without exploring the flow of ideas from the other fields that inform cyberculture.
The proximity and traffic between the discourses about new media and cyberculture are reason enough to pay them full attention in this book, but there is another reason which may be more important. This is that many of the questions that the emergence of new media have given rise to are actually versions of larger and more fundamental questions about the relationship of culture to technology and technology to nature. These are not questions that media studies, in general, concerns itself with. However, a number of studies and bodies of thought that attempt to address the nature of everyday life and experience in advanced technological societies under the name of ‘cyberculture’ or ‘cybercultural studies’ do have some things to say about culture, technology and nature. Indeed, these three categories and the shifting relations between them can be said to lie at the very heart of cyberculture.
People may be used to dividing ‘nature’ from ‘culture’, and we routinely base our academic investigations on attending to one or the other realm, but the advent of technology troubles this simple distribution of academic labour, and compels us to ask the question of how to approach ‘the question of technology’ at all. It is to these ideas, histories and theories that we now turn. While the ideas at the centre of cyberculture can all too easily seem to be either enjoyable or trite and naive, near-delirious imaginings of science fiction authors and screenwriters, it has also been recognized that ‘cyberpunk’ science fiction offers an address to many current developments in science, technology and culture that the divided academic world often fails to catch. As one media theorist has put it, ‘cyberpunk can be read as a new form of social theory that maps the consequences of a rapidly developing information and media society in the era of techno-capitalism’ (Kellner 1995).
Thus, cyberpunk fiction is accorded the status of a sociology of new media cultures. Conversely, Kellner goes on to recommend that we read actual sociologies of media-saturated society, such as those by the notorious theorist Jean Baudrillard, as actually being a form of ‘dystopic science fiction’. Kellner’s view stands like a warning: we are about to enter a sphere in which distinctions between science fiction, sociology and philosophy can become hard to maintain. We will not, however, merely be spinning bizarre riddles or presenting cyberculture as the realm of delirium some critics have energetically insisted it is. Our attempt here is to take the reader behind the scenes of cyberculture by tracing the conceptual roots and histories of some theories and ideas concerning nature, culture and technology, automata and living machines, the actual and the virtual, and so on. It will then explore some core developments in the contemporary studies of science, technology and culture that place developments in new media.
BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA
BAPRM III - 42686
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