Thursday 17 March 2011

I'll tell you why, Cyberculture.

Before I get into my opinions and thoughts on David Bell's Why Cyberculture?, I just want to share my thoughts on learning the basics of Flash Professional, and they are:

OH SO MUCH FUN!
I've always enjoyed playing around with creative programs on the computer. I loved learning Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, and I still play around with them whenever I can. I feel like these kinds of programs (Flash included) are a great excuse for adults to mess around like kids. It's like Play Doh and Lego, but with more buttons.
 Awesome.

On that note of technological advancement, Bell's article (or chapter, or whatever it was) definitely brought some interesting things to mind while I was reading it. At one point, he talks about experiential stories and interactions with new technologies by conjuring the image of connecting to stories, images, and ideas via the world wide web, and the, what he calls, "ambient fear" of infection through spam, pop-ups, and unprotected searches (Bell, 2007). This automatically brings up the question in my mind, how did we reach this point of the cyber world, or "cyberspace," crossing over into the physical world? We worry about getting viruses, but when it comes down to it, a computer virus doesn't affect us physically. We don't get sick from it, and we certainly don't die.

In a more general sense, when Bell lists the inclusions of cyberculture studies, he mentions such technologies as artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics, and new modes of film production, distribution, and consumption (Bell, 2007). All of these actually do exist in our physical world, but still retain that somewhat intangible element of cyberspace. With AI and A-Life, as with robotics (which often gives the illusion of AI), we can physically see and understand the results, but unless we're scientists or engineers, we often can't quite comprehend the "how" of it. The film industry, on the other hand, touches many people more personally because we all watch movies, and many of us take advantage of new distribution and consumption methods, such as movie downloads, illegal pirating, and so on. I don't want to go on forever, so I'll just leave it at that.

Bell, D. (2007). Cyberculture Theorists: Manuel Castells and Donna Haraway. Routledge: New York.

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