Globalisation and Culture  ACOM 465 Fall 2003

© Terrell Neuage

Week 9  The Internet and Cyber Identities 

October 26-November 1

 

NOTE THURSDAY CLASS WILL BE IN CETL (THE “new” SCIENCE LIBRARY) digital Workshop 1 (as you go in to the right)

 

We will be doing some online activities

 

Class powerpoint

 

There will be a short test next week Thursday 6th November covering material we have discussed in the first nine weeks.

Journal

From the CyberAnthropology Page: http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/cyberanthropos.html pick any one of the links in the categories of: Theory, Reflections, Praxis, Cyborg Eschatology, Predictions, AnthroFuturism, AnthroFuturism or Ethnogenesis and analyse the material in respect to how people in different cultural groupings would view it. (At the end of the day it really is just a bunch of anti-language so you should be able to go pass the words and read the techno-centerness of the author(s).

 

For example if you are using the article ‘TECHGNOSIS, INFOMYSTICISM, AND THE WAR AGAINST ENTROPY’ from Cyborg Eschatology  at http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/techgnosis.html - reference it and relate it to the Internet, globalisation and discuss how someone from a different cultural background that had no knowledge of the Internet or cyberspace would view the article. WHAT IN THE ARTICLE YOU READ MADE IT PARTICULARILY WESTERN? For example is there an assumption that anyone can relate to the material presented or only those in the same mindset?  I would expect about three to four hundred words.

 

(Tuesday October 29) TOPIC:

The Internet and Cyber Identities

Discussion Board:

Discuss whether the Internet should be regulated and censored.

 

Reading

There are three readings on Internet chatrooms below. Read and critique two of the readings and discuss how chatrooms create a space where one can mold him or her self into anything – without boundaries and discuss whether these three readings pertain to people in Western/First World cultures or would they hold true in an Indigenous culture also?

 

·        Rheingold, Howard. A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community. http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/mlr/readings/articles/aslice.html  Last viewed, Wednesday, October 23, 2002 (note: this article is of interest as it was written ten-years ago)

·        Neuage, Terrell. Case Study One, Conversational Analysis of Chatroom Talk. PD Thesis.  http://se.unisa.edu.au/1.html Last viewed, Wednesday, October 23, 2002

·        Suler, John The Psychology of Avatars and Graphical Space
in Multimedia Chat Communities: http://www.rider.edu/users/suler/psycyber/psyav.html Last viewed, Wednesday, October 23, 2002

 

(Thursday) Group discussion

NOTE THURSDAY CLASS WILL BE IN CETL (THE “new” SCIENCE LIBRARY) digital Workshop 1 (as you go in to the right)

 

CLASS POWERPOINT FOR THURSDAY

 

·        Discuss the downsides of the Internet and the positives.

·        Do you think relationships in cyberspace are real?

 

Below from Introduction to “Conversational Analysis of online talk”

Electronic communication has been important to globalisation and the rise of modern society, not simply for its capacity to “transmit” neutral information globally and in real time, but as a stage for the enactment of modernity itself, with all of its contending views and forces. The evolution of the media has had important consequences for the form that modern societies have acquired and it has been interwoven in crucial ways with the major institutional transformations which have shaped modernity. John B. Thompson argues that: 

The development of communication media was interwoven in complex ways with a number of other developmental processes which, taken together, were constitutive of what we have come to call ‘modernity’. Hence, if we wish to understand the nature of modernity - that is, of the institutional characteristics of modern societies and the life conditions created by them - then we must give a central role to the development of communication media and their impact (1995:3). 

In particular, the reinforcement within modern communications media of an individualised transmission and reception – an increasingly personalised rather than a massed or communal pattern of use – has produced the sorts of pluralism, selectivity and inclusivity /exclusivity witnessed in CMC use. It is arguably these same features which have contributed to the rise of “interactivity” as a dominant CMC form – one suited, I will contend, to the “personalised” and “responsibilised” user-consumer central to contemporary economic productivity and social order. It is within an analysis of how ‘chatrooms’, as among the latest forms of communication, ‘work’ or do not ‘work’ that I explore electronic conversation as a force of social change.