Cybercultures

Featured Site

• Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies. Rich site for investigating all aspects of cyberculture. Includes bibliographies, reviews, course links, interviews with cyber theorists/critics, and more. Excellent resource run by David Silver.

General Sites

• Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. Useful site, especially for the complex legal issues surrounding cyberspaces. Sponsored by the Harvard Law School.
• Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine. Online magazine that deals with cyberspace-age communications.
• Computer-Mediated Communication Studies Center. A listing of their online courses.
• Cyberstudies Web Ring. Links to many of the major cyberstudies sites online.
• Digital Culture. Interesting course from David Rodowick at Cornell University.
• The Digital Divide. List of articles on race and gender gap in cyberspace, from Yahoo.
• Internet, Cyberspace and Social Theory. Excellent set of links to articles, books, programs and materials bringing social theory to bear on analysis of cybercultures.
• Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Key online journal, jointly published by the University of Southern California and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
• The Netizens and the Wonderful World of the Net: An Anthology. Nice collection of essays on the history, nature and social impact of the Internet.
• The Virtual Community. Book by Howard Rheingold exploring different kinds of online communities. Includes a history of the Internet.

Online Articles

• The Carnage of Identity: Cyborgs and Women in Science Fiction and Horror Films. Article by Ben Rollins.
• Coming Apart at the Seams: Sex, Text and the Virtual Body. Article by Shannon McRae.
• Feminization of Cyberspace. Article by Doctress Neutopia.
• From Big Brother to the Electronic Panopticon. Article by David Lyon on the dangers of new electronic surveillance mechanisms.
• Gender Online. Special issue of the electronic journal Computer-Mediated Communication.
• “I May Be Synthetic, But I’m Not Stupid”: Technicity, Artifice and Repetition in Cyberville. Excerpt from an interesting undergraduate thesis by G. Marks.
• Is the Web Too Cool for Blacks." Article by Leonce Gaiter. Is black culture too conservative to produce an interest in the web?
• Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community. Article by Judith S. Donath, MIT Media Lab.
• Napster Debates:
  • The Day the Music Died? Harvard’s Policy on Napster and Its Siblings—Past, Present and Future. A panel discussion sponsored by the Berkman Center at Harvard (see above).
  • Signal or Noise: The Future of Music on the Net. Conference on Napster-related issues.
• The Presentation of Self in Electronic Life: Goffman on the Internet. Article by Hugh Miller, Nottingham Trent University, on the relevance of Erving Goffman’s theory of self-presentation to Internet life.
• The Presentation of Self in WWW Home Pages. Article by Hugh Miller and Russell Mather.
• Sex and the Cybergirl. Online sexual harassment issues.
• Situating Cyberspace: The Popularisation of Virtual Reality. Article by Philip Haywood on how cyberspace has been promoted and popularized by different popular culture institutions and languages.
• Surplus Identity On-Line. Article by Annalee Newlitz, from the key journal Bad Subjects.
• Who Will We Be in Cyberspace? Article by Langdon Winner on unequal power relations in the creation and use of cyberspace. Scroll down to find article.
• Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? Article by Allucquere Rosanne Stone on the complexities of embodied identity in cyberspace.

Class In Cyberspace

• The Internet and Poverty: Real Help or Real Hype?
• Possible Roles for Electronic Community Networks and Participatory Development Strategies in Access Programs for Poor Neighborhoods.
• High Technology and Low-Income Communities: Prospects for the Positive Use of Advanced Information Technology.
• Losing Ground Bit by Bit: Low-Income Communities in the Information Age.
• Falling Through the Net II: New Data on the Digital Divide.

For much more on cybercultures/digital cultures, see Digital Cultures.