New Ways of the Older World: Cyber Culture

Abstract

The increasing popularity of the various modes of engagement as postulated and made possible through the internet, or the information age, has a significant impact on language, culture, and psychology of the user and the using world. In enabling a world of virtual connection and atypical—to the world that saw itself through ‘real’ presence—responses, internet and its use has revived an interest in personal and social, unimpeded by spatial and ‘practical’ relations, which in turn sparked academic debates that have drawn together from Cybernetics, Sociology, Psychology, Linguistics, Economics, and Literature. One of the major concerns of Cyber culture studies is the problem of potential theoretical continuities and the alternate space where the theories breakdown, especially with regards to the traditional notions of social-personal-private equations. If one were to treat the platforms that are available globally online as a continuation of non-networked lived realities as opposed to a revolutionary rewriting of expectations and expressions, the question arises: how are these social replications sustainable in a period where data is consumed and produced self-consciously and critically?The rapidly growing range of theoretical and practical questions therefore raised by the shift encompass questions of selfhood and cyber presence, communities constituted entirely of online selves, the relevance of RPGs of Role Play Gaming and its possibilities in expression and withdrawal, the social inequalities that infiltrate the supposedly neutral cyber reality, and the ways in which our imaginings of  the world has had to work to include social and cyberculture and the networked nature of either space. The question then would be whether the questions that were raised in the past on the nature and function of self by itself or embedded in a network are the right questions to raise, or whether they have automatically been understood to be different as the questions themselves are understood to be different in the face of the Information Age.This paper attempts to address these questions, and if not arrive at a resolution, then at clarifying the various ways of asking them.