CYBER CULTURES IN THE REAL WORLD
Todd May
Edie Garrison
English 101
April 26, 2008
2nd Draft
Everyone lives in and interacts with several different cultures.People may not realize it, but they likely participate in several different cultures each day. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines culture as “The way of life of a people, including their attitudes, values, beliefs, arts, sciences, modes of perception, and habits of thought and activity. Cultural features of forms of life are learned but are often too pervasive to be readily noticed from within [culture].”Some of the different cultures people couldbe participating in are the cultures at their home, school, and work. Each of these cultures differs on their opinions of certain subjects or in the way they do things.With the large number of cultures existing in an extremely smaller area, it is not surprising that they overlap. Where they interact with each other can be viewed as what Pratt calls the “contact zone.” She says “I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (Pratt 59). She is saying that contact zones refer to areas where cultures overlap with other cultures. An example of this would be at a job where someoneserves customers who come from different cultures. Some of the customers may be from similar cultures while other customers may be from cultures on the other side of the world such as in customer service where customers in America will often end up talking to support people from another continent such as India. Other contact zones could be in schools where students from different cultures may work together on projects or in homes many people will have friends over who are from different cultures.
One of the common ways different cultures interact today is on computers through the internet. Its development has revolutionized the way people and cultures interact. There are several different websites such as MySpace and Facebook where people can make and customize personal profiles of themselves so others can learn about them and communicate with them through messages. These sites have millions of users signed up and interacting from all over the world. Someone can easily find other people with common interests from other cultures and then become their “friends.” Many people will never see their online friends face to face. All their interactions will be through the Internet. Then there are a few people who will meet online and eventually see each other face to face, but doing that usually involves a fair amount of traveling where a person will interact with different cultures on his or her journey.
Another common way for people to communicate is through an instant messaging system, such as MSN messenger or AIM. These messaging systems are very similar, and both allow people to communicate with others in real time. A person can even do a video chat in which they can see and hear the other person if they have a webcam, but most of the conversations will take place using mostly text. Occasionally emoticons, which are little pictures usually of faces, are used to express the writer’s emotions. Through instant messaging many people interact with people from other cultures.
When communicating using instant messenger or text messaging there are numerous abbreviations and phrases which get used all the time. The one thing that text conversations lack is a sense of emotion. Since the people cannot see each other’s faces or hear the tone of their voice, they can have a hard time determining how the other person is responding. Sometimes what someone types can be interpreted the wrong way because the reader cannot tell what the writer is feeling when he or she wrote it. Because of this virtual world where many people spend huge amounts of their time, many of the younger generation cannot communicate as well with other people in the context of real world face to face interaction, which many consider a necessary skill. When looking for a job or working with other people, a person will need to be able to communicate with their potential employers or coworkers. I recently talked with a friend who owns a music store and he was saying how some of the younger generation cannot communicate with customers very well since they have most of their interaction with other people via electronic devices like phones or computers. The cashier at a store does not communicate with the customers via text messaging or instant messaging. Maybe someday the world will come to that when everyone forgets how to speak because they spend so much time in the virtual world of the Internet.
This new culture that the internet has created is called a cyber culture. In the article “Welcome to Cyberia,” Arturo Excobar discusses how the study of humanity is analyzed in the area relating to technologies. He basically talks about the study human interaction with technology and suggests ways to study that area in the future. Exobar states “Significant changes in the nature of social life are being brought about by the computer, information, and biological technologies, to the extent that–someargue–a new cultural order, ‘Cyberculture,’ is coming into being” (Escobar 211).The Oxford Dictionary of Law Enforcement defines cyberculture as “The culture that has formed among those who use the Internet and other networks to communicate, and have formed social groups which meet and interact online and may never meet in real life. Cyberculture has its own customs, etiquette, mythology, and ethics.”Cyberculture is like a bridge joining most of the cultures that exist. To picture how the internet has affected other cultures, think of culture as a circle. It is one thing all by itself. But, there are many unique cultures, so think of lots of circles. All these cultures that we know of are on planet Earth, which is not very big, so now take all the circles and squish them together until they overlap. That is the earth a couple centuries ago, but with the invention of the Internet most of the circles can overlap each other even if they are extremely far apart geographically. This is difficult to visualize but that is what the Internet does—it brings people into contact with each other.The contact between people and cultures is whatPratt does an excellent job of describing and explaining in her essay “Arts of the Contact Zone.”
Another person who has written about contact zones isGuillermo Gómez-Peña. In his essay “Documented/Undocumented” he talks about his experience living on the border of two cultures, Mexican and American. He was born in Mexico and then moved to the farthest north in Latin America. Gómez-Peña explains how living on the border he has become less Mexican and more American. He has watched cultures melt together and borders expand. According to Pratt he would be living inside a contact zone. His essay is a specific example of a contact zone and what it can do from personal experience.He wrote hisessay twenty years ago in which he was explaining the interaction between real world cultures, but even back then he noticed the effect technology was having on the sharing of information. He said, “our artistic options in terms of the medium methodology, system of communication, and channels of distribution for our ideas and images are greater and more diverse than ever” (Gómez-Peña 131). Since 1988, when he wrote his book, it has become even quicker and easier to share information, because most people have computers and can send images, videos, or messages to each other instantly with only a couple clicks. Some people even make websites to share information with the whole world. People do not need a license or permission to make a website and so anybody who wants to can make their own website and put whatever they want on it. A good amount of information about the real world has been digitalized and put up online. This creates a virtual world of information with many different cultures represented. Many different people with contribute and access this information making the internet like a cyber contact zone between real world cultures. Like the contact zone in Gómex-Peña’s essay, the internet is a contact zone which has made a major impact on the unity of cultures. Over its relatively short existence it has helped to bring many different cultures together. Although some of the people who contribute to the information online will put useful information on their website which other people can learn from, but the Internet is not monitored and so people can put up lies. If someone felt like it they could write a story on how the earth has been rediscovered to be the center of our solar system. The person would not get in any trouble or be told not to do that. A popular website that a lot of people use and rely on is Wikipedia which is an online encyclopedia with just about everything a person could imagine. The unique part about this site is that anyone can go in and add or change the entries for words or phrases, meaning that if someone who does not know what they are talking about goes into and changes the entry, it will be wrong until someone else comes along, notices that it is wrong, and takes the time to fix it. Knowing this, a person should realize that not everything they see on the Internet can be trusted.
One of the major problems the internet has is information privacy. There are many people who steal personal information from the cyber world which they use in the real world such as addresses, credit card information, and bank account information. In cyberspace your actions are all tracked and recorded. Kang, who attended HarvardLawSchool and later taught at UCLA where he was elected professor of the year in 1998, has written a couple papers on cyberspace. In the paper “Cyber-Race” he states “The best way to grasp this point is to take seriously, if only for a moment, the metaphor that cyberspace is an actual place, a computer-constructedworld, a virtualreality. In this alternate universe, you are invisibly stamped with a bar code as soon as you venture outside your home” (Kang 1198). Kang goes on to explain how our every action is seen and recorded. When someone visits an online store, the store tracks what they look at and for how long. This is not important information that other people would want to get their hands on but it allows the store to learn a great deal about your habits. It also helps the store become what their customers are looking for. Most people’s concern about privacy is over exaggerated. By visiting a website it cannot collect information like the users address or credit card number unless they give it to them, but companies will store information and sometimes they will share the information with other companies or sometimes people will be able to hack in and steal the information which is just link in the real world. People cannot easily acquire personal information about you in the real world, but criminals can break into stores and look at their records to collect information. People considering making a purchase online the customer should be sure that the company has a good reputation for being secure. When someone gets past a company’s defenses or gets access to information they should not have access to, “companies generally expend resources investigating the matter, often hiring private investigators so that they do not suffer reputational loss. If other hackers become aware of the site's vulnerability, a nonmalicious hack may be the precursor to more malicious attacks” (Wible 1578). When hackers get the information they want they will sometimes use it to create fake credit cards or identification such as work badges which they can use in the real world to do stuff they should not, such as buying items with other people’s money or getting into a company building with private information. An example would be someone who hacks a website to steal credit card information and then uses that to buy items from stores. The hackers are some of the cyberspace crooks, people who commit crimes online. Some of these people commit crimes in both the real world and cyberspace.
This article by Whible talks about a website for hackers. It explains how crimes can be committed anonymously so that they cannot be punished with the standard methods. It suggests hacking contests as an alternative so that sites can become more secure and hackers have a place where they can do what they want to do. These contests are usually sponsored by a company that makes security software and the first person to get past it gets an award. This article points out how people can be virtually anonymous when committing online crimes. The conventional methods of punishment do not work in the cyber world. In the real world when a store is broken into it is usually fairly obvious, but online stores may not know people have used them to get access to peoples credit card info, addresses, or emails until customer start complaining.Cyber criminals cannot be easily punished in the cyber world. They cannot have internet access taken away from them since there are free internet spots everywhere and they cannot really be hurt in any way. They must be punished in the real world by being fined or put in jail.
Cyberculture has some disadvantages but it also has advantages. It allows people from different cultures to interact without even knowing it or thinking about it. When playing games with other people online it is possible that they are from a different ethnicity, but the players would never think about it, while in real life they may not like each other and avoid each other. The internet also allows people from different continents to interact with each other and share ideas on forums. A great number of online users communicate through forums where they discuss anything and everything. These people are not always from the same culture causing forums to have a wide variety of ideas from different cultures.
One type of cyberculture tool that hundreds of people use each day to help them with the real worldis map programs whichcan show people what an area looks like or give directions to a destination. Some can even tell you how fast traffic is moving. Online there are places like MapQuest or Google Maps which allows users to view the world from above and it can tell them how to get where they want to go. Microsoft even has a free map program for cell phones which is GPS-enabled that will give real time directions using the internet to find the best route. These websites must have the layout of the real world inputted into them and then they reproduce this information to many different people in many different cultures. Before the internet and computers people had to use hand drawn maps which where nowhere as complete or detailed as the ones online. People also had to have some idea of where their destination was on the map. Now people just have to type in an address and the programs online can tell you exactly where it is.
The cyberculture has definitelymade a big impact on the real world cultures. Most of it has been beneficial and outweighs the negative effects. A majority of people take part in the cyberculture each day for many reasons. Some people do homework or school, some people work online, some people play games, and some people use it for many other various tasks. Without the cyberculture people would not be communicating as fast with each other and they would be having more face to face relationships. Now many tasks can be accomplished much quicker, since the information needed to do it can be found online quickly and people do not have to go to libraries or find knowledgeable people to answer their questions. Overall real world cultures are much better off since the invention of the cyberculture.
Bibliography
"culture."The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Simon Blackburn. OxfordUniversity Press, 1996. Oxford Reference Online. OxfordUniversity Press.WashingtonStateUniversity.16 April 2008 <
"cyberculture."The Oxford Dictionary of Law Enforcement. Michael Kennedy. OxfordUniversity Press, 2007. Oxford Reference Online. OxfordUniversity Press.WashingtonStateUniversity.16 April 2008<
Escobar,Arturo, David Hess, Isabel Licha, Will Sibley, Marilyn Strathern and Judith Sutz. “Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture.” Current Anthropology, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Jun., 1994), pp. 211-231
Kang,Jerry. “Cyber-Race.” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 113, No. 5 (Mar., 2000), pp. 1130-1208