Internet and Cyberculture

As the new technologies associated with personal computers have proliferated over the last few decades, along with the emergence of a communications infrastructure designed to allow these computers to support a global network of information and cultural exchange, the resulting Internet has evolved to become an important commercial and noncommercial aspect of everyday life all over the world. “Cyberculture” has become a sort of catchall used to characterize the wide diversity of online Internet experiences available, in both their popular and fringe aspects, and it represents a blossoming transdisciplinary academic field of study that is attempting to chart the Internet's history, theorize the rich array of individual and social meanings that the network affords, and imagine the future developments that may occur as Internet technology comes to dominate social life.

Though it has a variety of historical antecedents, the Internet proper began as a Cold War project in decentralized communications by the U.S. Department of Defense in the 1960s. Named Arpanet (it was the computer network for the DOD's Advanced Research Project Agency), during the 1970s it expanded to become an international communications hub for research specialists in both universities and the military, at which time e-mail (electronic mail) became ubiquitous and Usenet (newsgroups devoted to postings around a specific topic) was created. The term Internet was [Page 415]not itself uttered to describe the network until 1982, and it was not until 1991 that the World Wide Web (WWW or “the Web”)—the series of associative multimedia pages that most people now consider iconic of the larger Internet—was established by Tim Berners-Lee. Interestingly, the hypertextual form of the WWW's interlinking pages, as well as its ability to condense vast libraries of information that could be personalized into efficient research and publication tools, had been envisaged as early as 1945 by the scientist Vannevar Bush in his essay “As We May Think.” The term hypertext was itself coined as early as 1965 by the Internet developer and theorist Ted Nelson.

During the late 1980s, BBS (bulletin board systems) hubs represented the leading edge of the technology fringe in which an underground network of technically sophisticated professional users and computer literate youth proffered a veritable “gift economy” of pictures, simple games, and electronic communication over extremely slow networks. Alongside the rise of the Web during the 1990s, varieties of multiuser dungeons (MUDs) appeared that allowed people to explore basic virtual environments and interact with one another in real time. Corporate culture also increasingly colonized the Internet with Microsoft's Bill Gates, on the one hand, symbolic of a new economic form of computer ideologue/tycoon, and with America Online's “You’ve got mail!” aesthetic, on the other, indexical of the popular post-1994 boom of the WWW in which mass marketing and electronic commerce have joined communication and research as major activities for Internet users.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Internet has matured to become a multifaceted, socially, and politically complex environment of over 500 million users. While corporate forces rapidly built a larger and speedier Internet for the new millennium, subcultural forces have sought equally to borrow the new online environment for their own sociopolitical intentions. Thus was the case, infamously, with the peer-to-peer (P2P) client Napster, which allowed approximately 60 million users at one point to share and freely trade a variety of multimedia files directly with one another. Recently, the Internet phenomenon of blogs (web logs, journals, and diaries) in which so-called bloggers self-publish, trade media stories, and offer a variety of commentary on social life, appears to be the latest version of a noncommercial Internet craze. The related growth of the Indymedia network (http://www.indymedia.org) appears to be one of the most promising current developments for those who aspire to a democratic network of critical and politically informed citizen-users.

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