Critical Cyberculture Studies

David Silver, Adrienne Massanari

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780814796047
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Starting in the early 1990s, journalists and scholars began responding to and trying to take account of new technologies and their impact on our lives. By the end of the decade, the full-fledged study of cyberculture had arrived. Today, there exists a large body of critical work on the subject, with cutting-edge studies probing beyond the mere existence of virtual communities and online identities to examine the social, cultural, and economic relationships that take place online.

Taking stock of the exciting work that is being done and positing what cyberculture’s future might look like, Critical Cyberculture Studies brings together a diverse and multidisciplinary group of scholars from around the world to assess the state of the field. Opening with a historical overview of the field by its most prominent spokesperson, it goes on to highlight the interests and methodologies of a mobile and creative field, providing a much-needed how-to guide for those new to cyberstudies. The final two sections open up to explore issues of race, class, and gender and digital media's ties to capital and commerce—from the failure of dot-coms to free software and the hacking movement.

This flagship book is a must-read for anyone interested in the dynamic and increasingly crucial study of cyberculture and new technologies.

Part I
Fielding the Field

Chapter 1
The Historiography of Cyberculture

Jonathan Sterne

We are at a turning point in the analysis of so-called new communication technologies.¹ Even though we are used to thinking of them as new, these technologies are not nearly as new as they were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. Claims for the revolutionary promise of digital technologies are dissipating as well: advertisers have moved to “digital lifestyle” campaigns that represent digital technologies as commodities to be integrated into everyday life rather than as epochal forces that will transform it. Meanwhile, scholarly treatments of so-called new media are getting more nuanced. While some conservatives and otherwise recalcitrant sorts still argue for the revolutionary power of “new” technologies, the technophilic position is at least somewhat less acceptable in serious scholarship than it was five years ago. With perseverance and good fortune, they’ll become even less respected as time passes. Similarly, critical scholars are less likely to present simple critiques of technological determinism and e-topian discourse (to borrow a term from Crawford [2003]) and are more likely to expand the scope of their studies either to offer robust descriptions of digital media or to connect the remaining e-topian discourses with broader social and political currents.

So in many ways, cyberculture studies—whatever you take the field to be—has made significant strides in the past five years. It has more conferences, more journals, and more good scholarship. Ah, signs of progress!² In other ways, however, we are still at the very beginnings of a specifically academic and critical historiography of cyberculture; we ought to step back and reflect for a moment. Some habits of historical and methodological thinking have begun to crystallize in cyberculture studies. Many of our analytical categories were developed in the 1980s and 1990s, and many of them persist into the supposedly new moment we now inhabit. In a sense, we are mirrors of our object: as we take each step, we carry forward a history that we have not yet fully grasped, and that history in part shapes our action on the present stage. In fact, most of our scholarly histories of cyberculture in one way or another recapitulate narratives available from corporations heavily invested in the digital media economy, or stories told online by self-described “pioneers” themselves (our language still hasn’t quite given up on the frontier mythos) or cheerleader journalists.

In this essay, I will challenge you, dear reader, to think more broadly and bravely about what counts in the domain of cyberculture studies. I will do so by exploring some aspects of contemporary media culture via sound. But my point is much bigger than “gee, people should talk about sound.” Rather, my point is that we need to be careful in our object construction. Or, to borrow a social scientific phrase, we need to be more sensible in our “research design.”

Sound might seem like an odd theme to crop up in an essay with a title as grand as “The Historiography of Cyberculture.” We already assume that an essay bearing such a grandiose title would discuss cyberpunk authors and sci-fi flicks, hackers and phone phreaks, defense systems, university networks and home computers, MUDs and MOOs, browsers and user groups, VR helmets and wearable media, Web sites and information economies, and sites of new industry. All of these objects are legitimate objects of cyberculture study—and elsewhere I’ve considered many of them. But if we assume that these are the proper objects of cyberculture study before we read the essay, then we are also assuming that the most important parts of our historiographic work are finished—that we already know what cyberculture is and where it comes from. I aim to trouble that certainty in this short piece.

Let us start with a banal example: a story on special effects in The Matrix Reloaded in the May 2003 issue of Wired magazine. As the author explains, the production studio created its fight scenes from elaborate composites of sampled images. Rather than creating an artificial reality and filming it, the editors built motion sequences out of countless still images of actors and locations—taken from every imaginable angle. In a word, they “sampled” images and created a totally fabricated scene from them:

The standard way of simulating the world in [computer graphics] is to build it from the inside out, by assembling forms out of polygons and applying computer-simulated textures and lighting. The ESC [a visual effects firm] team took a radically different path, loading as much of the real world as possible into the computer first, building from the outside in. This approach, known as image-based rendering, is transforming the effects industry.

A similar evolution has already occurred in music. The first electronic keyboards sought to re-create a piano’s acoustic properties by amassing sets of rules about the physics of keys, hammers, and strings. The end result sounded like a synthesizer. Now DJs and musicians sample and morph the recorded sounds of actual instruments.

Instead of synthesizing the world, [ESC effects-guru John] Gaeta cloned it. To make the Burly Brawl, he would have to build the Matrix. (Silberman 2003)

The Wired writer immediately picks up on the analogy between sampling sounds and sampling images, and points out that the Matrix’s “Burly Brawl” fight scene was indeed “sampled.” For all the academic critiques of Wired, I wonder how many of us scholars would have picked up on that obvious parallel as quickly as a Wired journalist. While visual design is very much at the center of cyberculture studies, the auditory dimension is almost always left out. One need only look at the available bibliographies. Beyond Steve Jones’s work (Jones 1993 [discussed below]; Jones 2000; Jones 2002) and a few other notable mentions like Mark Dery’s references to music in Escape Velocity (1996), Sean Cubitt’s chapter on sound in Digital Aesthetics (1998), or a passing mention of sound synthesis in Lev Manovich’s Language of New Media (2001), one has to leave the field entirely to find interesting writing on digital audio that is not simply commentary on MP3s and file sharing (for example, Meintjes 2003; Rothenbuhler and Peters 1997; Taylor 2001; Theberge 1997).³ In other words, the history to which Silberman refers is often left out of academic histories of cyberculture. Indeed, a great many writers in cyberculture studies have taken the field to be a subspecies of visual culture (for example, Druckrey 1996; Manovich, forthcoming; Mitchell 1995; Robins 1996). It is one thing to claim that there is a visual dimension to cyberculture and that cyberculture might well connect up with other aspects of visual culture. It is another to subsume cyberculture under the rubric of visual culture, and this is my concern here.

There are many possible explanations for why sound is so neglected by cyberculture scholars. We could blame it on the organization of the disciplines: while “visual culture” is an object of study and a set of problems recognized across many humanities and social sciences (and one can find various kinds of “visual studies” positions advertised in many fields), “sound studies” is only an emergent term. Even though there exists a massive interdisciplinary archive of scholarship about sound, many of these writers are only beginning to notice one another, much less be noticed by people in other fields. Although there is some merit to the “organization of the disciplines” story, it is ultimately unsatisfying because cyberculture scholars have been quite creative in other areas of object construction. Yes, “visual culture studies” is an available scholarly orientation. And as Lisa Nakamura points out elsewhere in this volume, scholars of the Internet are only now waking up to the fact that it is filled with pictures as well as texts. But why has digital audio fared even worse than images in cyberculture studies?

A more robust answer lies in our historiography. Consider the available histories of digital media. Although the compact disc was the first digital medium widely adopted by consumers, it is rarely discussed in histories of cyberculture. For all our self-congratulation about moving into a new period of cyberculture studies, here is where the millennial specter still haunts us. Is it possible that CDs fare so poorly in our histories because so few people thought of them as “revolutionary” in any significant way? Because compact discs were a new storage medium that neither responded to nor required significant changes in practices and habits of music listening, they do not fit the model of new technology as “revolutionary.”⁴ While computers, networks, and various aspects of virtual reality have populated the available histories and prehistories of cyberculture, CDs warrant a footnote at best. The same can be said for digital sound synthesis, sampling, and digital audio recording in general (with the exception of the scholars cited above).

Sound is, pardon the pun, a blind spot of cyberculture historiography. Consider this “visual culture” narrative of the history of “virtuality,” an important theme in cyberculture studies:

Virtuality is a buzzword for the 1990s, a seemingly new way of experiencing the outside on the inside . . . . Some critics have wanted to call [it] a radical break with the past, heralding a transformation of everyday life unequalled since the Industrial Revolution. Others have insisted that there is relatively little new here, recalling a panoply of once-forgotten visual devices from the panorama to the stereoscope and zootrope that immersed the viewer in a seemingly real environment. For all the bluster, a middle way seems fairly clear. Virtuality has certainly been experienced before, perhaps as long as people have been sufficiently distracted by an artist’s skill to take a picture briefly for reality. On the other hand, computer-generated environments offer the chance to interact with and change this illusory reality, an opportunity that no previous medium has been able to provide. At root, the question is the relationship between the human body and space, mediated by the sense of sight (Mirzoeff 1998, p. 181).

Nicholas Mirzoeff ought to be applauded for his attention to the tensions between historical continuity and change in the description of the present. And, to be fair, he is writing about cyberculture in the context of a reader on visual culture. But as I have argued elsewhere, even if we presuppose the “hegemony of the visual” (I do not), hegemony does not mean the totality of vision, and therein lies the rub. Mirzoeff’s media history is entirely partial because he collapses media history into visual history. If virtuality has been experienced as long as people have been willing to take pictures for reality, then what about human-produced sounds? Next to (and before) panoramas, zootropes, and stereoscopes lies a history of automata, musical instruments, and architectural acoustics designed to produce synthetic auditory experiences. Whether these are “virtual” in the same way that we talk about virtuality today is open to question. But they are better and more preponderant examples of the phenomena Mirzoeff points to through reference to nineteenth-century visual technologies. We should be wary of collapsing the history of virtuality or any other dimension of cyberculture too quickly into the visual.

My criticism of the visual culture orientation is not just a matter of inclusion. Consider Mirzoeff’s claims that “computer-generated environments offer the chance to interact with and change this illusory reality, an opportunity that no previous medium has been able to provide” or that “at root, the question is the relationship between the human body and space, mediated by the sense of sight” (p. 181). Both of these claims are simply untrue and leave out perhaps the most important and mundane experience of virtual space in twentieth-century media: audio recording. As Steve Jones (1993) has written, audio engineers have been producing one or another form of “virtual space” for most of the twentieth century through the use of careful microphone placement, synthetic echo and reverberation, and artificial manipulation of listeners’ stereo fields. Indeed, many of the problems now faced by Virtual Reality (VR) designers were first faced in the areas of sound design for audio recordings. (Jones also deserves kudos for pointing out the visual bias of new media theory ten years ago; if only we’d listened!) Ken Hillis (1999) has smartly connected the visual obsession in VR theory with more tactile issues surrounding bodily motility—the experience of moving through the space and the connection between a VR helmet (or glasses or other head-mounted display) and a glove that measures movement. Hillis’s point is that virtuality is not simply a visual experience but a multisensory one. Indeed, if virtuality is not defined as a purely visual experience, then it has a century-long history to be unearthed: the same problems of spatiality and motility were addressed over a century ago in early experiments with stereo audition and in attempts to use audio to give listeners a sense of spatial position (Bell 1880; Sterne 2003a, pp. 156–157).

The same kind of history exists regarding representations of information. “Audialization” is a term coined by Honor Harger (2003) to refer to the process whereby information is made more comprehensible by rendering it as sound. It is the auditory equivalent of the more familiar “visualization” of information, but in fact, it is older and more fully established. In fields such as radio astronomy, sound is often converted into images for easier scientific apprehension and comprehension. Yet sometimes sound provides more information than sight. For instance, the rotation of a pulsar becomes much more comprehensible when it is actually heard by a listener. As with spatialization, attempts to comprehend and analyze phenomena by converting them into sound (or merely attending to their sonic characteristics) have a history much longer than that of cyber-culture. For instance, from the second decade of the nineteenth century, physicians used stethoscopes to audialize the otherwise imperceptible interiors of their patients’ bodies (Sterne 2003a, pp. 99–136).

What do these histories of auditory media mean for cyberculture scholarship? At the most basic level, auditory media have, over the past century, developed in areas that are now considered central themes in cyberculture studies. Long before Virtual Reality hit the scene, there were media experiences designed specifically as artificial media experiences, and many of the so-called new problems of cyberculture have already been dealt with in the auditory realm. This is true for artificial senses of space; it is true for a sense of artificial or “pure” media experience; and it is true for even basic issues like interface design: for example, in Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco’s history of the Moog synthesizer, there is a very interesting chapter on debates over whether to control synthesizers through pianolike keyboards or th...