Bell, D (2001) Storying cyberspace 1: material and symbolic stories, chapter 2 of An introduction to cybercultures. Abingdon: Routledge. pp6-29. [e-book] [PDF]
Sterne, J (2006) The historiography of cyberculture, chapter 1 of Critical cyberculture studies. New York University Press. pp.17-28.
I see why, in comparison with Hand, Bell might be the more enjoyable read; he tells a firmer narrative and much of the story is already familiar. In fact, it’s almost exactly the ‘canonic’ overview of digital culture that Sterne vaguely sneers at:
“[An essay on the history of cyberculture would] discusss 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. (p18)”
But I like Sterne’s main point – that we can’t be complacent, that we don’t really yet know what ‘cyberculture’ and ‘digital culture’ is, that our ‘histories are highly selective’. Again, it makes me wonder about the study of e-learning, and the things we leave out as we close in on an understanding of what ‘e-learning’ or digital culture in education is: visuality (yes and sound!), theories of the subject, surveillance, popular culture all strike me as just a few important examples of things we don’t talk about much.
Bell talks about cyberpunk as providing ‘a cognitive map of human-computer interaction’, and I wonder about the enduring impact of cyberpunk on our understandings of e-learning, in particular perhaps the tendency for technicist, cognitivist discourses to dominate much of the literature. The uploaded consciousness, the downloaded ‘learning object’ (cf the famous ‘Neo learns kung fu’ scene in the Matrix), the fascination with ‘technophilic’ identity. Perhaps there’s interesting scope for a project on popular culture influences on e-learning (dissertation topic, anyone?), much like Edgerton et al.’s Imagining the Academy: higher education and popular culture.
Tags: Bell, cyberculture, cyberpunk, e-learning, history, Sterne