Cyberculture/Cyberspace as a Mode of Transmission of Cultures, Identities and Power Relations: A Theoretical Perspective

Abstract

The sweeping rise of new technologies has allowed for the normalization of digital tools and devices as powerful modes of communication and transmission of cultures, lifestyles, languages, texts, and power relations. Communication has definitely and irreversibly taken on a new turn/trajectory in cyberspace, where people have transferred their offline activities, experiences, interactions, and socialization. Cyberspace is a vast, open, and malleable space that gives momentum to human communication and velocity to the multi-layered process of transmission. Cyberspace, as an electronic and digital landscape, is widely used to create, share, and transmit information. It also contributes to storing information to enhance and extend human memory. The power dynamics of cyberspace manifest in its ability to extend human memory, empower communication, and globalize transmission. The fluid and constantly streaming aspect of cyberspace allows the free flow of ideas, texts, artefacts, knowledge, narratives, arts, cultural heritage, and identities, to cite but a few. By subsuming all these social, cultural, and epistemological actions, cyberspace has fostered a new culture, cyberculture. The French scholar Pierre Lévy defines cyberculture “as a set of material and intellectual techniques: practices, attitudes, modes of thinking and values that have developed alongside the growth of cyberspace. Understood as a synonym for ‘network,’ cyberculture offers a new medium of communication…” (Qtd. in Teixeira et al, 2017). Cyberspace provides multiple virtual platforms where various forms of culture are being stored and transmitted. Both cyberspace and cyberculture have become new digital paradigms that could be conceptualized as semiotic signifiers of the new society, hosting collective intelligence and providing electronic venues/spaces to empower/sustain local cultures and identities. The fact that cyberspace combines audio-visual, textual, and graphic materials can amply facilitate the transmission and the development of local and national cultures, oral or written. This paper is, then, a theoretical attempt at showcasing the potential of cyberspace and cyberculture to communicate, transmit, and empower local and national cultures and identities through the multiple platforms that digital technologies offer to the new society, which, at the same time, could reflect power relations.