Reflecting on David Silver's "Looking Backwards, Looking Forward: Cyberculture Studies 1990-2000"

A quick recap of the reading to get me thinking...
I just finished reading David Silver's "Looking Backwards, Looking Forward: Cyberculture Studies 1990-2000," (http://www.scribd.com/doc/9525177/Silver?secret_password=2kj8wcye7gt62iokofhh). His essay is a look at many major scholarly writings examining cyberculture from 1990 to 2000. In the essay David Silver categorizes the literature into three generations of writings popular cyberculture, cyberculture studies, and critical cyberculture studies. Silver calls them generations due to the way the writings evolved throughout the ten year time span.

Starting with popular cyberculture stage consisted mainly of journalists writing, who in a sense can be considered the first writers of history. They described the new medium in terms of the idealistic American Pioneer. Who had to struggle their way through the vastness of the new frontier. Silver notes that these early writings were mainly descriptive in nature and slowly started to appear in major magazine publications such as Time magazine and Newsweek. Silver notes that many of the writers in the, "early popular cyberculture often took the form of dystopian rants or utopian raves," (Silver, 2000). These two types of descriptions of the internet remain consistent even into today, as scholars continue to debate cyberculture and what it means to people.

Silver refers to his next stage as the cyberculture studies. This stage again retains its descriptive nature and its dualism of ideologies of where the internet will ultimately lead us to. Silver notes that in this stage of writing people began to write about the complexities of interactions of humans on the internet. Where the idea of community formation is changing the definition of a community as being bound by interaction in terms of local geographical space and where there may never be real face to face interaction. Silver notes Howard Rheingold's book, "The Virtual Community," as one of the pinnacle texts in describing a brief history of virtual community formation.

Silver then introduces the reader to Sherry Turkle's work, "Life on the Screen:Identity in the Age of the Internet." Turkle takes on a more utopian view of the internet. Highlighting that people create online identities to more often than not to highlight their offline selves. The online identity allows people more freedom than their 'real' life and in turn this allows a greater introspection of ones concept of personal identity.

The later years of they 90's is where Silver points out that the study of cyberculture really takes off scholarly and this is where the third stage of critical cyberculture studies begins. Silver notes that in this generation scholars start to go move away from the pioneer studies and into a more traditional relation of understanding how we are interacting in a new communications medium. Silver breaks this generation into 4 main areas,
* Critical cyberculture studies explores the social, cultural, and economic interactions which take place online;
* Critical cyberculture studies unfolds and examines the stories we tell about such interactions;
* Critical cyberculture studies analyzes a range of social, cultural, political, and economic considerations which encourage, make possible, and/or thwart individual and group access to such interactions;
* Critical cyberculture assesses the deliberate, accidental, and alternative technological decision- and design-processes which, when implemented, form the interface between the network and its users.
(Silver, 2000).
Silver explains these four areas and shows they are all interconnected. In the first area labeled
'contextualizing online interactions' Silver notes that there isn't a very good history of the development of cybercultures and that scholars looking into this domain have just started. This was where I got excited since my research will be the history of virtual communities. Silver also brings up that the internet is a place where new discussion has started to be generated in regards to the internet being a frontier and it being a place of boystown (Silver, 2000).

Silver mentions that the net as a new frontier metaphor emphasizes the internet as a place for 'men' and unfit for young children or women. Showing that old myths have a foothold in stereotyping the new medium. Silver highlights the boystown discourse as the internet being a place of, "material desire for young men" (Borsook).

The next area of 'online access and barriers', Silver goes on to show that the typical user of the internet is a younger white male from the middle class. Silver shows research from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. In their work they investigated the divides of who is information have nots and have lots. The NTIA points out that the divide between the lower and middle classes in relation to access to the internet is increasing. Their reports also note that the racial divide is increasing as well when it comes to who has more access to the internet. Yet in these ever growing divides Silver quotes some of Mitra's work, "... using these technologies to re-create a sense of virtual community through a rediscovery of their commonality" (58). Basically as the divide between access grows those marginal groups that are on line are connecting and forming virtual communities due to their similarities.

Overall David Silver's essay is a great overview of some of the best examinations into cyberculture in its early years. Silver points out the need for continuing extensive multi-dimensional research into cyberculture. This is exactly where our research fits in as a part to complex whole of new ways of approaching the study of cyberculture. Studying cyberculture demands a combination of old and new methodologies. The field of digital ethnography puts at the forefront the notion that the old ways won't work in respects to the new medium where traditional research is done in clear geographical space and time. My research will fit in nicely when describing anonymity and the formation of community, because you can't begin to understand if you don't know the how, when, and why virtual communities started to form using the new technology.