My Culture is Web Culture

Web culture, as defined by the book Web Theory:

"The manner in which the Web represents, enacts, and supports the network society and how its users construct a space that exemplifies the fragmentation of the postmodern and the flows of information that loosely underwrite a sense of dispersed globalization and identity."

...I'm sure that's supposed to be English. You tell me. These definitions really do nothing for my understanding of the term. For an introductory text, they assume we have a lot of knowledge already. But at the same time, they feel the need to complete words like webcamera, because we might not know what a webcam is? Come on. (Okay, soapbox moment over.)

When I think of web culture, I think of basically what I've grown up on. Now, a lot of my experience has to do with fan culture, although I know that's not the only sort of culture on the web. What web culture means to me is this new method of networking between people, and the new ways that information can be shared through digital formats.

Since I was twelve years old, basically since I've been using the Internet, I've been active in fan culture on the web. First, it came through making fan sites. This was before the more community-oriented sites were available, and the Internet seemed like a much smaller place. I might have linked to some other websites on my own, but there was very little communication with other people. When I became interested in a new show or book or movie, I made a new website. There must be dozens of old Angelfire websites floating around out there with my crappy teenage writing on them.

After the websites came the communities. A few years later, I began to use sites like Yahoo!Groups and LiveJournal, networking with other fans to form communities and friendships. The Internet suddenly exploded with people, all out there on their blogs, ready to give their opinions and show off their fanfic, fanart, videos, icons. That's when the idea of web culture first started with me, though I didn't know the term for it. But here was this whole world of other people who were interested in the same things I was interested in. The Internet did become that global village, everyone and everything available to me if I could find the right links and communities.

I will admit, there is the "dislocation of identity and community" that this book talks about. I am not, perhaps, the same person I am online as I am in the real world. Some of my friendships are with people I've never met, people whose real names I don't know. But this new culture has its advantages, too. There are millions of people out there who share my interests, and I never would have found them if it had not been for web culture and the opportunities it provides for worldwide networking.

Living in a Global Village

Global village, as defined by the book Web Theory:
"A term coined by Marshall McLuhan to describe how the new technologies of communication provided a different form of connection that resembled the village. It remains a celebrated term in discourses on both the Internet and its relationship to globalization."

To quote the ever-popular Wikipedia, "McLuhan describes how electronic mass media collapse space and time barriers in human communication, enabling people to interact and live on a global scale. In this sense, the globe has been turned into a village by the electronic mass media."

With the rise of innovations such as radio, telephone, film, television, and the Internet, the world becomes progressively more connected, and on a more immediate scale. News on a worldwide scale can be transmitted almost instantaneously, and one's physical location becomes less important. Internet communities, for example, have less to do with the area a person lives in, and more to do with their interest. Therefore, Doctor Who fans, for example, from the United States and England can interact with each other based on their shared interest, and not be limited by the fact that physically they are thousands of miles away from each other. As information becomes easily accessible by people all over the world, the world becomes, in the virtual sense, one giant village. Everyone is able to find their niche, regardless of physical location.

Introductions and Explanations

Hi. I'm Kerri, blogger extraordinaire.

I'm an English major, with a concentration in Creative Writing and a minor in Japanese Studies. I work part time as a library page, shelving books. I hope to get a full time library position after I graduate, because it's an environment that I enjoy being in.

I've got a few goals I'm working towards. We'll see if I actually achieve any of them. One thing I'm working on is improving my knowledge of web design. I have a website already Squareways.com, but it's still pretty basic and I'd love to develop it further. I've been making websites since I was twelve or thirteen years old, fan pages on Angelfire and LiveJournal blogs, but my experience has never gotten much farther beyond basic formatting. I'd like to develop those skills, because web design is one field that interests me, and even if I don't end up using it professionally, I'd like to be able to make my own website as shiny and impressive as possible.

I'm also a writer, and though I have yet to be published anywhere, I'm working on it. So when I become a famous author, I'm going to need a good website to go with it. I'm fascinated by blogs, too, and would love the opportunity to develop my blog writing skills further. There are several blogs that I read regularly, and I have to say I'm a little jealous of their success as bloggers. I'm hoping this class will give me the practice that I need.

I'm part of several different online fandoms, and lately I've been interested in writing about that kind of thing for classes. It's always fun when an appreciation for something like that can be discussed in class or incorporated into a project. I find it fascinating that the internet has changed the way fans interact with and support what they're interested in. People who once may have been isolated, with no other friends who share their interests, now have the opportunity to find other people who are part of the same fandoms.

Take Joss Whedon, for instance. The man has a huge fan following, many of them incredibly loyal and determined to see his shows be a success. When Firefly came out in 2002, and was threatening to be canceled by FOX, his fans took out a full page ad in a magazine in an effort to save the show. Without the internet and the sense of community created by fans throughout the world, something like this could never have happened. Firefly, though canceled, went on to be a film, Serenity, a few years later. Without the dedicated internet fanbase, this probably never would have worked.

I've begun to ramble, so I'll wrap this up. But now you know a little bit about me, and I have an idea (I think) of the kinds of things I'd like to explore.