May 1, 2003
Conference brings cyberscholars together
The rapidly advancing Internet, where things happen in “real-time,” will have to endure a moment of reflection next month.
New media scholars from around the globe will gather at the UW to discuss and debate the burgeoning field’s brief history, its current state, and its future. “Critical Cyberculture Studies: Current Terrains, Future Directions” runs from Thursday, May 8 to Saturday, May 10. The symposium may be the first gathering of its kind, according to the faculty member responsible for organizing the event.
“It’s like a State of the Union of the field,” said David Silver, an assistant professor in the UW Department of Communication. “It’s the first interdisciplinary academic conference with the goal of brainstorming what this field is and what it should become. We’re a new field. To examine it is very important and timely. Why not start being self-reflexive and thinking critically from the beginning?”
Scholars at the event will consider everything from computer gaming to the impact of Web structure on cultural access to technology and much more. Silver said discussion will likely fall into one of three tracks — what is the field and what are its methods; how are perspectives of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender and class relevant to the field; and what has been the impact of commercialization on the field.
In all, 28 participants will present papers. Only five of the participants are tenured faculty, the rest are junior faculty, graduate students and people working in the field. That was by design. More important than having a long and established scholarly record, Silver says, the guests at the symposium are progressive thinkers when it comes to the Internet.
Those progressive thinkers, he says, believe that the field is as vital as ever, despite the end of the dot-com mania that was sweeping Seattle and much of the nation during the late 1990s and into 2000.
“I would argue that the Internet is a thriving and exciting medium because the dot-com bust has occurred,” Silver said. “Now that people have gotten over their dreams of dollar signs and IPOs, now we can focus on really interesting things like cultural expression, civic engagement, new forms of communication, new modes of expression.
“I think the dot-com thing helped fuel a lot of the development, but now that that money has run dry doesn’t mean that the communities and the identities and the technologies have run dry — actually the opposite. Now people are putting them to really interesting use.”
For example, Silver notes the increasing emergence of Web logs, or blogs, as they’re called in cyberculture. These Web pages often seem like nothing more than personal journals posted online. But they represent an important aspect of the medium’s power, he says.
“I think you can view blogs as just another example of the narcissistic aspects of the Internet — people spending hours talking about themselves and their daily lives as if the public really cares,” Silver said. “But on the other hand you see people engaging the medium as a form of production rather than consumption. People are saying I’m not just logging onto the Internet to point and click, to consume, to passively receive information. I’m logging on to become a producer of information on the Internet.”
Funding for the symposium was provided by a grant from the Ford Foundation. The event is hosted by the Simpson Center, and has received support from the Department of Communication and the College of Arts and Sciences. For more information go to www.com.washington.edu/rccs/ford/.
