Computer technology has had a profound and vast impact on all aspects of contemporary life, from entertainment and shopping to education and business. With computer interaction taking place in cyberspace, the topics concerned with communication and cyberculture, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and art are numerous, complicated and often contradictory. Perhaps this is due to the lack of censorship pertaining to the Internet or the multitude of ideas expressed on a global scale, regardless as to whether these ideas are factually based or not. In order to answer this assignment effectively, myth and romanticized notions of cyberspace and cybertechnology have to be dispelled in order to reach a more realistic discourse concerning these issues.
Question 1a: Write two pages on cyberculture: Do you think that cyberspace and virtual reality have fundamentally altered the way in which we experience art objects? .
A culture exists when a group of people exhibits cohesion through the sharing of values, language, ritual and icons. Cyberculture is used to refer to the concept of a group, or groups of people achieving cohesion by means of 'the information infrastructure' - which currently means the Internet (Clarke 1997. Sv "Encouraging Cyberculture"). Housed in the framework of the computer and linked to thousands of networks worldwide, an estimated 150 million people globally utilize the World Wide Web (Internet) (Allan 2000. Sv "Cybersocieties"). Personal computers are a relatively recent phenomena where over the last 10 - 20 years such machines have become common in the workplace and homes. Though the prehistory of computing was largely dominated by educational, governmental and commercial organization, today the computer is no longer a mere machine that was built for word-processing and databasing - it is now a medium of global communication (Allan 2000. Sv "Cybersocieties").