Information, Communication & Society

Visions of Excess: Cyberspace, Digital Technologies and New Cultural Politics
Stephen A. Webb - University of North London, UK

Abstract: This paper critically situates contemporary concerns with cyberspace and digital media within a cultural dimension. It begins by undertaking ground clearing work about the nature of cyberspace and providing an analytical index of its position in relation to claims that are made about its imaginary or real status. It is argued that cyberspace is destined to attract two contradictory responses, first form being too true to life; and second for not being true enough. This contradiction enables a number of competing characterisations and claims to be made for digital media at the level of culture and cultural politics. The paper then addresses how the cultural significance of spatial metaphors, technological enhancement, digital communities and utopian aethetics are framed. Here the paper specifically examines the new materialism of transhumanist and extroprian perspectives. This frontier discourse which relies on a 'disclosing space' for digital media is criticised from a phenomenological perspective and shown to be a reified space and unreflexive 'mode of becoming'.