ABSTRACT
Part of the significance of cyberpop lies in the way it reflects the paradoxes and ambiguity that characterize digital culture. Moreover, as a genre cyberpop media plays an important role in the formation of identities and lifestyles by representing modes of technological being and the integration of computer technologies into everyday experience. As Scott Bukatman has argued about cyberpunk, popular cyberpop texts serve as narratives of accommodation to the high-tech order of things—while encouraging a critical discourse on the present, and a self-reflexive awareness of the audience’s implication in mainstream technoculture and commerce. A form of sexy social criticism (Sterling, Mirrorshades) with a didactic function, cyberpop creatively interprets the implications and reverberations of information and computer science on culture and individuals, challenging its audience to think different. As an infomediary in the feedback loop of technoscience and popular culture, cyberpop ads, films, novels, and artwork present provocative, creative, and oftentimes critical scenarios about our present and future digital culture by connecting to and sometimes amplifying key conceptual nodes in the network of cyberculture.
