ABSTRACT

WH A T , F I N A L L Y , C A N W E S A Y about cybercultures? My aim inthis book as been to explore some of the things that ‘cyberculture’ means, as a way of naming the relationships between the objects, images and experiences that together constitute cyberspace as culture and cultural artefact, to recycle Christine Hine’s (2000) formulation. The book has been a modest introduction, partial and contingent – written as a way to think through with you some domains and dimensions of this inevitably multiplicitous thing. I am not sure, poaching from Costigan (1999), that I know what cyberculture is – but I would like to think that all the time spent buried in books, browsing the web and thinking with computers has at least contributed to the task of understanding and illustrating some components of cyberculture. To end with a summary-of-summaries, and to be brief (as I feel I’ve detained you long enough), here’s what I consider to be the key points raised in and through the book: