ABSTRACT
Cyberculture, as used here, is a portmanteau term for a wide range of subjects and methodologies related to, but not restricted to, the Internet. It is typically wider than web studies or Internet studies, although also less specific than each of these and, unfortunately, more at the mercy of vagaries of fashion. As a term it obviously owes a great deal to cyberpunk, the sub-genre of science fiction that emerged in the 1980s and the history of which serves as a warning to anyone engaged in the study of cyberculture: cyberpunk had, by the 1990s, become somewhat passé, only to achieve a renewed lease of life with the release of the film The Matrix at the end of the last millennium.
