ABSTRACT
Cyberculture is a contested term, so although there are numerous ways to conceptualize it, for the purposes of the present book it is understood as a discursive formation inspired in part by Michel Foucault’s use of the phrase—a network of linked cultural practices and knowledges (Archaeology 38). This network is organized according to particular rules of formation or codes, which legitimate a limited range of articulations. Foucault describes the rules of formation as an architecture—the structure or infrastructure of logics, cultural productions, relations of power, actions, behaviors, and ideologies that underpin and support the functioning of a discursive formation. Through decoding this architecture it is possible to identify the processes whereby particular configurations of subjects, knowledges, and power arrangements become hegemonic, normalized, dominant, and authorized—while others are delegitimated or rendered deviant, obsolete, or unintelligible.
