Читать книгу Essentials of Sociology - George Ritzer - Страница 123

The internet is, as mentioned before, one site for the proliferation of consumer culture and perhaps postconsumer culture. It is also the site of an entirely new culture—cyberculture (F. Turner 2008). That is, the internet as a whole (as well as the individual websites it comprises) has the characteristics of all cultures, including distinctive values and norms.

Some of the distinctive values within cyberculture are openness, knowledge sharing, and access. These values have their roots in the open-source software that emerged before computing became an attractive commercial opportunity. They are also rooted in the knowledge sharing and continuous improvement that were the practice when early computer professionals survived through reciprocity (Bergquist 2003). These roots have been maintained through the open-source movement, through actions against censorship, and through organizations such as the Free Software Foundation and the “copyleft” movement. In line with the values of a postconsumer society, these “cyber-libertarians” favor user control of information and applications and free products (Dahlberg 2010; Himanen 2001). They are in conflict with the more dominant values of profit maximization and control of the internet by large corporations. This conflict of values, a culture war by the definition offered earlier in this chapter, goes a long way toward defining the internet today.

Various norms have also come to be a part of cyberculture. Internet users are not supposed to hack into websites, create and disseminate spam, unleash destructive worms and viruses, maliciously and erroneously edit user-generated sites such as Wikipedia, and so on. Many norms relate to desirable behavior on the internet. For example, creating and editing entries on Wikipedia is supposed to be taken seriously and done to the best of one’s ability. Once an entry exists, the many people who offer additions and deletions are expected to do so in a similar spirit. Those who purposely add erroneous information on Wikipedia will suffer the stern disapproval of other contributors to, and users of, the site. They may even be banned from the site by those who manage it.

There is, of course, much more to the culture of the internet. For example, in addition to a general cyberculture, there are a number of cybercultures that vary from nation to nation. But the point is that cyberculture, like all culture, is emerging and evolving as other changes take place within and around it. The biggest difference between cyberculture and other cultures is that, because the internet is relatively new and the changes in it are so rapid, cyberculture is far more fluid than culture in general.

People need to be socialized in order to learn how to use the internet, and they increasingly interact online rather than face-to-face. In Chapter 4 we turn to a broad discussion of the sociological perspective on socialization and interaction.