Having a bit of breathing space over the next week to go back and look over my blog is a good thing. Mostly, I have forgotten the blog posts I published and I get a chance to review them with fresh eyes, but there is also regret in the ones which I deleted without ever publishing as I have now lost those chains of thought.
One post which caught my attention was my early definition of culture.
My thoughts then were very much with the sci-fi movie genre of digital culture and computing, the dark dystopian tales of the computer geek subculture trying to take down the corporations in control of the “big” computers or of the experimentation of technology enhanced humans going too far, Miller (2011) describing unexpected and ramshackle results which I associate with the subculture underdogs trying to make do with a lot of knowledge but not a lot of access to the high-grade technology of the corporations, much like the edupunk. The opposite is true of the access to technology of the big corporations in this dystopia, where the opposite effect has occurred, one where the results are much more cyborg, where this technology human hybrid becomes almost unrecognisable as human. This I associate with films such as terminator, depictions of the cyborg which we fear. It is perhaps this view, the cyborg, almost human, but not quite and somehow more, which leads me to a new thought on culture, not culture as in a group who share similar goals, practices and outlooks as I had originally defined culture, but now I can relate these cyborgs to another possible definition of culture and that is from biology, where to culture is to grow and harvest organic cells.
References
Miller, V. (2011) Chapter 9: The Body and Information Technology, in Understanding Digital Culture. London: Sage.