Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History

Citation

du Preez, M. (2003), "Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History", The Electronic Library, Vol. 21 No. 6, pp. 613-614. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470310509199

Darren Tofts sees Prefiguring Cyberculture as a book about technology and change, or, to be more specific, about mutability. In it, media critics and theorists, philosophers, and historians of science explore aspects of contemporary technological culture such as the Internet, the World Wide Web, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, virtual reality and the cyborg.

The essays in Prefiguring Cyberculture are structured around three themes: subjectivity, spatiality and temporality. These are all brought together with some postmillennial speculations in the fourth section, Futuropolis, and a coda reflecting on some memories of the future. Each theme has its own section and introduction. The ideas discussed within each theme or section, are also apparent throughout the book as a whole, resonating the historical prevalence of ideas that occupy the volume.

Section 1, The robot, is about contemporary manifestations of a historical continuum of metaphysical and speculative thinking about life, the mind, thinking machines and possible self‐awareness among machines. These essays commonly examine the continued relevance of dualistic or binary thinking for conceptualising the posthuman. They reflect on the challenges posed by artificial intelligence and computer technology interfaces.

There is a need to examine what reality is in an age where the concept of virtuality dominates. The essays in Section 2, Virtuality, do just that when they suggest virtuality is merely a new name for the ongoing crisis within the representation of entities. Cultural phenomena such as cyberspace have also introduced new virtual forms of social interaction as immediate as face to face communication.

One of the premises of Prefiguring Cyberculture is that representation is constitutive of the contemporary moment people shorthand as cyberculture. Eric Davis argues persuasively in Visible unrealities: artists' statements (Section 3) that aspects of cyberculture may reinstate the Cartesian split, while technologies of virtualisation such as the Internet present new possibilities for “projecting” embodied subjectivity into cyberspace for artists like Stelarc.

Section 4, Futuropolis: post‐millennial speculations looks at how the technological future has been imagined. The common theme explored in these essays is utopia. Margaret Wertheim, for example, traces the lineage of utopian thinking back to Thomas More's sixteenth century picaresque narrative while Bruce Mazlish identifies a vision of a world turned upside down in Samuel Butler's novel Erewhon (nowhere spelled backwards).

The Coda offers some Memories of the future: Excavating the jet age at the TWA Terminal. It describes a rocket garden and the terminal's condition, looks at class consciousness, examines the causes of cabin fever, discovers a field of debris and explores the departure lounge.

Prefiguring Cyberculture is a fascinating book for those interested in the history and philosophy of information technology and information science and the impact that these have on society. Reading the book is an exercise in reconfiguring cyberculture while enjoying the capacity to be surprised by this phenomenon.