Cyberculture and Cybersexuality Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Cyberculture and Cybersexuality - Essay Example Since the middle of 1960s sociologists and social philosophers actively discussed a question on the introduction of the most developed countries in a qualitatively other stage of social development characterized by them as a post-industrial or information society which main distinguishing criterion is the defining role of information technologies in all spheres of people and society life. In general, information technologies cannot be considered as something belonging exclusively to the world of techniques for they have so deeply got into the life of people and society, that it is obviously not possible to isolate them from the general world outlook and cultural context any more. The quantum leap in the information industry urgently specifies necessity of the analysis of the newest technologies through a prism of world outlook changes. We should admit that those changes are observed in all spheres of human life and also in the sphere of human sexuality. In the context of Cyber Sexuality, they claim that digital communication technologies have led to a more isolated society. Theoretical Background This issue is very topical as on revealing of relationship between the information technologies which have created unique opportunities for new vision and perception of a social (an in particular sexual) reality on the boundary of the third millennium will allow to give to concept "cyber sexuality" more concrete and powerful theoretical status in order to protect it from unilateral and unduly prejudiced interpretations. In 1984 William Gibson (1984: 51) has published the novel "Neuromancer" in which for the first time he has entered the concept of a cyberspace: "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced by billions of legitimate operators ". After Gibson's novel gradually cyberspace has began to be considered as a space created by the world telecommunication network and other computer communication systems. Social consequences of functioning of new information technologies are extremely various: they change a way of a person's activities, person's social communications, organizational forms and the content of social interactions. In this connection a subject of attention of researchers became the influence of information technologies on mentality of the person, communication mediated via computers and peculiar features of person's activity in the Internet. In 1960s in connection with the development of TV and other electronic means of information communication Herbert Marshall McLuhan has noted the change of a way of thinking. He has stimulated modern researches of sociology of culture, on having allocated the influence of "means of communication" on the change of ways of thinking and social organization. Since then mass-media communications become the object of attention of Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Slavoj Zhizhek and Umberto Eco - those thinkers who have moved the research of th e virtual reality created by means of telecommunication technologies from the level of intuitive representations up to analytically-theoretical level and have tracked a birth different kinds of simulacrums, their influence on the connectedness of space as bases of social reality. Any social relation arises and supports own existence owing to the information. The channels of reception of the information (verbal, visual, audio, etc.) studied Rudolf Arnheim, R. Bart, Umberto Eco and other researchers.