| This dissertation is an analysis of cyberculture and its popular cultural productions or cyberfigurations. The study begins with a Foucaultian model of cyberculture as a discursive formation, and explains how some key concepts (such as “virtuality,” “speed,” and “connectivity”) operate as a conceptual architecture network linking technologies to information and individual subjects. The chapters then each focus on a particular cyberfiguration, including Hollywood films (GATTACA, The Matrix), popular literature (William Gibson's Neuromancer, Scott Westerfeld's Polymorph), advertising for digital products and services (Apple Computer's “1984/McIntosh” campaign, AT&T's “mLife” campaign), and digital artworks (including virtual females such as Motorola's “Mya” and Elite Modeling Agency's “Webbie Tookay,” and work by visual artist Daniel Lee for Microsoft's “Evolution” campaign), and video games (Tomb Raider). Each close reading illustrates the ways in which cyberfigurations operate to invent representations of digital lifestyles and identities, encourage participation in digital capitalism and commodity cyberculture, fetishize computers and communication technologies, and celebrate a “high tech” aesthetic. At the same time, it is suggested that cyberfigurations are in an inherently ambiguous and shifting relationship to the status quo, which they reflect, reify, reproduce, but at the same time revise, upgrade and challenge. It is argued that cyberfigurations oftentimes function as forms of social criticism, creatively inspiring users, audiences, or players to think different [sic] about the technofuture and the digitalization of everyday life. To analyze and appreciate the ambiguity, irony, and paradox inherent in cyberfigurations, a cyberpoetic methodology is introduced for the study of new media forms, which reflects the author's positionality as implicated in, critical of, and fascinated by cyberculture's popular media. |
