Cyber-Culture - It's Influence on the Traditional World

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Introduction:

The history of humans and their inventions have played a huge role in bringing up social and cultural lifestyles across the globe. Psychologists have also found how people panicked when some form of new technology was invented. 

But on a larger picture, the time has come to discover how such technologies have impacted people. Even when the Printing Press was invented, it affected the way individuals used to perceive written texts or the knowledge they gained from them. Comparing those times to the current living situation, there’s not much of a difference except for the intensity in which we are grasping things!

Adapting to the Internet and its speed and the range in which it has impacted people has been compared to the advent of the printing press every so often because similar to the Internet, it greatly enhanced the availability of information and the rate at which it could be spread across. 

The Internet can transform business and provide a broader economy, making it a great medium to communicate from a one-on-one conversation to entire mass communication. But perhaps, its equally thoughtful change in the society has been felt culturally as it is transforming and teaching a new way of living and interacting with the world.

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Influence of Cyber on Culture:

When we speak of cultures, there can be primary or sub-cultures that constitute our lives. The Cyber influence has generated an entire range of rejoinders from various people vacillating from idealism to cynicism or people who are stuck and mixed along with Marxist capitalistic society. 

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It has its own advantages which have led to work culture, relations to time, interpersonal interactions, networking, expectations in speed and expediency, and even majorly reduced linguistic barriers. 

But the expression ‘cyberculture’ has been diversely used concerning the cultural practices or outcomes given birth from computer and Internet technologies. This has also paved its way to subcultures that victor computer-related hobbies, languages, and art forms.

The Beginning of an Era:

When we have a look at the evolution in usage of cyberculture, in the 1970s, it was treated as a limited domain that only a handful of technology experts would use. It might have been mathematicians, digital enthusiasts, computer scientists, or academics who were meant to exchange and promote one’s ideology or work towards the growth of electronics. 

Later on, this was followed by the commercialization of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s. Cyberculture at this point took on a new life where computer and information technology were globalized and took the changing dynamics in culture and social relations drastically.

The Current Living Conditions:

The Internet has become one of the most fundamentals of the new generation as we rely on it for literally everything. Even the smallest of the things like finding various locations, reading books or gathering intel, shopping, paying bills, playing the stock markets, etc., have been taken care of on the web. 

The previous generation before the 1990s were well-versed in similar tasks physically which our ‘new culture’ has definitely made it easy for us. The cyberculture has connected many parts of life to glorify the industrial and capitalist society that we live in.

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The children of the 21st century are profoundly influenced by the Internet where this culture teaches them to live a certain way. They are also exposed to various things very easily, be it negative or positive content. 

It has given them their own type of vocabulary, a bigger medium to connect and commute with people which can be influential in many directions. Social media has also evolved recently which would not be possible in the first place without the Internet. 

This is a great way to connect but also a very addictive and toxic platform that can make people and especially adolescents compare and self-doubt themselves. There’s a whole sort of psychology theory involved in how specific social media affects people’s lives when not used in moderation.

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Such things that sound trivial have actually affected the current culture in a humongous manner where people have interconnected this with their emotions, work balance, or hiking-up their expectations from life as a whole. People have built their ability to jump from India to Japan to Las Vegas within minutes due to e-mail facilities that offer such swift communication. 

Conclusion:

Evidently, there have been advancements from telephones to this condition where it eliminated physical barriers. Not to mention, it has also helped people with keeping them engaged with news, entertainment and even brought in new concepts of ordering food, groceries, and other essentials in the need of the hour!

Written By - Amulya Sriharsha

Edited By - Daniel Deepak Charles