Virtual culture, virtual community, virtual humans: ergo, virtual God? (updated)

Yesterday, blogscapes left an encouraging message on my post about: 15 tips for blogging. Very kind. I had a look at their blog, and this post of theirs reminded me of the following article I’d written a couple of years ago, and posted here almost a year ago. As I revisited the article, I noticed that the footnotes and hyperlink relating to Tim North’s thesis that includes the reference to Sandia’s Elaine Raybourn no longer work, so here’s the reference: (Tim North, ‘The Internet and UseNet Global Computer Networks, 1994).

Is it possible to have a virtual society with virtual humans who create a virtual culture? Just over ten years ago, a thesis was produced by Tim North, which looked at these issues in the wider context of an anthropological study of the Internet and its users. Underlying his thesis was the primary research question of whether the users of the Internet and Usenet global computer networks form a society that has a distinct culture of its own. After discussing whether it is possible for a society to have more than one culture, North concludes that, ‘It seems reasonable…to assume that the members of a particular society all share the same culture.’ However, he goes on to argue that the nature of the Internet is such that it spans the globe, and that if it were to conform to the classical anthropological understandings of society and culture then its users would need to be from the one society. This obviously cannot be the case, and so he resolves the issue by creating a new term for the Internet’s societal structure, which he calls the pan-societal superstructure. So, a new way of thinking about society is created with the Internet. This pan-societal superstructure frees the Internet from some of the responsibilities of ordinary society such as providing food and shelter for its inhabitants, because its members are also members of societies that already provide those things.

This new way of thinking about society, virtual community and culture, (which sounds like an oxymoron) has nevertheless been taken seriously by the private sector as it engages with globalisation.