Amanda Olson

Manifesto

June, 2000

Earthling's Internet Culture

Culture: "The integrated pattern of human behavior

that includes thought, speech, action, and artifacts

and depends on man's capacity for learning

and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations."

-Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary

Culture is sliding, slipping, crawling- shifting like earth's tectonic plates beneath our feet. At the surface level, changes are happening daily. Consider news flashes, fads, and new technologies to be the little waves on the ocean, pulling, lapping, sweeping freely across the surface of the earth, individually superficial and fleeting. Their combined energies, however, set off chain reactions that reach deep into the depths of the ocean, deep down to the swells of cultural change. The internet is a little wave on the ocean. It has not transformed society as dramatically as the commercials during the super bowl this year would have liked us to believe. However, it is making an increasingly profound impact on global culture.

But is it useful, or even possible to speak in terms of global culture?- earthling culture, what it means to live on earth? Earthling culture affects 'us,' I believe, sort of like how the internet affects 'us.' Some people in the world are more aware of a global culture than others, and the internet is a tool of those who are aware to maintain that position. It remains debatable whether this is a privileged position. But culture, at least superficial culture, or maybe it is just American culture, changes on a day to day, month to month and yearly basis. It is largely dictated by those who have power, knowledge, access and control of media and technology, or who indeed, created the media and technology. The mediums I think of as things that affect culture are T.V. programs and commercials, advertisements in newspapers, magazines, radio, t-shirts and other clothes, tennis shoes, the entertainment industry, large commercially owned farms, etc. Anything that affects what we eat, how we talk to each other, how we view each other and judge character, and how we explain ourselves to children and grandchildren.

All these things, T.V., radio, clothes, warehouse grocery stores, are not the experience of everyone living in the world. They are only a small piece. We must look deeper for a global earthling culture. It lies, if you will bear with the metaphor one more time, deeper in the ocean's depths, where things don't change so feverishly. Its time line is divided into decades and centuries. It is tied more solidly to universal truths that people speak to each other and are passed down over generations. Truths to which a wider audience can relate - love, birth, death, eating, sleeping Maybe global culture is simply being human. Anyone who is human that lives on earth is sharing the experience of being alive, being a member of the global culture, and this is the common consciousness that ties us all together.

So how does global culture, if it does indeed exist, if there is a common human consciousness affect specific social constructs like personal identity and relationships? As part of that culture, does it affect me? Does it matter to me how it affects someone else in Afghanistan, on the other side of the world? Am I in the same culture as that person? Possibly. We may both subscribe to "Ostrich Farming Today." Parts of our culture, our identity overlap. But how do we connect with each other, share the fact that we may be part of the same culture- This is where the internet can come in, indeed can be a profound culture-changing force, speeding the same catalog on ostrich harnesses to me and the guy in Afghanistan, and then providing a space via e-mail or a web based bulletin board for us to communicate instantaneously about out common interest. About the culture of which we are both a member.

As something that earthlings created the internet is a cultural force. Or rather it is a tool used by us to affect culture. It affects some aspects of culture, some places, and some groups of people more directly than others. In turn, through those groups the internet affects other groups of people more indirectly, and more slowly. I don't mean to present a stilted, one-sided view of the internet, thus far I have been highlighting its abilities as a communication/information technology to bring people together, and engender cultural development. In my own personal experience, I find sitting at a computer using the internet leaves me drained, and even feeling slightly dirty and contaminated, by the sterility of the cyberenvironment perhaps, but more often I think, by the creepy feeling that I found out too much information, that I have access to stuff that I don't want to see somehow. At any rate, I am sticking to my hypothesis that the internet will continue to be a tool for cultural change. It affects human eating, sleeping, reproducing and communicating patterns already, and will do so on an increasingly global level. It will be a valuable tool to communicate the universal truths that make up a culture we all share, however it is named, global, earthling, or just human.