Abstract – Cyberculture, the material, symbolic and imaginary atmosphere typical of post-industrial capitalism in its advanced communication phase, epitomizes the present: transnational, it places itself everywhere, within and outside of cyberspace; unfolding at a breakneck pace, its ramifications are uncontrollable and its complexity irreversible.

Researches into the theme everywhere in Brazil reflect international trends. From the early 90s to this date, these researches have been vital and have continued to prosper, especially at PUC-SP, UFRJ, USP, UFBA, UFF, UERJ, PUCRS, Unicamp, UFRGS, Unisinos, UMESP, Cásper Líbero, UFPE, UFES, UFSC, UTP, UFMG, UFJF, ESPM and UDESC, among other institutions. A long list of scientific works and articles has been produced by innumerable well-known researchers in the last decade.

The field of Communication in Brazil has been contributing substantially to an understanding of the problem, although naturally it does not hold a monopoly on the subject. The social repercussions of digital technologies and networks supplant all the private domains. The empiria of cyberculture is linked, for instance, to the development of genetic engineering, to astrophysics and to the new forms of war. This fact, per se, evidences the very magnitude of the phenomenon and the need for interdisciplinary studies. Thus, the simultaneous efforts of various areas of Human Sciences, Applied Social Sciences and Linguistics, Letters and Arts are redoubled.

In 2006, the scientific community involved with the theme was therefore ready – from the theoretical and epistemological standpoint – to take its most innovative and fertile step: to implement a national association in the country with the essential institutional mission of [1] to organize researchers, Research Centers, Nucleuses and/or Groups, Lines of Research of Postgraduate Programs and/or Institutions; and [2] to provide adequate conditions directed at the organization, expansion, deepening and consolidation of pertinent scientific knowledge. The seed of this association goes back to the year 2000, when it was discussed for the first time by a select group of researchers connected to COMPÓS – National Association of Postgraduate Programs in Communication. The reasons for its creation are set forth in the Book of Abstracts of the 1st National Symposium of Researchers in Communication and Cyberculture, organized by CENCIB – Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Communications and Cyberculture of PUC-SP and held at that University from 25 to 20 September 2006, with support from CAPES and Itaú Cultural and cultural support from TUCA – Theater of the Catholic University and from Cortez Bookstore (www.pucsp.br/pos/cos/simposionacional). The Symposium thus harbored, as the source, something that – under the consensual name of Brazilian Association of Cyberculture Researchers (ABCiber) – had already gone beyond a mere seed and whose consequent horizons were and will be collected sculpted in the coming years.

This is a singular moment that, like all laminar and founding moments, favors public insight into the characteristics, dramas and possibilities of human life in the digital phase of its historical trajectory.

Keywords – Cyberculture, communication, national association, scientific research, interdisciplinarity.

Abstract – In the final years of the 20th century, the fusion of concomitant and abrupt movements in the configuration of the economy, of ideology and of politics at the international level (the fall of the Berlin wall was the most symbolic of these), with rapid and structurally far-reaching advances in scientific and technological development (among which the Internet was the most significant and probably with the most long-lasting repercussion), had a profound impact on the understanding of phenomena directly or indirectly tied to communication. This area experienced a boost in the establishment of economic groups whose action was vertically and horizontally integrated by fragmented, albeit economically rationalized productive processes; the establishment of industrial, commercial and financial strategies based on the concept of the world as a global market; the consequent understanding of humans within a referential framework that privileged their economic role as consumers participating in a global cogwheel of offer and demand for material and symbolic products of information and communication; the expansion and consolidation of representative liberal democracy as the norm for a compulsory pattern of conduct, under the surveillance of supranational (and even, ultimately, national) entities with high powers of military, moral, financial and commercial coercion; and the unceasing movement of technological creation fantastically expanded through the insertion of millions of people into its processes, notably with respect to the development of software applied to hardware of the most varied nature. All this represents a colossal set, interactive and aggregator of communication and information interests, of isolated individuals, distinct reference groups, communities, self-proclaimed neo-tribes of real of imaginary anthropological character, nations and countries.

The objective of the text is to argue about the finding that, contained within the sphere of communication, the base upon which these actors move – and the principal conditioner of their action – is a three-pillared infrastructure: one, technological, constituted of the system of telecommunications, the electro-electronic industry and Informatics, from which derive communication units and services; another, political, constituted of the politics of information and communication, of scientific and technological development, of Culture and of Education, that underpin the action of the State and interact with the strategies of growth of the corporations in the sector; and a third, legal, comprising the national, international and supranational regulations linked to those policies, which establish economic, moral, ideological and cultural limits to the action of the actors involved. Today completely interlinked and interdependent, these pillars are, at the same time, the base and the constitutive parts of what is generically called the Information Society, within which germinates the so-called cyberculture.

Keywords – Cyberculture, Information Society, communication infrastructure, communication and information policies, regulation of communications.

Abstract – This article proposes to demystify the idea of democracy tied to the propagation of telematic networks in cyberculture, based on the historical construction of a democratic ethical ideal that serves as a parameter of analysis. Using theoretical critique as its postulation, the article attempts to demonstrate that the notion of democracy works, within the aforementioned context, as a significant vacuum in face of which is consolidated a hegemonic practice of partial closure of meaning, favorable to the exhaustion of the transforming dimension of the concept of democracy.

Keywords – Internet, democracy, significant vacuum.

Abstract – To better understand how the recombination of diverse elements in play works today in contemporary culture – which some will call the information society, post-industrial society, cyberculture or knowledge society –, I will establish three basic principles or three laws of this information society, particularly with respect to its cultural practices, which are rebroached at the end of this text. These three guiding principles enable an overall understanding of the emergence of the different social, communicational and productive practices that create diverse and novel recombinations in contemporary culture. Cyberculture is, so to speak, a “recombinant territory”. We will explore “remix cyberculture”, the principles of information society and the notion of territory to finally reach the hypothesis of the creation of informational territories, which are expanding today through wireless communication technologies. These will foment new recombinatory practices in contemporary cities.

Keywords – Communication, cyberculture, recombination.

Abstract – This text discusses the impact of cyberculture on the quotidian of our society, starting from a brief historical review of the embedment of communication in technologies and extending up to the advent and global use of ICTs. We understand, by this, that the quotidian of people – with a greater or lesser degree of access –, begins to incorporate a series of technological devices that are “imposed” on life in society. As individuals begin to communicate (and also have fun, work and study) assiduously through digital devices linked in networks, their daily life will become increasingly transferred to a collective and intangible SPACE for the realization of mediations, exchanges and transactions. In this space, one finds that the emitting sources become very impersonal, almost unidentifiable; that there is little difference between emitter and receiver and that the body itself is transformed into a personal and nontransferable password. We will take as premises that the forms of sociability have a close and indissoluble relationship with man’s processes of communication; and that when such processes take place through environments mediated by ICTs, we experience a “cybercultural” manifestation. We will address the conceptual differentiations between cyberspace and cyberculture, the imaginary and the communicational practices in this ambit, and the imaginary that is constituted in the scenario of a future post-digital era.

Keywords – Cyberculture, communicational practices, cybercultural imaginary.

Abstract – This text examines the relationship between reality and imaginary. It takes reality as an entity as solid as an ice cube, existing only as successive images and approximations. Snapshots of an eternally spiraling movement. Constant evaporations in the name of stability. The real is an intermediate state between two peaks of entropy. The stupendous magic of the real consists of simulating what it is not: an absolute truth external to the observer. The objective real always depends on and adhesion or a belief. All reality is a social construct demarcated by the individual trajectory. If this statement seems excessive, it can be said that, save for the “primary realities”, all the rest goes through a long process of objectivation and of sedimentation.

Keywords – Communication, reality, imaginary.

Abstract – To more strictly and precisely dimension the effective alterations of the statute of the image linked to the new digital technologies, as well as the ongoing changes within the ambit of subjectivity in cyberculture, it is necessary to go back to the 19th century, and especially, to the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, the moment when a concept of image was created that responds to the modern experience of derealization of the world. Readdressing the recent theses of Jonathan Crary about the process of modernization of perception, we can observe the emergence of a new epistemological model and optical regime along the 19th century, in which the image, no longer anchored to a physics of light rays and to a logic of representation, becomes the effect of a live, changing body, to be scrutinized by the new empirical and human sciences and controlled by disciplinary practices. From the slow-eye prevalent in the 17th and 18th centuries one then passes on to the opacity of a physiologically constituted eye that is able to produce images in the absence of any external stimulus (post-images, entopic images). The process of modernization of perception is implied in the development of a new culture of images, in the emergence of new regimes of “spectatoriality”, in short, in the consolidation of the process of industrialization of the regimes of contemplation. In the last decade of the 19th century, this process was catapulted into one of its most instigative and radical expressions both in the sociology of Gabriel Tarde and in the Bergsonian concept of image. Starting from a discussion of this process and its implications insofar as they concern image, perception and subjectivity, hypotheses are put forward about the transformations of the statute of the image in contemporaneity, as a function of digitization and informatization processes, as well as their possible implications in the modes in which new inflections in subjectivity are constituted.

Keywords – Image, modernization of perception, genealogy of cyberculture, contemporary subjectivity.

Abstract – Inserted within the ambit of a broader research project whose object is the unity of space/visuality/communication, this article studies the semiotic dimensions of space as an agentive element of cyberculture and an interferent in the dynamics of its global and local flows. In this context, the work is divided into two major lines: (1) a study of the materialities of time in the construction of an intuition and of a concept of space that will lead to the reinstatement of the seeds of historical time in geographic space; and (2) a study of the constructs of time designed by the flows of a digital space and the emergence of a new culture and of a social imaginary that serve as the basis for other and new communicative relationships. Exploring this time-space unity represents a strategy of reflection to outline the roots and projections of cyberculture and to characterize the concept of topochrony, homologous to the concept of chronotropy studied by Bahktin.

Keywords – Time, space, culture, cyberculture, chronotropes.

Abstract –Researches of telepresence and virtual reality (VR) as computer-mediated interactions are linked to the keywords “real” and “virtual”. Reflecting about how we act in the surrounding physical environment, in the distant environment through telecommunications, and in the artificially modeled environment forces us to distinguish between the interiorized and exteriorized experiences of presence, which lead us to mistakenly identify the former as endoreality and the latter as exoreality. The perceptive spaces in which we interact invite us to reflect upon the boundaries between illusion and perception.

Keywords – Telepresence, virtual reality, illusion, perception.

Abstract – Face-to-face and online classrooms are centered on the unidirectional distribution of information prevailing in the mass media, when the offer of multimedia communication is increasingly greater and better in the communicational environment redefined by the interactive set-ups of the computer and the Internet. This discrepancy of the school and the University will not be solved simply by the inclusion of more computers connected to cyberspace. What is essential and urgent is a pedagogy based on communication that does not separate emission and reception and on the construction of knowledge through collaborative elaboration.

This text addresses pedagogy starting from the complex concept of interactivity, which is understood as the supersession of the historically consolidated logic of transmission in favor of the logic of communication characteristic of cyberculture.

Keywords – Face-to-face and online education, cyberculture, interactivity.

Abstract – This paper proposes to discuss, in both the postmodern and posthuman contexts, the relatively consensual conception of style as marks left in language by an individual talent. To this end, in the first place, the notion of style, not only in its individual but also its historical aspect, is reviewed in the light of semiotic categories. The concepts of postmodern and posthuman are then distinguished in order to analyze the transformations that each of these specific conditions – postmodern and posthuman – impose on style.

Keywords – Style, talent, stereotype, postmodernity, posthumanity.

Abstract – This article analyzes consumer practices and musical content generated on social platforms of distribution, classification, recommendation and dissemination of music on the Web. We begin by making a survey of the conceptual history, in which we discuss the definitions and characteristics of the social network sites. We then describe these characteristics and communicational flows in user practices based on an initial comparative observation of the Last.fm, MySpace and Blip.fm platforms. We consider the emergence of some categories of analysis, namely: the role of recommendations and of the classifications of musical genre on Last.fm; the characteristic of awareness about the segmented audience on MySpace; and the constitution of a reputation for musical microcontents on Blip.fm.

Keywords – Online music platforms, consumption, social networks.

Abstract – Based on the book “O perfeito cozinheiro das almas deste mundo” (The Perfect Cook of the Souls of this World), a diary of the bachelor pad kept by Oswald de Andrade between 1918 and 1919, the Digital Poetics Research Group of ECA-USP started to develop a videogame in which the leading character gets lost in São Paulo in the year 1918 and interactively visits several environments in which he gradually uncovers the plot. The text presents some phases of the process of construction and realization of the game.

Keywords – Interactive installation, game, media art, new media, digital art.