ABCiber

SYNOPSIS OF THE WORK

This book is a compilation of essays by well-known Brazilian researchers on the historically emergent and transnational phenomenon of cyberculture, the socio-technological formation corresponding to the contemporary development of late capitalism, articulated and modulated by the collective appropriation of interactive media and of cyberspace.
The second online eBook of the ABCiber Collection, open to universal access, this project concentrates and deepens theoretical, epistemological and methodological concerns about the main characteristics of the civilizing process postulated therein, of an advanced multimediatic base – its origins, state of the art, trends and horizons –, and particularly how this process is expressed in Brazil, be it through its problematic aspects or through to its diversity and potentialities.
As such, this book complements the reflective and critical cycle introduced by the first volume of the Collection, offering an abundant source of discussions encompassing diverse fields of human endeavor, such as the science, research and education of journalism and photography, music and entertainment, cyberspace, social networks and daily life, etc., as well as several areas of knowledge, including Communication, Information Science, Sociology, Philosophy, Semiotics, Political Science, Law, History, Education, Psychology, Arts and Design.
Under this interdisciplinary umbrella, the explicit or posited backbone of the seven parts of the book involves, essentially, the relationships between power, freedom, sociability, mobility and transformation, which are complex nuclear concepts that, like threads of the proposed arguments, above all when interlaced – relationships of power under the aegis of the drive for freedom; sociability according to the ethics of sharing, of co-creation and of contagion; and mobility in the shadow of the renewal of rights –, designate, not by chance, the very threads of the current civilizatory process. This mosaic of articulatory factors, in turn, is rooted in the core of specific processes, as different as apparently dissociated, which are embodied herein, namely, the construction and consolidation of an emergent field of knowledge and the respective populating of the social division of intellectual labor; the dynamic structures of cognitive capitalism; the fatal coupling of humans, machines and the Web; the socio-technological configurations of collective intelligence; the modes of expression and visibility of the subject and the body in cyberspace; the discursive formations of the promoters of cyberculture; the socio-technical status of hierarchy and lifestyles at the horizon of digital nomadism; the interactive rescaling of micropolitics; the recreation and colonization of new spaces of action; the texture of and sharing in cities and on the Web; the logic of recombination, of cyber commons and of collaborative practices, and the legitimate opposition to the perpetuation of intellectual property; the invisible social prominence of video surveillance; the voyeuristic and ludic concretization of generalized control and the online mercantilization of passions and affections; the collective overcoming of the positivist paradigm of thought; the modes of creation and public exhibition of digital art; and the epochal affirmation of cognitive competencies and of consumer practices, among other relevant processes.
In particular, the essays capture, directly or indirectly, the random and uncertain leanings toward inner transformation of the socio-technological, political-legal, spatial-corporeal, aesthetic-subjective, and ethical-practical metabolism of cyberculture – propensities that affirm and rescale the structural indetermination and unpredictability of the cyberspatial phase of human life.
In this context, the chapters outline, in equal intensity, their understanding – explicit or implicit – of the hybrid as a multilateral processual empiricism, and hence, simultaneously, as a privileged notion of the times.
Many of the essays highlight the necessary reflective exercise of expansion that challenges, besides the aforecited aspects, the socio-cultural, political-economic and technological structure of mass media, the tradition of legal permission, the limitations to access to the media, networks and data, the precarious forms of interactivity, teaching and learning constricted by outdated methods and procedures, trends for cyber over-optimism, and digital segregation.
Above all, the threads, the main foci and the core themes of this work enable the qualified detection of the sociocultural and infotechnological forms of the hybrid, the immaterial and the mobile, without losing sight of the dictate of necessary ethical defense of freedom and solidarity as universal values, guided faithfully by the basic principles and the trajectory of ABCiber – Brazilian Association of Cyberculture Researchers in Brazil.