WoW as Cybercultural hub
If you don’t already read We Make Money Not Art , they’ve recently posted some interesting impressions from 23C3 (which sadly I couldn’t attend). Of particular scholarly interest I think are the notes from Joi Ito‘s presentation on World of Warcraft and MMORPGs.
I can’t help but feel drawn back to McLuhan (from The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962)):
Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.
Addendum: Joi Ito posted a link to the full video coverage of Lawrence Lessig’s talk on free culture and code from 23C3. Always great to hear him talk. Make with the clicky.
Tagged as 23C3, Communications, Cyberculture, Futurism, Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig, Marshall McLuhan, MMORPG, Noosphere, World of Warcraft, WoW + Categorized as Art/Culture, Futurism, Science/Technology