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The Unifying Aspects of Cultures

SECTION:

Cyberspace - The Closeness out of Difference

Chair of the section/Suggestions, Abstracts, Contributions to:
Email: Gerald Ganglbauer (Sydney)

ABSTRACT: For a typical transnationalist like me (an Austrian in Australia), the space we call Cyberspace has become something like a global living room, a virtual meeting place, where nations, cultures and languages have lost their traditional meaning. Often, however, the experienced closeness also only creates or simulates, respectively, a sense of connectedness, which is capable of influencing various levels of communication in very different ways.

In the last ten years the Internet has matured into a fixed aspect of life. We go less often to the coffee house. Indeed, we don't leave the house at all. We meet fewer people in our neighborhood than on the other side of the world. Online Dating expands the interpersonal relations in our life, our email shortens and speeds up our communication, "netiquette" creates a new, universal standard in our dealings with one another, released from and independent of our cultural background.

This section will concern itself with that closeness out of difference, based on examples of electronic journals and online communities.

THE UNIFYING ASPECTS OF CULTURES