In a restricted but popular sense, cyberculture denotes the hacker subculture along with various social and artistic manifestations; as such it references feedback loops, computer slang, video games, the Internet, hypertext, virtual communities, and more. In a wider and more argumentative sense, cyberculture refers to contemporary culture in its totality, insofar as it has been influenced by cybernetic technology and its creative ideas. In both senses cyberculture has become a new scientific and technological context that stimulates ethical reflection.

Historical Development

The term cyberculture appeared in the 1980s but is ultimately dependent on Norbert Wiener's creation of the science of "cybernetics" (1948). An initial cyberculture emerged before the term itself when the scholarly community attempted to apply cybernetics to the interpretation of phenomena in psychology, economics, politics, anthropology, and education. The work of Gregory Bateson (1972) and Heinz von Foerster (1984) in the development of "second-order cybernetics" was central to this...