Anthropology of Cyberspace

The anthropology of cyberspace is a minor subbranch of sociocultural anthropology that deals with cybernetic systems, the culturally informed interrelationships between human beings and technologies. These interrelationships include the attempts to fuse technological artifacts with human and other biological organisms, with human society, and with the culturally shaped environment. In the wake of recent discourses growing around metaphors like globalization and information age/information society especially Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) move into cyber anthropology's focus. The complex 'human beings and ICTs' unfolds its relevance for sociocultural anthropology inside the following three main sectors: ICTs as tools for sociocultural anthropologists both in teaching and research. The spectrum reaches from using a personal computer as a typewriter, using and/or generating online-databases and -catalogues, communicating with colleagues and peers via Internet-services, to keeping in touch with informants online, and the theory-based generation of new forms of representation for anthropological knowledge.