Postmodernism and Cybersex essays

Postmodernism and Cybersex essays Gravitating around the epistemological and psychological spheres, postmodernist theorists, amongst other things, make two fundamentally crucial claims when discussing twenty first century computer mediated communications (CMC). The epistemological claim is that the search for the ultimate foundations of knowledge, for depth and mechanism, is futile. Postmodernism is an anti foundationalist philosophy in the sense that it denies that there can be such a thing as transcendent, perfect knowledge. Instead all knowledge claims are justified by rhetoric, convention or authority. The psychological claim of postmodernism is that the notion of a coherent and unitary self is an illusion. The self is really a multiplicity of parts and fragments. Associated with this, the coherence of traditional identity formulations relating to classifications on the basis of race, gender and other physical characteristics are also suspect. So, in keeping with the postmodernist doctrine, what could be more postmodern than cybersex? Now "cybersex" stems from the term cyberspace, originally a term from William Gibson's science-fiction novel of 1984, Neuromancer. Basically cyberspace is the name some people use for the conceptual space where words, human relationships, data, wealth, and power are manifested by people using computer mediated communications technology, or CMC for short. Cybersex, depending on who you talk to has a number of definitions and a number of approaches according to those definitions. How postmodern. Broadly speaking, cybersex is a generic term for erotic interaction between individuals in cyberspace. Generally, it can include exchanges of e-mail, real-time visual communication via webcams, encounters in chatrooms, bulletin boards, and other online virtual communities. However, given prevailing technological restraints, the majority of cybersexual activity occurs in chatrooms and is facilitated by text-sex - essentially, sexual ...