The Vocabulary and Culture of Internet Collectivity
摘要
Taking a wider view, but still with a predominant focus on the 1990s, this chapter describes how a distinctive vocabulary for Internet Polity discourse developed and how cultural significance was attributed to collective activities on the internet. A brief discussion of the nodal term—‘internet’, and coterminously words with ‘e-’ and ‘digital’ prefixes—precedes that. An account of computing and internet dictionaries (and glossaries and word-listings) fleshes out the vocabulary that was consolidated as Internet Polity discourse. Several phases of dictionary making are covered: of computing terms for professionals, of computing terms for lay users, of hacker slang/jargon/techspeak, of internet terms in themselves, of internet slangSlang and cyberlexicography. Turning next to attributions of cultural collectivity via Internet Technology, the overlaps and distinction betweenTechnoculture ‘technoculture’, ‘cybercultureCyberculture’, and ‘digital cultureDigital culture’ are unpacked. After pausing on the rise of popular ‘online communities’, a final section delineates the normative and ideological shifts that took place around the term ‘hacker’.