The contributions of hip hop to cyber-culture have not yet been clearly identified.
At the very least, the collection mentality of hip hop (sampling past sounds and styles)
has played a significant role in the formation of online communities - including
the BEV - and the rhetorical methodologies employed on the Web. As Mark Dery
points out and is alluded to in this text, cyberculture borrows from strategies
originally devised by the avant-garde, but currently made
popular by digital music - using found objects to create discourse.
The found object is at the heart, for example, of William Gibson's work, which
outlines cyberspace as the juxtaposition of digital, African-American, and consumer
cultures.
Wittingly or not, all of [Cyberculture] constitutes living proof of
William Gibson's cyberpunk maxim, 'THE STREET FINDS ITS OWN USES
FOR THINGS' - a leitmotif that reappears throughout [Escape Velocity].
Whether literal or metaphorical, their reclamation of technology
and the complex, contradictory meanings that swirl around it shifts
the focus of public discourse about technology from the corridors of
power to Gibson's figurative street; from the technopundits,
computer industry executives and Senate subcommittee members who
typically dominate that discourse the
disparate voices on the fringes of consumer culture. (Escape Velocity 15)
Gibson's usage of "found objects" resembles Dery's understanding of cyberculture in general.
The fringes of "real time" culture have become the builders of cyberculture - even if their
representation within the cyber is, at times, problematic.
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