Walkthrough: videogames and technocultural form - Seth Giddings

the structuring binaries of Western thought, in particular the masculine subject as the agent of history. The
notion of the posthuman, and science fictional figures of the matrix of cyberspace and the cyborg, are (more
or less ironically) invoked. These theories have been influential on many studies of new media – particularly
on critical cyberculture.
Cultural Studies, Media Studies, and Cultural and Media Studies
Critical cyberculture often operates within Cultural Studies. For example Aronowitz et al’s Technoscience
and Cyberculture (1996), and Penley and Ross’s Technoculture (1991) address technology and technoscience
from a Cultural Studies perspective. Within Cultural Studies, particularly in North America, there has been a
sustained enquiry into the relationships between technology, science, medicine and culture. Again, Donna
Haraway’s socialist and feminist articulations of science and technology have been highly influential, a
springboard for much work on technoculture by feminists and other Cultural Studies scholars. Anne
Balsamo acknowledges the significance of Haraway’s essay, but also charts a longer history of Cultural
Studies and the study of science and technology (Balsamo 1998), including the work of Marshall McLuhan
and Raymond Williams. She asserts the importance of these objects of study for Cultural Studies as ‘science,
technology and medicine […] the dominant institutional sites for the production and circulation of
contemporary global culture’ (Balsamo 1998: 285).
Cultural Studies and Media Studies have their own disciplinary, institutional and conceptual
genealogies but these are often tangled together. For example the widely used ‘Culture, Media and Identities’
series of textbooks (e.g. Hall 1997, DuGay et al 1997, Mackay 1997, discussed in some detail in Part 3.1)
indicate a certain normalisation of the overlap between Cultural Studies and Media Studies, as does – for
example – the School within which I work and within which this research is undertaken. I will refer to these
disciplines separately as far as possible to preserve clarity, but will also use ‘Cultural and Media Studies’
when it is specifically the overlap between them that is being referred to. As this thesis takes as its focus the
point of contact between the form and conventions of the videogames as media ‘text’ and the contexts and
events of its ‘consumption’ in everyday culture then this disciplinary overlap is significant.
Within the UK disciplines related to Cultural Studies and Media Studies, primarily communication
studies and media sociology have - when they are concerned with technology - often looked at the everyday
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