Editor’s Message
Welcome to Issue 4 of The Comm!
The title of this month’s issue is Cyber! For a generation that spends approximately 95% of their time online, we have somehow found the time to create a cyber culture offline, too! 3D art, futuristic fashion, social media influencing, etc. all fall under the cyber category.
Internet culture is relatively new and is made up of a lot of different micro-genres. The idea of “cyber” and its image changes frequently too—is it like vaporwave? Or seapunk? Or rave wear? Or cyber goth? What is it?? When thinking about what ties all of these themes together, I came up with the words: synthetic and digital. Everything is over-processed and man-made. This covers cyber art, clothing, and even social media. To some, given the futuristic connotations of the word, the style could be more space-themed—but others think of it as something homegrown (excuse the irony) by using motifs of 2000s Windows and floating 3D text.
Even though some things don’t look “cyber”—take for instance the style “Cyber Ghetto” (anyone remember that?)—the fact that it was around for an instant and pretty much exclusively existed on Tumblr gives it a feeling of having only occupied a “cyber” space. There was nothing organic about how the trend came about. I even intended The Comm’s logo and URL to have a cyber sort of feel, the cursor in the “O” of Comm and the URL ending in .online rather than .com remind me of the online space where the community can all gather.
What will this “cyber” image look like in the next decade? Because of the nature of all things cyber and its technological feel, it evolves just as rapidly. A projection of the future might not conjure up the same image!
So are you ready to connect?