Reminds me of one of my biggest pet peeves from my days as a slave to a retail corporation: their constant references to their rules as "corporate culture." I always insisted that nations had cultures, ethnic groups had cultures, but goddamnit, Software Etc. does not have a "culture."

I did say that I didn't name the course.. :D
Seriously, though: I agree that software doesn't have a "culture", but for the sake of trying to define this course, I do think there could be an argument put forth that the Web (as in the community that you and I and everyone else is a part of when we go online) does have its own culture. If you look at some of the more artful Web pages out there, it's usually very difficult to tell where the creator is from just from the work; creativity online seems to come from the same place regardless of the originating country.

That's what I'm trying to discover - sites that are artful. Ignore the "culture" bit if you find that annoying, and consider this to be more of a "Web Art History" course...

Web culture? Hmmm ... difficult to say! I'm thinking of a kind of "common ground", of commonly used "signs" (I'm just thinking aloud). As one example I can add a site that I found yesterday. It's the official site of Jefferson Airplane. I like the site a) because of the design, and b) because of the seamless integration of the"sixties look" & the technology of 2002. I don't know if I'm making sense here, but basically I feel that "web culture" is as diverse as the web itself.

P.S.: While thinking about this topic, I realized that there isn't one web culture, but rather a variety of sub-cultures: the "email culture", the "culture of online gaming", the "chat culture", the culture of open-sorce programming, and so forth. Interestingly, I discovered that - more or less by intuition - I don't see the "commercial" web * as part of this culture. IMHO, companies like Microsoft (to take just one example) just provide the software, but they are not part of any culture (if they themselves may see this in a different way). One afterthought I had was: If you take the first part of "culture", then you have "cult". I have no Webster or Oxford dictionary at hand, but it might be helpful for you to look up the definition of "cult".

• I realize that this is not always true - just take sites like Wired. Difficult !

I rather like the following definition:
culture n 1: a particular civilization at a particular stage 2: the tastes in art and manners that are favored by a social group 3: all the knowledge and values shared by a society [syn: acculturation] 4: (biology) the growing of microorganisms in a nutrient medium (such as gelatin or agar); "the culture of cells in a Petri dish" 5: the raising of plants or animals: "the culture of oysters"
Source: WordNet ® 1.6, © 1997 Princeton University
As you see, it's an on-line, recent definition. The first 3 descriptions surely fit the Internet. I particularly like the third: "all the knowledge and values shared by a society". Sharing knowledge is a great deal of what the Internet has been from the beginning, as is freedom of "speech" and "movement." We may not like what someone says, and we can click right on past it! We can explore a plethora of sites on any topic, discussed from multiple perspectives. Issues of censorship pop up from time to time and it seems that, in the long run, freedom wins. It may not be easy for people in some countries, but they are developing ways to get around governmental controls. In South Korea, one of the most technologically savvy lands, censorship simply doesn't work. A kid in a PC shop slips around the "net nannies" and goes where he or she wants!