What's Up

Promiscuity

2011-06-17T22:48:00.000+07:00

Promiscuity? Hmm .. if it responded in a positive way of course this will be very exciting. We can be friends with all men want. But unfortunately, the phrase promiscuity has its own meaning which tend to be negative and dirty. Promiscuity like the Berlin Wall has been destroyed. No more limits. All completely free.

Adherents of promiscuity tends to no longer respect the norms in force. Promiscuity a bad result even if they accidentally hit. They think now is the era of them. Era to do something in accordance with the wishes without any restraints of any party. It's a big fallacy.

Early Occurrences of Free Intercourse

It is not wrong if the expansion of the United States to various countries in the world has been blamed as the beginning of spreading false understanding of free association. Not least in Indonesia, all things Western superpower must refer to this. How could I not, from spectacle to the food, the United States enough control on ground water.

Starting from food and spectacle-spectacle of the United States, which quickly spread across the country this is promiscuity gradually erode the defense of Eastern Indonesian community norms. Never tried to KFC or Mc Donald someone immediately said 'not hanging out, going out only to hold hands, immediately said to be' conservative ', and many more tunes "serene" other.

Other factors

In fact, eating just a small factor and the spectacle of an exaggeration. There are still many other factors that actually holds the largest role in eroding oriental culture and the creation of promiscuity. One of the main course, the lack of understanding of religion that is followed by a weak understanding of the result of the free pegaulan.

a. Lack of Understanding of Religion

Religion is control. Religion is a clue. Someone who has a little pamahaman about religion would be very easily influenced by any negative things, including the doctrine of promiscuity that is spread through western culture. Religion tdak longer be hold for them.

Thus, whatever they do will forever they think is right. Sin is no longer something that is feared by them. Moreover, parents babble. There will be no longer capable of reminding them, before they finally felt the impact and consequences of such promiscuity

b. Promiscuity Impact

Most of the impact or the result of promiscuity is perceived by adolescents and other age groups. Why did? At his age, the teens are looking for identity and want to try to do things that are considered new.

Smoking, drugs, free sex, and others. Indeed, initially they just try, but unfortunately it will only make someone who never did become addicted.

Increasing number of adolescents and among the productive age who suffer from Aids disease, died of overdose, and suffering from other chronic diseases is some evidence of the enormity of the result of this promiscuity. Yes, due to promiscuity is not only painful but also deadly.

Minimize the Impact of Promiscuity

Currently, to minimize the promiscuity among teenagers is not only the responsibility of religion, but rather a shared responsibility, especially the government, parents and the immediate environment. Governments should be able to restrict and filter out the serious damage to everything that comes from western culture.

In addition, parents also should not be too cool by association his children. Then, its immediate environment, in this school, should begin to provide insight on the dangers of promiscuity by providing sex education is fair.

Source : http://tinyurl.com/6znwraa

Definition of Cyberspace

2010-10-09T12:48:00.001+07:00

‘Cyberspace’ is a complex term to deﬁne; indeed, its deﬁnition can be refracted through our three story-telling tropes to give us different (though often overlapping) deﬁnitions. We can deﬁne cyberspace in terms of hardware, for example – as a global network of computers, linked through communications infrastructures, that facilitate forms of interaction between remote actors. Cyberspace is here the sum of all those nodes and networks (‘what it is’). Alternatively, a deﬁnition based partly on the ‘symbolic’ trope could deﬁne cyberspace as an imagined space between computers in which people might build new selves and new worlds (‘what it means’). In fact, cyberspace is all this and more; it is hardware and software, and it is images and ideas – the two are inseparable. Moreover, the ways we experience cyberspace represent a negotiation of material and symbolic elements, each given different weight depending on the kind of experience (‘what it does’).

We can experience cyberspace mundanely, as where we are when we sit at a computer checking emails; or, we can experience cyberspace as an immersive realm where our ‘real life’ (RL) bodies and identities disappear – even if what we’re doing in those two scenarios isn’t, at one level of interrogation, that different.

In The Cybercultures Reader Michael Benedikt deﬁnes cyberspace along similar axes, pointing out a number of different ways of conceptualizing what turns out to be an elusive thing. Consider just a couple of his attempts at deﬁnition: Cyberspace: A new universe, a parallel universe created and sustained by the world’s computers and communications lines. A world in which the global trafﬁc of knowledge, secrets, measurements, indicators, entertainments, and alter-human agency takes on form: sights, sounds, presences never seen on the surface of the earth blossoming in a vast electronic light.

Cyberspace: A common mental geography, built, in turn, by consensus and revolution, canon and experiment; a territory swarming with data and lies, with mind stuff and memories of nature, with a million voices and two million eyes in a silent, invisible concert to enquiry, deal-making, dream sharing, and simple beholding. (Benedikt CR: 29)

After ten such attempts, Benedikt states that ‘cyberspace as just described does not exist’ (30). In fact, I would argue that it does exist – maybe not in terms of hardware and software, but certainly in terms of story-telling.

Attending to cyberspace through its stories makes deﬁnition harder, but that’s a necessary thing if we are going to grasp the manifold places it occupies in the worlds of science and technology, business and everyday life, dreams and nightmares. So, in fact, I am deferring deﬁnition because to deﬁne cyberspace too rigidly at this point would shape the agenda of the ways we read the stories I want to introduce. Instead, it’s more useful to redeﬁne cyberspace in the context of each story, and then explore the overlaps and intersections of these deﬁnitions. As John McLeod (1997) remarks, stories are ways of making sense of the world and our place within it – so, what I want to do in these two chapters is to share with you a number of different stories, that taken together might give a broader picture of the relationships between cyberspace and everyday life.

From : Bell, David. An Introduction to Cybercultures. Routledge. Page : 6-8

Modelling Social Architecture, Network Topologies and The City

2010-10-09T12:37:00.000+07:00

"those who are both doing the moving and the communicating and who are in some way in a position of control in relation to it…. These are the groups who are really, in a sense, in charge of time- space compression, who can effectively use it and turn it to their advantage." (Massey 1993:61)

In effect, computer networks allow such groups to extend their ‘personal extensability’ through electronic means, by being electronically present in other, distant places to undertake transactions, maintain social relations, extend their political power and access information (Adams 1995). Elite executives, to some extent, can now ‘live where they choose and still remain plugged into the economic mainstream’ (Leinberger 1994:51). Such elite, transnational groups seem likely to experience interactive, empowering models of electronic democracy, as the new class strives to be ‘internally egalitarian and communitarian, and externally effective in exercising political and economic power’ (Calabrese and Borchert 1996:250).

Second, there are the lower strata of less affluent and mobile wage earners, who seem more likely to be, as Dordick et al. (1988) put it, ‘the information used’—experiencing different technological topologies: hierarchical systems geared towards narrow, passive consumption. Access for these groups to anarchic, non-hierarchical and interactive networks such as the Internet is likely to be outweighed by the growth of consumption-driven, home telematics systems which embody ‘high degrees of hierarchical control’, interactivity largely limited to ‘press now to purchase’ buttons, and ‘high bandwidth downstream flows and low bandwidth upstream flows’ (Calabrese and Borchert 1996). This ‘consumer model’ of the ‘Information Superhighway’ will have only limited capability for interactivity supporting the development of horizontal discourses:

"wage earners, the precariously employed and the unemployed will interact infrequently on the horizontal dimension, except primarily in commercial modes which are institutionally and hierarchically structured, and controlled for commercial purposes such as games and shopping, and also do more routine forms of telework. The low spatial mobility of lower strata will be mirrored by low network mobility and limited perceived prospects for using the available network resources for creative expression or upward mobility, and by limited felt need for horizontal and upstream communication flows beyond those which are structured for commercial purposes or for the accessing of social services where they are available." (Calabrese and Borchert 1996:253)

The current frenzy of global alliances and mergers between TV, Internet, cable, telecoms, film, publishing, advertising and newspaper industries must be seen in this context, as sectors jostle to take commanding positions within a global set of information infrastructures, geared toward exploiting and commodifying the information, media and cultural industries, and offering homebased consumer services (Schiller 1996; Hamelink 1995). The commercialisation of the Internet, the development of electronic transaction and financial systems, and the emergence of commercial, off-the-shelf Internet packages geared to consumption, shopping and entertainment, are all part of its shift toward a ‘consumer’ model information highway driven by ‘pay-per’ electronic consumption (Baran 1996).

Finally, of course, in the ‘off-line’, marginalised spaces of cities there will be disadvantaged groups living in poverty and structural unemployment who seem likely to be excluded altogether from electronic networks. Here, poverty and unemployment mean that access to any electronic network at all, from the phone upwards, will be financially problematic. Infrastructure providers are unlikely to target new investment in such spaces. In the context where certain neighbourhoods in western cities have been shown to have only 30 per cent phone penetration (Graham and Marvin 1996) the inclusionary rhetoric of the ‘Information Superhighway’ seems somewhat hollow for the most disadvantaged areas of cities. In fact, ‘in the electronic ghettoes’, writes Nigel Thrift (1995:31) ‘the space of flows comes to a full stop. Time-space compression means time to spare and the space to go nowhere at all’.

In such spaces, efforts to get lower income groups on to the interactive and discourse-driven Internet will continually have to address difficult issues. At the very least there are likely to be competing priorities, costly training needs, crime problems, relatively low levels of English literacy, issues of technological intimidation, the rapid obsolescence of technologies and the high costs of continually upgrading software to meet the latest industry standards (Sparrow and Vedantham 1996). Moreover, the relevance of Internet access can often be questioned for those facing the most severe social crises. ‘Just giving someone time at a terminal with Internet capabilities—or, by extension, at a kiosk in a public place—will not benefit anyone who feels confronted with a seemingly insurmountable problem, or who has no idea where to begin’ (Rockoff 1996:59).

From : Loader, Brian D. (ed.). Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency and Policy in The Information Society. Routledge. (page : 63-66)

Modelling Social Architecture, Network Topologies and The City

2010-09-29T22:06:00.000+07:00

It is important, then, to disaggregate the social make-up of cities, so that we can begin to trace the positions of different groups within the emerging urban social architecture of cyberspace (see Castells 1996b: 371). Three broad groups, we would argue, are likely to emerge here. First, elite groups seem likely to be the ‘information users’ (Dordick et al. 1988) experiencing the full benefits of global, interactive telematics systems like the Internet. There is substantial evidence that a new ‘transnational corporate class’ is emerging which is the primary agent of operating the global economy, and which relies on intense mobility and access to interactive global computer networks on a continuous basis to ‘command space’ (Sklair 1991:62–71). Friedmann (1995) argues that the emergence of such groups in western cities needs to be seen as an integral element within a worldwide shift towards the emergence of global spaces of capital accumulation, dominated by transnational corporations (TNCs) and their associated social elites. This transnational elite group consists of "those who are both doing the moving and the communicating and who are in some way in a position of control in relation to it…. These are the groups who are really, in a sense, in charge of time- space compression, who can effectively use it and turn it to their advantage." (Massey 1993:61)

In effect, computer networks allow such groups to extend their ‘personal extensability’ through electronic means, by being electronically present in other, distant places to undertake transactions, maintain social relations, extend their political power and access information (Adams 1995). Elite executives, to some extent, can now ‘live where they choose and still remain plugged into the economic mainstream’ (Leinberger 1994:51). Such elite, transnational groups seem likely to experience interactive, empowering models of electronic democracy, as the new class strives to be ‘internally egalitarian and communitarian, and externally effective in exercising political and economic power’ (Calabrese and Borchert 1996:250).

Second, there are the lower strata of less affluent and mobile wage earners, who seem more likely to be, as Dordick et al. (1988) put it, ‘the information used’—experiencing different technological topologies: hierarchical systems geared towards narrow, passive consumption. Access for these groups to anarchic, non-hierarchical and interactive networks such as the Internet is likely to be outweighed by the growth of consumption-driven, home telematics systems which embody ‘high degrees of hierarchical control’, interactivity largely limited to ‘press now to purchase’ buttons, and ‘high bandwidth downstream flows and low bandwidth upstream flows’ (Calabrese and Borchert 1996). This ‘consumer model’ of the ‘Information Superhighway’ will have only limited capability for interactivity supporting the development of horizontal discourses:

"wage earners, the precariously employed and the unemployed will interact infrequently on the horizontal dimension, except primarily in commercial modes which are institutionally and hierarchically structured, and controlled for commercial purposes such as games and shopping, and also do more routine forms of telework. The low spatial mobility of lower strata will be mirrored by low network mobility and limited perceived prospects for using the available network resources for creative expression or upward mobility, and by limited felt need for horizontal and upstream communication flows beyond those which are structured for commercial purposes or for the accessing of social services where they are available." (Calabrese and Borchert 1996:253)

The current frenzy of global alliances and mergers between TV, Internet, cable, telecoms, film, publishing, advertising and newspaper industries must be seen in this context, as sectors jostle to take commanding positions within a global set of information infrastructures, geared toward exploiting and commodifying the information, media and cultural industries, and offering homebased consumer services (Schiller 1996; Hamelink 1995). The commercialisation of the Internet, the development of electronic transaction and financial systems, and the emergence of commercial, off-the-shelf Internet packages geared to consumption, shopping and entertainment, are all part of its shift toward a ‘consumer’ model information highway driven by ‘pay-per’ electronic consumption (Baran 1996).

Finally, of course, in the ‘off-line’, marginalised spaces of cities there will be disadvantaged groups living in poverty and structural unemployment who seem likely to be excluded altogether from electronic networks. Here, poverty and unemployment mean that access to any electronic network at all, from the phone upwards, will be financially problematic. Infrastructure providers are unlikely to target new investment in such spaces. In the context where certain neighbourhoods in western cities have been shown to have only 30 per cent phone penetration (Graham and Marvin 1996) the inclusionary rhetoric of the ‘Information Superhighway’ seems somewhat hollow for the most disadvantaged areas of cities. In fact, ‘in the electronic ghettoes’, writes Nigel Thrift (1995:31) ‘the space of flows comes to a full stop. Time-space compression means time to spare and the space to go nowhere at all’.

In such spaces, efforts to get lower income groups on to the interactive and discourse-driven Internet will continually have to address difficult issues. At the very least there are likely to be competing priorities, costly training needs, crime problems, relatively low levels of English literacy, issues of technological intimidation, the rapid obsolescence of technologies and the high costs of continually upgrading software to meet the latest industry standards (Sparrow and Vedantham 1996). Moreover, the relevance of Internet access can often be questioned for those facing the most severe social crises. ‘Just giving someone time at a terminal with Internet capabilities—or, by extension, at a kiosk in a public place—will not benefit anyone who feels confronted with a seemingly insurmountable problem, or who has no idea where to begin’ (Rockoff 1996:59).

From : Loader, Brian D. (ed.). Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency and Policy in The Information Society. Routledge. (page : 63-66)

Between Liberalism and Positivism

2010-09-20T08:29:00.002+07:00

TWU7HSQE2YCT Our current global situation is different, and yet is in essential continuity with the circumstances in which this book was written. Today, neo-liberalism has further extended its sway, but has now begun to mutate into a new mode of political tyranny. (For this reason, in response to the banalities of certain of my politically liberal critics, I simply offer a reading of the current daily newspapers in my defence.)

In some ways this makes the essential unity of Theology and Social Theory more apparent. For, from the beginning to the end of the book, it is constantly suggested that there is a problematic relationship between the formal openness of liberalism which is designed to mitigate conﬂict on the one hand, and an arbitrariness of content on the other hand a ‘positivism’ which always threatens to overwhelm even the peace of mere suspended hostility which is the best that the civitas terrena can ever manage.

This positive content can be either ‘scientiﬁc’ as in the case of eugenicism and the extermination of the supposedly weak (which happens in far more modes than we usually acknowledge) or it can be ‘religious’ as in the case of recently emergent ‘fundamentalisms’ which usually trade off, and theologically conﬁrm, socio-economic liberalism, while also in certain strategic ways surpassing and opposing it. In many ways the ﬁrst two treatises of the book on ‘liberalism’ and ‘positivism’ respectively, are in consequence the most decisive – because ‘dialectics’ is seen as but a variant on liberalism in terms of a Christian Gnosticism (a thesis now amply conﬁrmed by the work of Cyril O’Regan) and ‘difference’ is seen as essentially a radicalization of the positivist vision. (Here the reader needs to be attentive to the fact that I treat ‘positivism’ in its historical complexity and ambiguity and never mean the term anachronistically – except where appropriate – in the mere sense of scientiﬁc or ‘logical’ positivism.)

These observations accord, I think, with the changed responses that the book is now liable to invoke. At ﬁrst, there was a certain amount of outraged protest from sociologists, many of whom took it that I was objecting to a supposed ‘reduction’ of religion to the social, when I was explicitly arguing that ‘the social’ of sociology was itself an unreal, unhistorical and quasi theological category.

Today, this sort of reaction survives only amongst theologians themselves – who are still so often belated. Within secular social theory by contrast, there is a widespread recognition (only a very little indebted to the impact of my book) that ‘sociology’ is an exploded paradigm, and in part because of its inbuilt secular bias.

The less ideologically-freighted models of ethnography and histoire totale are today far more in vogue – in academic practice still more than in academic theory. There was some protest also from those still committed to the dialectical tradition.

Overwhelmingly though, most thinkers of the left have now aban doned the Marxist afﬁrmations of a teleological progressivism or any notion that there must come a necessary ‘ﬁnal’ crisis of capitalism. Much more persistent remains the inﬂuence of Hegel’s philosophy of history. Yet this is increasingly because interpreters conﬁrm the essence of Alexander Koje `ve’s reading of Hegel: the Hegelian metanarrative is plausible because it was already akin to a nihilist genealogy and was a kind of anti-metanarrative.

For what it traced was the work of negation and redoubled negation in the sense of the dismantling of all bounds against a radically self-grounded freedom. In this sense the story told is of the gradual unleashing of the anarchically positive – even though it took Schelling to be clearer about this, and Hegel himself commendably, but inconsistently, had aspirations to resist such a rule of both the formal and the arbitrary. It is also true that the thesis of an ‘end of history’,when there emerges a fullmutual recognition of autonomy, fails to see that the celebration primarily of freedom has no stable way of securing the value of suchmutual recognition over-against the positive afﬁrmation of one particular freedom or set of freedoms as paramount. In consequence it has no surety against history resuming its sinister inventiveness.

Still more markedly, there was a great deal of protest from those inﬂuenced by the ‘left-Nietzscheanism’ stemming from the 1960s, an inﬂuence in which Theology and Social Theory is itself clearly steeped. This protest almost always took the form of saying that I was wrong to see this discourse as upholding nihilism and ‘ontological violence’ – rather it supported the diversity of life and held open inﬁnite possibilities of variegated coexistence with others fully acknowledged in their otherness.

In retrospect though, one can see yet more strongly how the left-Nietzschean current constantly had to compromise a radical positivism which seeks actively to afﬁrm the ungrounded ‘mythical’ content of difference beyond mere formal tolerance, with a continued attempt to re-inscribe some mode of stoic or Kantian formal resignation and collective agreement as to abstract procedures. This is as true in the end of Deleuze as it is more evidently true of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and even Badiou. These thinkers, therefore, were trapped in the liberal/positivist oscillation.

John Milbank. Theology and Social Theory : Beyond Secular Reason. Blackwell Publishing. Page : xi-xii

Cyberspace as The New Urban Public Realm

2010-09-16T13:46:00.000+07:00

Whilst the nature of the public realm of cities clearly varies across the world, we do believe that general forces exist towards urban fragmentation in which the traditional notion of a universal public realm becomes increasingly problematic. Such a context has encouraged a wide range of debates to emerge surrounding the potential of digital computer networks (or ‘telematics’) for supporting new types of public social and cultural exchange. Not surprisingly, such debates increasingly interconnect with those on the urban public realm.

In North America, a growing band of optimists have urged us to look to cyberspace—the ‘space’ of digital exchange, transaction and communication accessible via new technology—as the ‘new public realm’ (Schuler 1996; Rheingold 1994). To such authors, the apparent or alleged erosion of the public realms of cities, by implication, need not necessarily concern us: such realms merely need now to migrate towards the brave new world of electronic mediation (see Graham and Marvin 1996: Chapter 5). Michael Benedikt, for one, hopes that cyberspace will lead him toward salvation from the city, allowing personal transcendence

"from all the inefficiencies, pollution (chemical and informational), and corruptions attendant to the process of moving information attached to things—from paper to brains—across, over and under the vast and bumpy surface of the earth rather than letting it fly free in the soft hail of electrons that is cyberspace." (Benedikt 1991:3)

In fact, much of the current hype and hyperbole surrounding the Internet and ‘Information Superhighway’ rests on the Utopian assertion that such networks will inevitably emerge to be equitable, democratic and dominated by a culture of public space, enrolling multiple identities into new types of collective, interactive discourse and ‘electronic democracy’ (Bellamy et al. 1995). Computermediated communications, stretched over global distances will, it is argued, offer simple substitutions for face-to-face contact in specific urban places, as part of a generic shift to telemediated work, service access, health and education networks, and media flows.

Some US commentators already argue that ‘virtual communities’ on the Internet, geared towards both specific interest groups or place-based communities, represent solutions to the search of people increasingly alienated by the (apparently) repressive, commodified and instrumental character of contemporary urban life. As large cities become more fragmented geographically, socially and culturally, Howard Rheingold, a keen advocate of virtual communities, suspects that ‘one of the explanations for the [virtual community] phenomenon is the hunger for community that grows in the breasts of people around the world as more and more informal public spaces disappear from our real lives’ (Rheingold 1994:6). Doug Schuler believes that virtual communities offer perfect antidotes to the often atomised, fragmented and threatening world of the many North American urban areas experiencing growing violence, fear, alienation and the reduction in civic associations (Schuler 1996). Heralding early urban network initiatives in the United States like the Cleveland Freenet, Santa Monica Public Electronic Network and Seattle Community Network, he argues that local initiatives can help establish a new vision of community based on decentralised, interactive, one-to-one and one-to-many media networks, which are intrinsically more equitable and participatory than previous paper and mass broadcasting-based media. Run ‘by the community for the community’, such local IT networks will, he argues, herald ‘an overall democratic renaissance and civic revitalisation’ (Schuler 1996:x).

The promise of new cyber-based communities offering new interactive ‘public’ arenas is perhaps especially strong for the most marginalised groups, who have been hardest hit by economic restructuring, growing urban privatism and the increasing predominance of individualistic ways of social organising in cities. To Cristina Odone, for example,

"the disenfranchised are still seeking an alternative public arena that will afford them an opportunity to participate in that circulation of ideas that constitute society. Enter the Internet: a technological patchwork quilt that will provide the arena for public dialogues and gather together some of the most disparate social elements, generating solidarity amongst distinct and sometimes conflicting elements. The Net has already managed to promise a reordered world where the individual can sample a community life that has long been eroded by the rush for individual gains, the rending of the fabric of family life, the polarisation of an economic system that makes for haves and have notes. The Net has been cast over that collective space once filled by the family hearth, the church yard, the village marketplace." (Odone 1995:10, quoted in Belt 1996)

From : Loader, Brian D. (ed.). Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency and Policy in The Information Society. Routledge. (page : 59-61)

The Evil Empires That Always Manipulate New Technologies

2009-12-11T23:08:00.000+07:00

Pornographers, fundamentalist religious movements, paedophile networks, racists, terrorists, ethnic cleansers, electronic stalkers—all these will make use of the Internet and global networks to expand the range, and sometimes the profit, of their seedy activities. Police forces all over the world are currently bemused as to how to deal with the abuse of public networks used to smuggle bytes of sadism and violence across national borders, and we are in for some big debates about what we should be allowed to do with these networks. When is a server a publisher? What is a newsgroup? And so on. All forms of publishing technology have raised issues like these in the past, but the freedom and liberty of the wired individual will tax our old moral and ethical values like no other form of publication has done. The digital copying of everything that is not nailed down will also tax good relations between nations and companies, and a select band of lawyers will make fortunes out of advising on the law (or the lack of it) concerning international and national copyright. As the old map makers of the fifteenth century put it when they did not know what was over the next ocean, ‘here be dragons’ indeed.

Any crystal-ball gazing into the future of networking technology is a complex business because we are always enmeshed in a crisis of progress. Our motives are always mixed but socially negotiated factors, such as trust in the system one belongs to; confidence in the way that science has been applied before; political and scientific secrecy that has excluded us from potential harms or side-effects during the development phases of past technologies; our experience with the previous impacts of market forces; our faith in the capacity of our political systems to distribute the benefits of technology—all these represent reasonable axes of concern. Science transforms human identity but we also want it to be subject to the scrutiny of independent moral principles. But these principles themselves shift as science, for example as in bioengineering, declares new possibilities that in themselves transform the cartography of what we choose to regard as acceptable behaviour. Internetworking operates on many levels. It is heavily diffused throughout the rest of the technical pantheon, ‘a pack horse in the great affairs’ of so many other technologies from missile systems and financial speculation to realtime medicine over great distance and the monitoring of dangerous chemical processes. Its valuable contribution as a ‘carrier’ within these domains will no doubt go from strength to strength. It is its role in facilitating the economic and social rejuvenation of large, as opposed to elite, populations and its exacerbation of the already discernible drift towards isolation and alienation that I believe is much more questionable.

We will probably have to wait another ten years or so before we can assess the impact of the main areas of concern noted here. In 2010 those babies born in the sunny mid–1960s of reasonably well-to-do parents in developed economies, who will have grown up with computers, e-mail, computer games and CD information to help with the homework, will be in their fifties and occupying leadership roles in business and government. In their teens when IBM launched the PC, using computers to ‘connect’ will be second nature to them.

However, they will be torn between two opposing ideologies. They will know that to leave large populations of citizens outside the networking club will mean:
1.Handing competitive advantage to those nations with more egalitarian and dynamic educational systems
2.The creation of a sizable subculture who will not be able to access some of the basic tools of a modern society both at work and at play.

But they will also know that access to more and more information creates some great contradictions. Less knowledge because of all the knowledge that is now signalled to exist. Less certainty as they are exposed to an explosion of options and counter-strategies. More anxieties as the complexities of life become more visible but no more comprehensible. Less certain as facts and expertise become more disputable and as less and less knowledge is derived directly from our own senses. Instead of a world of greater certainty they will know a world where confidence is always qualified by anxious suspicions of incompleteness. The Utopian certainty of the young, predominantly male computer infatuates of the 1980s has been seriously qualified by some expensive mistakes in setting up big computer systems, the infection of software by ‘designer’ viruses—McAfee the anti-virus software vendor reckons that 90 per cent of companies experience a virus attack every month (Taylor 1997:7), by the hacker’s easy invasion of ‘secure’ environments and by fears of hardcore pornography trickling quietly into school classrooms. We have learnt to take the vehemence of the techno-optimists with more than a hard-diskfull of salt. There will be great riches and great opportunities from internetworking but there are no certainties, and we have little evidence so far to suggest that all economic groups will secure similar benefits. Without a major shift away from the current economic paradigm, we cannot doubt that it will be the economics of profit rather than of social enrichment that will be prioritised.

From : Loader, Brian D. (ed.). Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency and Policy in The Information Society. Routledge. (page : 31-33)

Deteriorating Political Agendas for Public Access to Information and The Widening of Existing Economic Disparities

2009-12-08T13:13:00.000+07:00

While there is a tremendous amount of interest in all societies as to how those with the tools and instruments to access the new global networks, e.g. modems, computers, software, telephone or cable lines, boxes full of interactive intelligence and the skills to understand and handle them, will be empowered, there are generally few political agendas addressing how accessible these networks will be for the sizable populations who will not have easy access to these tools. The impact of exclusion both on the haves and the have-nots, and the extent to which such a discrepancy changes each group’s assumptions about the world, looks like being left to market forces to mould and then control. It has ever been the case that the affluent in any society have always had new discretionary wants created for them by the market while the economically hard-pressed simply tend to adjust their wants downward to cope with new conditions.

Free-market capitalism has no system for identifying common human needs (as opposed to wants) and provides no way of fostering community forms of provision. Attempting to sell needs is never very profitable. Needs are by definition low or nonmargin services required to achieve the lineaments that we style a ‘minimum quality of life’. The very sophistication of the information handling and processing options available to rich corporate environments, their ability to pay over the top for quite mediocre information solutions, and the strongly emerging imperative that all information should be regarded as a market-driven commodity, has had a deleterious effect on current perceptions of publicly funded sources of information. Thus the kind of values that accompany a subscription to Reuter’s news and financial services by a profitable commercial concern are now nearly always used when politicians and civil servants address the issue of community- based information provision outside the corporate domain. The loss of cheap paper sources of information as the build-up of digitisation accelerates is a little considered issue in the context of wide public access to sources of information. But without institutions to mediate digitised information to economically deprived groups, their access to something that was often relatively easy via a public library, law centre or citizens advice bureau could be severely impaired.

The growth of networked access to information by the middle ground of citizens who nearly always vote, i.e. a public library of their own via a modem, is unlikely to encourage them to vote for the continuation of public institutions which provide information on a community basis. Although many optimists see the widespread access to computer-linked networks as a way of spreading information and knowledge to many more citizens and thus sharing political and economic influence even more widely, others believe that access to these networks will simply be laid over the same old patterns of geographic and economic inequality. For these pessimists the network as a marketplace of ideas will move from metaphor to reality where established patterns of consumer detriment, the compounded disadvantages of low-income groups, are replicated in digital form. Such groups could become the victims of a powerful triumvirate: a developing cocktail of selfish technology for the economically stable, a propensity for the middle ground to adopt a more reactionary political stance with regard to public investment in information infrastructure, and the continuing invisibility of the social and economic value of public information sources in the information- knowledge chain. The self-sufficiency of the ‘wired home’ is becoming a high-tech icon of the ‘there is no such thing as society’ politics of the late 1980s, a situation where everyone should take individual responsibility for the economics of getting online. If they don’t then they must just accept that they will be left out!

Although all technologies trickle down, particularly those capable of pollinating new forms of accessing revenue-producing entertainment, few have revolutionised the way in which the majority of citizens have been able to understand and then influence the variety of political, social or cultural options available to them. Power structures continue to remain distant (parliamentary involvement in UK government long ago gave way first to cabinet and then to special committee government), the fibres of US government remain largely untouched by the existence of a White House e-mail number, economically limited citizens continue to remain limited in their access to higher education and the effective manipulation of the higher-level technologies that comes with it. The integration of higher-level communicational computing into everyday life—other than that found in washing machines, the TV remote control and cash machines—has remained the exclusive preserve of Robert Reich’s elite ‘symbolic analysts’, i.e. that 20 per cent of a developed nation’s population who work for enterprises with disposable cash to spend on the technology or who believe that their business will benefit from the investment. Although the one-person design, translation, editing, consultant-type of small enterprise might easily invest in such connectivity as the cost of the technology falls, by far and away the majority of users will still be members of large public or private closed systems. Social divisions and distinctions have remained largely untouched by the massification of a whole range of computer- based technologies, and the Internet will be no different. It owes its existence to the desire of info-rich actors to talk and share information and knowledge with other info-rich actors, and whatever their altruistic motives may or may not be, neither will have the power (though some may have the desire) to extend membership of the club. Contrary to current Internet folklore, the users do not own the ‘means’.

They have great freedom to communicate but they do not have the freedom to decide who else may communicate with them. That decision will remain with the ‘investors’, be they individual or corporate, and will thus exhibit all the disparities of access that characterise existing technologies. Such questions lie at the crux of the info-rich/info-poor debate across the world as well as within individual countries. Most developing countries, except Singapore and Hong Kong, have an average income per head (as measured by the World Bank at purchasing power parity which takes account of international differences in costs of living) at well below the OECD average of US$20,110.

India comes bottom with below $1,000 per head; Poland and Brazil lie seventh and eighth from the bottom at around $5,000 per head. The GDP per head in Africa has grown at only 2.6 per cent over the past ten years, which given its rapid population growth was insufficient to lift real incomes at all (The Economist 1997:138). The disparities between sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world are so great that comparisons seem almost meaningless. There may be eight million documents available on the World Wide Web, but 70 per cent of the host computers are in the US and fewer than ten African countries are connected to the Internet (see Holderness, this volume). A modem in India costs about four times as much as it does in the US, and Internet access can be twelve times more expensive in Indonesia than in the US. While developed nations will gradually increase the range of socio- economic groups that can access global networks, Internet users in developing countries are likely to be confined for many years to a much smaller privileged elite. As in developed economies, this group will naturally increase their awareness and extend their grip on the ‘deep understanding’ and ‘knowing’ which is such an important part of economic differentiation. As those with the deep knowledge dig deeper they inevitably extend their hold on the developing sophistication of systems. Employing the latest and most satisfying version of networking technology requires ongoing, hands-on know-how to maintain its benefits as well as the disposable income to invest in it. Lack of opportunity to access this know-how, as well as lack of cash, will forever keep large populations on the edge of the networking revolution. In developed nations they will get some trickle down as corporations seek outlets for their content, but as observers rather than as richly engaged participants. In poorer countries the ‘superhighway’ is more often than not a long and tortuous dirt-track miles from a made-up road which itself is miles from the nearest medical centre or school. Slow trickle down in some countries will be a matter of policy. Governments such as those in Singapore, Vietnam and China face the paradox of wanting more and more access to the world of WWW documents and images for use by their governing elites, while at the same time seeking ways to stifle or limit the free flow of information which might change their citizens’ view of the political and social system that they currently belong to. The oft-promoted universal virtue of global networks pales somewhat before the private affluence and public poverty that look set to coexist within the noble aims of the Internet movement. In developed economies, Are you on the network? could become as big a social and economic differentiator in the late 1990s as Are you employed? has been in the early 1990s; indeed, the answer to either question might now well depend on your access to the other.

This need not be so. If both nations and supranational bodies like the European Union or The World Bank can find ways of stimulating access to non-profit-purposeful information, information that fuels curiosity and self-education, and encourages animated and involved citizenship (including dissent) in tandem with stimulating the conditions within which private enterprises can better use information to be more competitive, then global networks would indeed be on the road to a ‘universal virtue’. However this would require levels of political commitment and social priority which none of us have seen yet.

The world has always been a place of haves and have-nots and I can see no way that internetworking is going to change this very much. Indeed it has the decidedly ominous potential to increase the sense of alienation that has always made it more difficult for the economically deprived to cross over into higher levels of economic activity. Although the technology trickle-down factor may operate differently in different economic systems, with those systems that favour a mixture of intervention and market forces1 facilitating the liberation of serious benefits to a wide range of citizens, it has always failed to deliver its promises in the UK. Opportunities for the economic liberation of wider population of citizens via technology in the UK have been lost in the mishmash of laissez-faire economics which has passed for public policy since 1979. The United Nations Human Development Report, published in July 1996, shocked us all by showing just how fast inequality has been growing in the UK over the last twenty years. It showed that the poorest 40 per cent of Britons now share a lower proportion of the national wealth—14.6 per cent—than any other western country: this is only marginally better than Russia, the only industrialised nation east or west to have a worse record. The gap between rich and poor in the UK shows a similar degradation, with the richest fifth of Britons enjoying on average incomes ten times as high as the poorest fifth. The poorest fifth of Britons have an average per capita income which is 32 per cent lower than their equivalents in the US and 44 per cent lower than in the Netherlands. During the same month Forbes Magazine in the US highlighted the plight of the worlds 447 dollar billionaires (up from 147 in 1986), the burden of whose combined wealth is now worth more than the annual incomes of at least half the world’s population.

Over two hundred years on from the world’s first iron bridge, technology has failed to deliver the levels of release from poverty and drudgery that its proponents anticipated, and among the developed economies the UK has performed worst. Only the most demented of optimists can expect internetworking to challenge the basis of this kind of society. The differentials run deeper than the deepest cable and they stand every chance of being made worse by the tendency for the ‘haves’ to observe the world from insulated, screen-based cells rather than in among the community outside their front door. The opportunities that easy access to information can bring have never been distributed evenly among the members of any community, rich or poor, large or small. What is probably more important is that despite the convergence of whole range of new technologies, easy access to the information that can really empower and liberate people still looks likely to be the preserve of an affluent minority. Unless the economic sharing of all kinds of information becomes commonplace this discrepancy could occur to such an extent in the future that it will become impossible for the inhabitants of info-rich and info-poor communities to communicate with each other using similar assumptions.

From : From : Loader, Brian D. (ed.). Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency and Policy in The Information Society. Routledge. (page : 21-26)

A Critical Perspective of Technological Development

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By avoiding the more Utopian accounts of the information society thesis, the contributors to this collection have attempted to adopt a critical and perhaps more cautious (although not intransigent) approach to the technologically driven changes currently underway. In particular technological development is seen as being shaped by social, economic and political relations which in turn often produce indeterminate outcomes. From this perspective the explanation for the uneven spread of Information and Communication Technology (ICTs) within and between societies is to be sought from a clearer understanding of the relationship between technological development and differential opportunities for exercising power.

What is important about such an approach is that it foregrounds the role of agency in any debates about technological innovation. Social action and inaction on the part of different groups plays a vital part in the social shaping of technological applications. The existence of the ‘information-poor’ for example may be due to the express desire on the part of some information-advantaged groups to deliberately and systematically exclude them from participation in the wider community. Material benefits to be acquired through electronic communication may therefore be clearly tied to the material conditions of those participating in the network. Without the resources for access, understanding and knowledge to compete in the information marketplace there is little opportunity or incentive for the underclass in advanced societies to have a stake.

This is not to say that those presently excluded can be regarded as passive recipients of technological change, unable to influence its course or direction. The ‘information-poor’ are no more an homogeneous social phenomenon than their wealthier counterparts. Fragmented and divided by gender, race, disability, class, location or religion, their experience of ICTs will vary enormously as will their opportunities to utilise it. Historically however, opposition and social
struggle can often significantly modify, delay and sometimes prevent the introduction of technological ‘solutions’. Again, it is important that we recognise the role played by such agency in the analysis of the restructuring we are experiencing.

Resistance can include, for example, the adoption of ICTs for purposes of empowerment. The hosts of disadvantaged around the world have not tended to participate in the social shaping of technology and have often experienced low-skilled jobs, sickness and oppression as a consequence. Increasingly however, some are arguing that cyberspace offers the liberating possibilities of ‘ordinary’ people constructing new identities which free them from the imposed classifications of class, race, gender or disability associated with material space and place (Haraway 1991; Barlow 1996; Squires 1996). The anonymity experienced through computer-mediated communication ‘is often valued because it creates opportunities to invent alternative versions of one’s self and to engage in untried forms of interaction’ (Baym 1995).

Thus technology may provide the locus for struggle between the social and economic forces for domination and the opposing attempts by others to shape their own identities (Foucault 1980). In this context, agency is expressed through the potential to ‘break out’ of the constraining social relations of family, work and community and forge new, remote relationships in virtual spaces. Communications networks offer the prospect of greater opportunities for finding employment,
seeking advice, challenging orthodoxy, meeting like minds and constructing one’s own sense of self. Entirely new notions of social action, based not upon proximity and shared physical experience but rather on remote networks of common perceptions, may begin to emerge and challenge existing social structures.

For the vast majority of the world’s population, the possibility of constructing virtual identities is entirely dependent upon their material situation. Clearly most people are not free to choose but instead are subject to a variety of social and economic conditions which act to structure and articulate their opportunities for action. Their experiences of the information society are less likely to be those enjoyed by the information elite, which emphasise creativity and remote ‘spanning networks’ (Mulgan et al. 1997) and more likely to be the routine, low-skill and dull jobs of information call-centre workers and isolated teleworkers.

From : Loader, Brian D. (ed.). Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency and Policy in The Information Society. Routledge. (page : 8-10)

Deﬁning Literacy and Cyberliteracy

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What is cyberliteracy? The term literacy is a highly contested one; I will provide a brief overview of this issue to illustrate how I am using the concept. Looking at this overview leads one to the logical conclusion that in the digital age, the concept of literacy must be reconﬁgured if it is to be useful for helping us understand communication in the future.

Kathleen Tyner, in Literacy in a Digital World (1998), provides a succinct overview of the literacy debate. She notes that in general, the term literacy is often equated with the ability to read and write. Before World War II, scholars wrote about “literacy as a tool for transforming higher psychological processes”.

This ideological perspective—that being able to read and write was somehow transformative and brought people to a “higher level” of cognitive ability—valued certain types of ability over others; thus, scholars were making vast judgments about the superiority of one culture over another. Western cultures, living in the post-Gutenberg world of print, were, according to this way of thinking, superior to many traditional, indigenous cultures that communicated their history and cultural knowledge orally (through stories, poetry, song, and so on). As studies of human society became more culturally sensitive, this older view of literacy was hotly contested, and people realized that what “counts” as literacy in one culture may not be the same in another. In a more open view, all forms of discourse from all cultures are also forms of literacy.

And yet, popular understandings of literacy often hearken back to those more biased, simplistic deﬁnitions, valuing reading and print over any other form of communication. This view of literacy is what might be labeled as “performative”: that is, the ability to do something is what counts. We hear about literacy in this way almost every day when we watch the television news or read the paper and learn that people need to become more “computer literate” or “technology literate,” which, translated, usually means that these people need to learn how to use a computer and keyboard. Indeed, this view of literacy is so common that it leaves little room for what I am suggesting: a critical technological literacy, one that includes performance but also relies heavily on people’s ability to understand, criticize, and make judgments about a technology’s interactions with, and effects on, culture.

In addition to literacy as performance, most people understand literacy to mean “print,” and thus we have come to favor the book over the screen. As Welch, Tyner, and others have argued, print dominance has profound implications for higher education, because while students spend hours watching television and playing on the computer, their schoolwork still focuses on printed books.

One way to update this print-limited view of literacy to include electronic texts is to consider the work of Walter Ong. Ong’s notion of “secondary orality” helps describe the language we use on the Internet (email, Usenet news, the Web)—language that is a blend of written and spoken communication.

I would be remiss to discuss Ong’s work without noting its critics. Some people believe that Ong’s analysis of oral and print cultures is biased, suggesting the inevitability of print and the superiority of those who live in the Gutenberg world, and they often draw on the following passage to make their case: “Oral cultures indeed produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth, which are no longer even possible once writing has taken possession of the psyche. Nevertheless, without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations. In this sense, orality needs to produce and is destined to produce writing” (Ong 1988, 14–15). For this sort of thinking, Ong has taken his share of criticism, because these words may be interpreted to favor the white, European, post-Gutenberg world of print over numerous other oral traditions—traditions that are equally powerful and signiﬁcant. He has, however, since modiﬁed his position.

Ong’s concept of secondary orality helps us consider cyberliteracy because it illustrates that electronic communication is in fact different from speech and different from print. A simple analysis of almost any email message illustrates this point. According to Ong, secondary orality combines features of print culture with features of oral culture. Like print, email is typed. It is ﬁxed in a medium, for however long, and like a printed book can be distributed widely. Yet email texts sound more liked typed conversations than printed material. (Spelling and capitalization are often ignored, for example.)

Ong identiﬁes nine features of oral discourse, noting in one example that oral style is “additive rather than subordinative” that is, each sentence builds on the previous one using certain parts of speech and rhythm. Others of Ong’s oral characteristics— aggregative rather than analytical; redundant; conservative; close to the human lifeworld; agonistically toned; empathetic and participatory; homeostatic; situational—are useful in seeing how the “written” e-texts of electronic discussions (like email) resemble both writing and speech.

This analysis helps us see that cyberliteracy is not purely a print literacy, nor is it purely an oral literacy. It is an electronic literacy— newly emerging in a new medium—that combines features of both print and the spoken word, and it does so in ways that change how we read, speak, think, and interact with others. Once we see that online texts are not exactly written or spoken, we begin to understand that cyberliteracy requires a special form of critical thinking. Communication in the online world is not quite like anything else. Written messages, such as letters (even when written on a computer), are usually created slowly and with reﬂection, allowing the writer to think and revise even as the document is chugging away at the printer. But electronic discourse encourages us to reply quickly, often in a more oral style: we blur the normally accepted distinctions (such as writing versus speaking) and conventions (such as punctuation and spelling). Normal rules about writing, editing, and revising a document do not make much sense in this environment. So it is not adequate simply to assume a performative literacy stance and think that if we teach people to use computers, they will become “literate.” Cyberliteracy (again noting Welch) is about consciousness. It is about taking a critical perspective on a technology that is radically
transforming the world.

From : Gurak, Laura J. Cyberliteracy: Navigating the Internet With Awareness. Yale University Press. 2001. (page : 12-16)

The Spatial Turn

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Despite their avid use of spatial metaphors in conceptualizing different kinds of democratic practices, political theorists, have tended to conceptualize space in physiocentric terms: as a natural, given, physical container within which physical bodies move. This framework, I suggested, is what has contributed to the construction of size (territory and population) as a limiting condition in democratic theory: the perennial problem of scale. This fetish about size creates a kind of conceptual impasse, generally committing theorists to a single position somewhere along the “democratic corridor”. The common premise is that participation by citizens is a face-to-face affair. Consequently, citizen participation is most active in a small-scale community and, of necessity, least active in a large-scale society, where the business of administering government is, therefore, best left to elected representatives.

If, however, we understand, following Lefebvre, that social spaces are socially produced, then different ways of conceptualizing participatory spaces become possible. Barber’s sense that political community is grounded in a space of communication (1984, 246‒48) contributes to this understanding, although he winds up, yet again, privileging face-to-face encounters in neighborhood assemblies as the font of an illusive intimacy and social bond that ostensibly are necessary qualities for the exercise of civic virtue. I am not suggesting we eschew the search for the source, quality, and even the meaning of “civic virtue,” but part of what I ﬁnd problematic about this enterprise is that it often leads theorists to make a number of normative claims about the kinds of relationships in which people should invest themselves for the sake of a “return” to a more enriching, because participatory, democratic idyll (Shulman 1983). Lamenting the so-called loss of small, associational spaces and then proposing some sort of (ultimately utopian) return to them is a fruitless endeavor. Instead of dictating where people should situate themselves in order to become more civic minded, something of the ethnographic spirit of “following the natives” (to put it indelicately) is needed in democratic political theory. As the foregoing analysis indicates, political theorists should perhaps begin by rethinking their conception of space. Social spaces are not simply physical; they are also produced by how we imagine them and by how we inhabit them. The analysis of hardware and software suggests that we need, as well, to broaden our understandings of the physical.Our studies should include not just spatial practices engendered by the movements of atoms and bodies, but also those involving the movements of electrons and bits, which include transnational data transmissions, speedy movements, perfect copies, invisible electrical ﬂows, and indirect effects.Having rethought what counts as a social space, theorists might then do well to explore those currently existing social spaces where different kinds of people are every day constructing sometimes new frameworks of sociality (some face-to-face, some not).

One additional consequence of the sense that social spaces are socially produced is that such spaces tend to proliferate. If, then, democratic politics are always closely linked to the social spaces through which they occur, then it may be a little shortsighted for theorists to advocate one kind of democratic practice as the best or truest form of democracy.What we may ﬁnd, in fact, is that we have been, all along, practicing a kind of mixed democracy: a combination of participatory democracy in some social spaces (not necessarily small, local, face-to-face spaces) and of representative democracy in other social spaces (again, not necessarily large, national, impersonal spaces). This implies a less unitary sense of public, political space: indeed, what it calls for is a sense of “a multiplicity of publics” and the need to “theorize the relations among them” (Fraser
1993, 136‒37). Looking at the ways in which electronic networking spaces overlie and become part of our conventional social spaces may help us to theorize these relations among multiple publics.As the concept of heterotopia ultimately foregrounds, social spaces cannot really be studied in isolation from each other (assuming even that one can carefully delineate their boundaries). Rather, more is learned about political practices and possibilities by analyzing the ways social spaces impact on each other.

In particular, the concept of heterotopia suggests ways in which a spatial theory of social change might be developed. My analysis gestures toward that. It offers a view of cyberspace as a space of “an alternate ordering” (Hetherington 1997, 9), where, because different spatial practices, concepts, and uses are at work than in conventionally physical spaces, that comparison or juxtaposition between physical and virtual can provide, in Foucault’s words, “a pure experience of order” (1994b, xxi). It can bring to awareness the process of ordering itself, calling into question what might have seemed fairly “concrete” assumptions about the orders of physical space. Like Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone (arguably another kind of heterotopic space), the productive ambiguities of cyberspace have “submitted for your consideration” a number of core concepts in political and social theory, including the very meanings of participation, of face-to-face, of here and there, and even of self. I am not suggesting, as have some observers (both critics and pundits), that cyberspace has created a state of chaos for everything we used to hold dear. Rather, as Hetherington suggests, a heterotopia provides new instances of both freedom and order.We may ﬁnd ourselves “free” from some of the dictates of the movement of atoms (e.g., bodiless), but the ﬂow of electrons in cyberspace follows certain orders as well, and it is the nature and impact of this different ordering that must be researched more fully.

From : From : Saco, Diana. Cybering Democracy: Public Space and The Internet. University of Minnesota Press. 2002. (page : 200-202)

Space, Technology, and the Body

2009-11-25T09:40:00.000+07:00

“Politics,” Stone observes, “works through physical bodies” (Leeson 1996, 114). Indeed, as Foucault’s own work has shown, relations of power in contemporary societies are manifested in a variety of disciplinary techniques that are organized around the visibility of the body. To the extent this is so, physical presence before others is a rather risky venture. The paradigmatic ideal for a kind of participatory democracy, however, has been the agora: an ostensibly egalitarian physical space where citizens could have a say, in part because they were physically present, there in the ﬂesh. Being seen,making an appearance before fellow citizens, was a necessary (though not sufﬁcient) condition for becoming empowered, for being a political actor. In one respect,Oguibe’s story participates in this ideal. The story he tells is fundamentally about how people are disempowered by being excluded from certain spaces, such as cyberspace. Even while he criticizes utopian claims about the democratic potentials of cyberspace, however, he makes the following challenge: “[T]hat we begin to explore with greater seriousness and humanism [the] means of extending the numerous, practical possibilities of this new technology to the greater majority of humanity” (1996). Hence, despite his criticisms, the technology still retains for him a certain emancipatory promise, which is why it needs, in his account, to be democratized, made accessible to others. Foucault reminds us, however, that if invisibility is disempowering, visibility is a trap (1979, 200). Being seen always comes at a price.

The politics of cyberspace, I want to suggest, foreground these ambiguities in salient ways.Whether by enabling a virtual anatomized body that becomes a quasi-medical exploratory space or by enabling computer forums peopled by virtual personae, computer networking creates virtual spaces and bodies and, in the process, dispenses (with) physical spaces and bodies. The latter, furthermore, should be understood in multiple senses: cyberspace creates, administers, distributes, draws from,manages without, and disposes of physical spaces and bodies. Because cyberspace seems a largely nonphysical phenomenon, however, calling it a space—in the context of our more common understanding of space as physical, Euclidean (i.e., three-dimensional) space—may seem no more than a rhetorical analogy. After all, one cannot walk in cyberspace the way that one can, for example, walk in a city. Not with standing this difference, I resist the dismissal of cyberspace as no more than a metaphorical ﬁction. In fact, the term cyberspace evokes a stronger, ontological claim that net- working really is a kind of space, even if it is (almost) entirely a “consensual hallucination” (Gibson 1984, 5). This claim, of course, depends on a different spatiality than is evoked by the notion of physical bodies in physical spaces. Indeed, those of us concerned with understanding the
political implications “of the digital era,” as William Mitchell asserts, “must begin by retheorizing the body in space” (1995, 28).

I draw on Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) work on the production of social space to show how social spaces are, in fact, not just physical but also mental and lived, i.e., they are composed of perceptual movements, conceptual blueprints, and experiential trajectories. Cyberspace, I argue, is the effect of a similar combination of components. My point is not, however, that cyberspace is exactly like all other social spaces; rather, I argue that it is an other space: a heterotopia. Foucault offered, but never fully theorized, the concept of heterotopia as a countersite that challenges the normalized ordering of the spaces to which it relates. Drawing from other recent work on heterotopias (Hetherington 1997), I develop that concept in more detail as a framework for understanding the speciﬁc ways in which cyberspace confounds our more conventionally physical spaces.

Still, because cyberspace is not the sort of space in which physical bodies can meet face-to-face,
16 it seems, on this self-evident criterion, to be incompatible with claims about its utopian promise for a new Athenian style of democracy. The linchpin here is space itself and how it has been
conceptualized in democratic theory. I foreground the conceptualizations of space that have plagued theories of democracy, contributing to the construction of “the problem of scale,” of the optimum size of a polity beyond which claims to a participatory democracy must be given up as chimera. Focusing on the public-realm theories of Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, I show how their respective works presupposed more elaborate spatial strategies and a more complex understanding of spatiality—not to mention a more decisive displacement of the body and its needs—than many political theorists have remarked.What emerges from Arendt’s and Habermas’s theories are concepts of public spaces that in fact are more compatible with the bodiless exultation of cyberspace than they might seem, particularly in light of their relentless critiques of modern technology and the mass media, respectively.

Such criticisms of technology, of course, are not unique to these theorists. Indeed, until quite recently, computers were typically feared as institutional tools that displaced workers, under the rubric of automation, and that reduced individuals to numerical entries on bureaucratic red tape, under the rubric of efﬁciency.What is remarkable in this context is how computers could come to be seen, since about the early 1980s, as a source of individual empowerment and democratic communication. This puzzle is my point of departure, where I turn to a more detailed analysis of the spatiality of cyberspace. Drawing from Lefebvre’s three-part framework for the study of social spaces (physical, conceptual, and lived), I organize my analysis around a comparable framework for the study of cyberspace: namely, hardware, software, and wetware (the human element). I focuses on the technological components (hardware and software) to show how innovations in computer technology—from electronic mainframes in the late 1940s, to distributed networks and packet-switching in the late 1960s, to the microprocessor and personal computers in the 1970s and 1980s—contributed, successively, to the production of cyberspace. I conclude that with a discussion of Gibson’s concept of cyberspace to show how it helped shape a cybercultural community by conceptually locating it. His conceptualization, however, differs signiﬁcantly from how the term he coined has been taken up by others. These observations provide a segue, where I explore Internet culture in more detail, focusing on how different online practices have helped ﬁnally to produce cyberspace as a social space, one that brings together incommensurable phenomena and with heterotopic implications for the more conventionally physical spaces around it. The jumble of institutional and individual linkages and of local and global connections over the Internet, for example, creates contradictory possibilities both positively for international democratic activism and negatively for new forms of covert government surveillance and control. Similarly, the play of embodiment ofﬂine (the computer as prosthetic device) and disembodiment online (the computer as electronic screen) creates the conditions both for nondiscriminatory modes of public communication and also for potentially exploitative deceptions, such as those computer cross-dressers who lie about their sex as part of a malicious con.

Of particular signiﬁcance for notions of democratic citizenship, is the related mix of visibility/invisibility that computer networking enables. These ambiguities, I argue, have engendered different politics of space evident in competing metaphors to respatialize cyberspace: that is, as Information Superhighway or as Electronic Frontier. I analyze these metaphorical blueprints as they have shaped the U.S. encryption debate. That debate, I argue, is illustrative of the key issues. It has been characterized, implicitly (and begrudgingly), as a successful instance of electronic activism (Wright 1995), and it also, substantively, concerns the politics of visibility (through surveillance) and invisibility (through encryption) that computers and networking have ambivalently enabled, highlighting, as well, the implications of these politics for state apparatuses of security,for individual liberty, and for democratic empowerment.

In the conclusion, ﬁnally, I return explicitly to the three concepts of space, technology, and the body, foregrounding in summary fashion some of the more salient points that can be drawn from the preceding arguments and highlighting implications for democratic theory and practice. I argue that understanding how these three concepts ﬁgure into our social and political practices is critical to developing democratic theories that are relevant to our era and our circumstances.Anything less runs the risk of proffering a nostalgic sense of loss for an ideal participatory space that existed, if at all, only for a privileged few. The overriding point of my analysis is that cyberspace, for all its apparent nonmateriality, is a new kind of social space that enables interactions and practices speciﬁc to its own physical laws: ones based primarily on electromagnetic forces. This speciﬁcity is what must be researched, cataloged, inspected: indeed, made visible.

The electronic domain of computer networking is certainly an other space in relation to the more familiar spaces we embody daily. At a minimum, it is a space devoid of meat—of the body—and cannot therefore be fully inhabited. As that observation suggests, however, cyberspace, despite its challenges, cannot replace physical spaces and bodies; it can at best supplement and perhaps modify them. How cyberspace constitutes spaces and bodies differently is the crux of the matter for understanding its relation to politics, egalitarian or otherwise. That it harbors the potential for both emancipatory and repressive practices is in my view undeniable and should make us not simply ambivalent, but rather enterprising with respect to the former possibility and vigilant in the face of the latter.

From : Saco, Diana. Cybering Democracy: Public Space and The Internet. University of Minnesota Press. 2002.

Cyberpower as a Possession

2009-11-24T13:02:00.000+07:00

If we think about all the tales that are relevant to the nature of individual cyberpower, we can see they all embody a notion of personal empowerment. In the myth of Julie, Sanford became a woman to experience conversations he desired and, until the deception was revealed, Julie provided support to a number of women. In cybersex, people can experiment and explore in ways they cannot do offline. In institutions, cyberspace can reorder hierarchies to benefit individuals. Even where it is not clear that empowerment is all that is on offer, the power of the individual still seems to dominate cyberspace. In the flame war between alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats, both communities were first empowered to exist—that is, to find other people committed to discussions about tastelessness or cats—but alt.tasteless then had the ability to invade rec.pets.cats. Online cat lovers found themselves losing the community cyberspace had allowed in the first place, but in kill files they engaged with each individual attacker. When cat lovers battled within cyberspace the battle was with individuals, not the collective of alt.tasteless.

Power continually appears as a possession that individuals have to greater or lesser extent. Whether others like it or not, identity fluidity supports the masquerades and experiments of avatars. Whether others like it or not, renovated hierarchies mean greater expertise and more inclusive forms of decision making. These flows of power produce little pieces of power—the ability to change gender, the ability to contact experts—that individuals take up and possess, utilising them to impose their will. For example, Sanford was able to utilise identity fluidity successfully to create an alternate life in the avatar Julie or Philcat was able to gain expertise. Power here is only apparent in its effects, in its realisation against resistance; like any possession it lies dormant in the pocket until the individual calls it into action. Sanford’s initial reason for creating Julie was to gain access to women’s conversations denied to him as a man. He found and utilised the power of identity fluidity against the emotional resistance of women to men. When any of these individual possessions of power, of the capacity for action, are systematised, then forms of domination emerge.

In the flame war between alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats, the individual actions of those from alt.tasteless, each avatar utilising both identity fluidity (concealing their lack of concern for cats) and renovated hierarchies (even with kill files they could not be kept out), eventually culminated in the domination of rec.pets.cats. Trolling is another example. When trolling is used systematically to establish boundaries between those who can recognise and enjoy a good troll from those who cannot, then a system of dominance appears out of the individual actions of those able to indulge in trolling because of the powers they possess in cyberspace.

The form of cyberpower that emerges when we take the obvious starting point for analysis of cyberspace, the individual in front of the screen, is cyberpower as a virtual possession. This cyberpower, first, underpins the ability to impose an intention or a will on someone or something else, second, is only realised against resistance and, third, may accumulate into systems of domination. By beginning from the common sense view of cyberspace we find the common sense view of power. Cyberpower from this perspective consists of three elements in constant circulation with each other—identity fluidity, renovated hierarchies, informational spaces—that each articulate a sense of power being a possession one avatar can utilise for or against another avatar. This is the abstract picture of cyberpower from the perspective of the individual and it gives rise not only to the wonderful forms of social and cultural life already examined but also to a distinctive form of politics. This cyberpolitics, flowing from cyberpower as individualised possession, is strung across the two axes of access to cyberspace and individual rights within
cyberspace. Exploring these axes completes the analysis of cyberpower at the level of the individual in cyberspace.

From : Jordan, Tim. Cyberpower : The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet. Routledge. 1999 (page : 88-89)

Sojourn to the Digital Public Sphere for the Millennium and Beyond

2009-11-22T20:45:00.000+07:00

This survey of select historic black presses’ migration to the Internet clearly reveals their commitment to continue the struggle for black political, social, ultural, and economic survival and prosperity well into the digital age. What the online incarnations of the Afro American, Indianapolis Recorder, Charlotte Post, and Philadelphia Tribune newspapers represent, besides a corrective to a presumption of black technophobia, is African Americans’ robust technological participation in the nation’s postmodern public sphere or what Nancy Fraser more accurately sees as an agglomeration of many “counterpublics.”

These presses, in print and online, exemplify Fraser’s challenge to Marxist critic Jürgen “Habermas’s account of the bourgeois conception of the public sphere [that] stresses its claim to be open and accessible to all,” when women and men of racialized ethnicities of all classes were excluded on racial grounds (56–80). Moreover, they seem to confirm Houston Baker’s black revisionist notion of the Habermasian public sphere ideal. For Baker, the fact that blacks might find attractive or believable the notion of a public sphere, predicated on a system of property ownership and literacy, is ifficult at best. But, following Fraser, Baker sees the potential for transcending these limitations, specifically for black communities. Baker recognizes that frican Americans;

And it is the expressive, self-fashioning, and emancipatory potential of the Internet, at this still-nascent moment, that enables the historic black press to affect a structural transformation of publicity to disseminate widely black counterhegemonic interpretations of local and global events, thus bearing out Baker’s black public-sphere thesis. For example, as the Clinton/Lewinsky affair and the subsequent impeachment trial became scandalous fodder for newsprint and the airwaves, the white mainstream presses tended to portray the African American community as an essentialized, pro-Clinton bloc of political lemmings, pathetically dispossessed of critical consciousness. It is true that the presses’ online editions carried impeachment stories, but, as the Recorder demonstrates, this national story of political intrigue receded to the background as the paper’s “Top Stories” were local ones. The home page’s feature stories were “Madame Walker Center Honors Business” and “NNPA [Nation Negro Publishers’ Association] National Briefs,” as Amos Brown’s satirical engagement with the issue, discussed above, became one item among many in the 1998 year-end review of news. And though Brown’s discourse of equivalence between “The Radical Republican Lynching/Impeachment of President Clinton” and the historic acts of Ku Klux Klan terror against African Americans conveys a nuanced sense of many black people’s objection to the impeachment, Samuel F. Yette, columnist for the Philadelphia Tribune, puts a finer touch on the issue. In his article “Clinton’s Attack on Iraq Shows He Is Out of Control,” Yette gives voice to that independent segment of the black community that the mainstream press routinely puts under erasure in its essentializing discourse on blackness. Discussing Clinton’s strained credibility following the political fallout over the Lewinisky matter, Yette expresses this skepticism about Clinton’s ill-timed attack on Iraq:

Even though Yette’s article bears the customary editorial disclaimer that accompanies controversial or polemical positions espoused by writers, the fact that the Tribune cybercast Yette’s views at all bears out Houston Baker’s views about the viability and legitimacy of a black public sphere. With the growing power and dominance of global media conglomerates, it is evident that the revolutionary digital public sphere developing in cyberspace represents the hope and promise for the ongoing survival of the independent black presses, established ones and upstarts alike.

Where established black cyberpresses such as the Post, the Recorder, the Afro-American, the Tribune, Ebony, and Jet (among others) provide a necessary link to the past and its lessons, newer ones such as the Capital Times, the Conduit, One Magazine, and even the journal Callaloo, became temporary autonomous zones or beacons lighting the pathways of progress to bright futures for black publishing online. As it stands, the black press presence in cyberspace is promising indeed; it remains to be seen, however, whether the Internet and this counterpublic will continue to coevolve in the new global information economy. Yet these examples represent a tiny fraction of online black presses to date, particularly, when Yahoo put the number at more than two hundred thousand in 1999. If the history of the black press is its prologue, despite the demise of the Capital Times, the Conduit, One Magazine, and other newer black-oriented journalistic websites, then we can be confident that the story of the black press in cyberspace will persist and be regenerative.

From : Everett, Anna. Digital DIaspora: A Race For Cyberspace. SUNY Press. 2009 (page : 105-108)

Hyperreality and Virtual Reality

2009-11-19T22:41:00.000+07:00

Perhaps most notable within the debates about postmodernism and CMC has been the prominence of Jean Baudrillard’s exposition of ‘hyperreality’ (1988) as it relates to the development of cyberspace and especially the potential capabilities of virtual reality technologies. Although based primarily upon mass communications media, Baudrillard’s contention that such technologies are constructing an entirely new social environment, an electronic reality, has clear resonance for those proclaiming that cyberspace represents an alternative, virtual reality. In contrast to cyber-libertarians, Baudrillard is unlikely, however, to find solace in the electronic frontier: his is a dystopic view of future technological change.

For Baudrillard and his followers, media communications technologies have been responsible in the past for hiding reality behind a veil of signs, images and symbols which constitute such processes of commodification, propaganda and advertising. The immense persuasiveness of such media have contributed to the condition of what he describes as the ‘ecstasy of communication’: an environment composed of simulations of images which have no base in reality: a ‘hyperreality’ (1983). The fantasy worlds of Disneyland and Disney World and the American cities of Las Vegas and Los Angeles are for Baudrillard examples of hyperreality where copy and fabrication become reality.

In the hyperreality of cyberspace it is contended that time, place and individual identity are separated from modernist physical locations. That virtual reality technology, at present in its infancy, will develop to enable computer-generated simulated environments where individuals will be able to interact through iconic identities which they may change at will. Feminists such as Donna Haraway have been eager to explore how such hyperreality may enable ‘imagining a world without gender’ (1985: 66). Such virtual empowerment further offers the opportunity for emancipation from the domination of otherphysical attributes such as disability and skin colour.

Such visions however have been treated with caution concerning technological capabilities (see, for example Schroeder, this volume) and even rejected as psychotic in their desire to construct and inhabit a fantasy world. Kevin Robins points out that ‘such empowerment entails a refusal to recognise the substantive and independent reality of others and to be involved in relations of mutual dependency and responsibility.’ He continues later that ‘it is the continuity of grounded identity that underpins and underwrites moral obligation and commitment’ (1995:144–5). As has already been suggested, such self- referential individuality seems unlikely to lead to the kind of mutual supporting virtual communities based on equality which some celebrants of virtual reality proclaim.

Instead, Baudrillard’s analysis may suggest that the governance of cyberspace at one level is essentially bound up with the creation, maintenance and contestability of the metaphors, icons, symbols and mores which influence the conduct of computer-mediated communication (CMC). I am reminded here of the ubiquitous Microsoft toolbars and icons which are instantly recognisable around the world and which with the launch of Windows 95 will doubtless attempt to colonise the Internet. Indeed, it is somewhat ironic that many of those who champion the libertarian credentials of the new ICTs now find themselves engaged in a kind of Habermasian contest to defend the earlier text-based interaction, which they believe promulgates democratic participation, against commercial interests which are portrayed as hell-bent upon commodifying political discourse in cyberspace (Habermas, 1989; Rheingold, 1994).

From : Loader, Brian D (ed.). The Governance of Cyberspace. Routledge. 1997. (page: 10-11)

Modernism Versus Postmodernism

2009-11-18T20:32:00.000+07:00

When the topic of "postmodernism" is discussed in "deconstructivist" circles, it is obligatory—a sign of good manners, so to speak—to begin with a negative reference to Habermas, with a kind of distancing from him. In complying with this custom, we would like to add a new twist: to propose that Habermas is himself postmodernist, although in a peculiar way, without knowing it. To sustain this thesis, we will question the very way Habermas constructs the opposition between modernism (defined by its claim to a universality of reason, its refusal of the authority of tradition, its acceptance of rational argument as the only way to defend conviction, its ideal of a communal life guided by mutual understanding and recognition and by the absence of constraint) and postmodernism (defined as the "deconstruction" of this claim to universality, from Nietzsche to "poststructuralism''; the endeavor to prove that this claim to universality is necessarily, constitutively "false," that it masks a particular network of power relations; that universal reason is as such, in its very form, "repressive" and "totalitarian"; that its truth claim is nothing but an effect of a series of rhetorical figures. This opposition is simply false: for what Habermas describes as "postmodernism" is the immanent obverse of the modernist project itself; what he describes as the tension between modernism and postmodernism is the immanent tension that has defined modernism from its very beginning.

Was not the aestheticist, antiuniversalist ethics of the individual's shaping his life as a work of art always part of the modernist project? Is the genealogic unmasking of universal categories and values, the calling into question of the universality of reason not a modernist procedure par excellence? Is not the very essence of theoretical modernism, the revelation of the "effective contents" behind the "false consciousness" (of ideology, of morality, of the ego), exemplified by the great triad of Marx-Nietzsche-Freud? Is not the ironic, self-destructive gesture by means of which reason recognizes in itself the force of repression and domination against which it fights—the gesture at work from Nietzsche to Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment—is not this gesture the supreme act of modernism? As soon as fissures appear in the unquestionable authority of tradition, the tension between universal reason and the particular contents escaping its grasp is inevitable and irreducible.

The line of demarcation between modernism and postmodernism must, then, lie elsewhere. Ironically, it is Habermas himself who, on account of certain crucial features of his theory, belongs to postmodernism: the break between the first and the second generation of the Frankfurt school, that is, between Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse on the one side and Habermas on the other, corresponds precisely to the break between modernism and postmodernism. In Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, in Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, in their unmasking of the repressive potential of "instrumental reason," aiming at a radical revolution in the historical totality of the contemporary world and at the utopian abolition of the difference between "alienated" life spheres, between art and "reality," the modernist project reaches its zenith of self-critical fulfillment. Habermas is, on the other hand, postmodern precisely because he recognizes a positive condition of freedom and emancipation in what appeared to modernism as the very form of alienation: the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere, the functional division of different social domains, etc. This renunciation of the modernist utopia, this acceptance of the fact that freedom is possible only on the basis of a certain fundamental "alienation,'' attests to the fact that we are in a postmodernist universe.

This confusion concerning the break between modernism and postmodernism comes to a critical point in Habermas's diagnosis of poststructuralist deconstructionism as the dominant form of contemporary philosophical postmodernism. The use of the prefix "post-" in both cases should not lead us astray (especially if we take into account the crucial but usually overlooked fact that the very term "poststructuralism," although designating a strain of French theory, is an Anglo-Saxon and German invention. The term refers to the way the Anglo-Saxon world perceived and located the
theories of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, etc.—in France itself, nobody uses the term "poststructuralism"). Deconstructionism is a modernist procedure par excellence; it presents perhaps the most radical version of the logic of "unmasking" whereby the very unity of the experience of meaning is conceived as the effect of signifying mechanisms, an effect that can take place only insofar as it ignores the textual movement that produced it. It is only with Lacan that the "postmodernist" break occurs, insofar as he thematizes a certain real, traumatic kernel whose status remains deeply ambiguous: the real resists symbolization, but it is at the same time its own retroactive product. In this sense we could even say that deconstructionists are basically still "structuralists" and that the only "poststructuralist" is Lacan, who affirms enjoyment as "the real Thing," the central impossibility around which every signifying network is structured.

From : Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. (page : 86-87)

Fantasy as a Support of Reality

2009-11-17T12:17:00.000+07:00

This problem must be approached from the Lacanian thesis that it is only in the dream that we come close to the real awakening - that is, to the Real of our desire. When Lacan says that the last support of what we call 'reality' is a fantasy, this is definitely not to be understood in the sense of 'life is just a dream', 'what we call reality is just an illusion', and so forth. We find such a theme in many science-fiction stories: reality as a generalized dream or illusion. The story is usually told from the perspective of a hero who gradually makes the horrifying discovery that all the people around him are not really human beings but some kind of automatons, robots, who only look and act like real human beings; the final point of these stories is of course the hero's discovery that he himself is also such an automaton and not a real human being. Such a generalized illusion is impossible: we find the same paradox in a well-known drawing by Escher of two hands drawing each other.

The Lacanian thesis is, on the contrary, that there is always a hard kernel, a leftover which persists and cannot be reduced to a universal play of illusory mirroring. The difference between Lacan and 'naive realism' is that for Lacan, the only point at which we approach this hard kernel of the Real is indeed the dream. When we awaken into reality after a dream, we usually say to ourselves 'it was just a dream', thereby blinding ourselves to the fact that in our everyday, wakening reality we are nothing but a conciousness of this dream. It was only in the dream that we approached the fantasy-framework which determines our activity, our mode of acting in reality itself.

It is the same with the ideological dream, with the determination of ideology as a dreamlike construction hindering us from seeing the real state of things, reality as such. In vain do we try to break out of the ideological dream by 'opening our eyes and trying to see reality as it is', by throwing away the ideological spectacles: as the subjects of such a post-ideological, objective, sober look, free of so-called ideological prejudices, as the subjects of a look which views the facts as they are, we remain throughout 'the consciousness of our ideological dream'. The only way to break the power of our ideological dream is to confront the Real of our desire which announces itself in this dream.

Let us examine anti-Semitism. It is not enough to say that we must liberate ourselves of so-called 'anti-Semitic prejudices' and learn to see Jews as they really are - in this way we will certainly remain victims of these so-called prejudices. We must confront ourselves with how the ideological figure of the 'Jew' is invested with our unconscious desire, with how we have constructed this figure to escape a certain deadlock of our desire.

Let us suppose, for example, that an objective look would confirm why not? - that Jews really do financially exploit the rest of the population, that they do sometimes seduce our young daughters, that some of them do not wash regularly. Is it not clear that this has nothing to do with the real roots of our anti-Semitism? Here, we have only to remember the Lacanian proposition concerning the pathologically jealous husband: even if all the facts he quotes in support of his jealousy are true, even if his wife really is sleeping around with other men, this does not change one bit the fact that his jealousy is a pathological, paranoid construction.

Let us ask ourselves a simple question: In the Germany of the late 1930s, what would be the result of such a non-ideological, objective approach? Probably something like: 'The Nazis are condemning the Jews too hastily, without proper argument, so let us take a cool, sober look and see if they are really guilty or not; let us see if there is some truth in the accusations against them.' Is it really necessary to add that such an approach would merely confirm our so-called 'unconscious prejudices' with additional rationalizations? The proper answer to anti-Semitism is therefore not 'Jews are really not like that' but 'the anti-Semitic idea of Jew has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of a Jew is a way to stitch up the inconsistency of our own ideological system'.

That is why we are also unable to shake so-called ideological prejudices by taking into account the pre-ideological level of everyday experience. The basis of this argument is that the ideological construction always finds its limits in the field of everyday experience - that it is unable to reduce, to contain, to absorb and annihilate this level. Let us again take "a typical individual in Germany in the late 1930s. He is bombarded by anti-Semitic propaganda depicting a Jew as a monstrous incarnation of Evil, the great wire-puller, and so on. But when he returns home he encounters Mr Stern, his neighbour, a good man to chat with in the evenings, whose children play with his. Does not this everyday experience offer an irreducible resistance to the ideological construction?

The answer is, of course, no. If everyday experience offers such a resistance, then the anti-Semitic ideology has not yet really grasped us.

An ideology is really 'holding us' only when we do not feel any opposition between it and reality - that is, when the ideology succeeds in determining the mode of our everyday experience of reality itself. How then would our poor German, if he were a good anti-Semite, react to this gap between the ideological figure of the Jew (schemer, wire-puller, exploiting our brave men, and so on) and the common everyday experience of his good neighbour, Mr Stern? His answer would be to turn this gap, this discrepancy itself, into an argument for anti-Semitism: 'You see how dangerous they really are? It is difficult to recognize their real nature. They hide it behind the mask of everyday appearance - and it is exactly this hiding of one's real nature, this duplicity, that is a basic feature of the Jewish nature.' An ideology really succeeds when even the facts which at first sight contradict it start to function as arguments in its favour.

From : Zizek, Slavoj. Mapping Ideology. VERSO. London.

The Global Digital Divide

2009-11-16T20:56:00.001+07:00

The network society is creating parallel communication systems: one for those with income, education and - literally - connections, giving plentiful information at low cost and high speed; the other for those without connections, blocked by high barriers of time, cost and uncertainty and dependent on outdated information. (UNDP, 1999: 63)

The principle of equality meets in the literature and debates about ICTs with a great deal of consensus. As the Independent Commission for World Wide Telecommunications Development (1984) states, it is in the interest of humanity that the majority of the world population is not excluded from the use of new technologies. The Commission, chaired by Sir Donald Maitland, writes in his report The Missing Link, 'that by the early part of the next century virtually the whole ofmankind should be brought within the reach of a telephone' (1986: 4). Yet, there seems general agreement in the scientific literature and in public policy statements that the leT gap between the developed and developing countries is widening and that thishinders the integration of all countries into the so-called Global Information Society. Nowhere in the world have the aspirations of the
Maitland report been achieved. Universal access has not been realized anywhere in the world! For some 5.7 billion people there are one billion telephone lines. In some 500 million households (34 per cent of the total in the world) there is a telephone. Early 1997 62 per cent of all telephone lines installed were in 23 rich countries with less than 15 per cent of the world's population. Although over half the population of poor countries lives in rural areas, some 80 per cent of all telephones are connected in the urban areas.

Unequal access holds for all new networks and services. In rich countries one finds 84 per cent of cellular phone users, 91 per cent of fax machines and 97 per cent of all Internet host computers. In 1999 there are an estimated 170 million people with access to the Internet. This represents some 4 per cent of the world population. Over 80 per cent are in North America and Europe.

Another indicator of present disparities are revenues from telecommunications services. In 1996 they reached a world total of US$620 billion. Europe, the USA and Japan combined 77 per cent of these revenues and the African countries a mere 1.5 per cent. Investments in the telecommunications sector show a similar distribution. In 1996 the world total is worth US$166 billion. Europe, the USA and Japan are responsible for 67 per cent of these investments and Africa for 1.7 per cent (ITU,
1998a).

The expenditures for electronic data processing per capita of the population show great variety across the world. In 1995 the world average was US$46. In the USA these expenditures were US$315, in Japan US$400, in Singapore US$1,500, in Brazil US$39, in Thailand US$29, and in India US$O.87 (Mansell and Wehn, 1998: 35). Large disparities can also be seen in the world trading of ICT. In 1996 the share in worldwide computer equipment imports for the USA, japan, Germany and the UK alone was 60 per cent. The share in worldwide computer equipment exports for the USA, Singapore, japan and the UK was 57 per cent. The share in tele communications equipment exports for the USA, japan, Germany, the UK, Sweden and Singapore was 60 per cent. The share in telecommunications equipment imports for the USA, Hong Kong, the UK, japan, Germany, China and Singapore was 58 per cent. The share in world imports of sound and TV recorders for the USA, Hong Kong, Germany, the UK and japan
was 67 per cent. The shares on the world market for computer software in 1996 of the USA (46.2 per cent), japan (11.4 per cent), Germany (8.6 per cent) and the UK (5.7 per cent) combined to 72 per cent.

Whatever the economic benefits of ICT deployment may be, at the present time the worldwide distribution of ICT resources is enormously unequal. In terms of availability, accessibility and affordability of equipment and services as well as the mastery of technical and managerial skills there are great disparities between affluent and developing countries, but also between different social groups within all countries. In the United States, for example, the 'digital divide' follows a clear geographic pattern: 'The West Coast and Eastern Seaboard from New Hampshire to Virginia are at the forefront of the 21st Century Economy. The Deep South and
the upper Midwest lag far behind' (Business Week, 2 August 1999: 39).

The present disparity is no new phenomenon. When new technologies are introduced in societies the chances to benefit from them are always unequally distributed. Some people will benefit, others will mainly experience the negative impact. This is a recurrent pattern. When a technology that promises financial benefits is introduced in social situations where unequal power relations prevail, a small group will enjoy advantages and the majority will often experience regressive development. Access to the global network society is mainly available to those with good education and those living in the OECD countries with sufficient disposable income.

In most countries men dominate access to the Internet and young people are more likely to have access than the elderly. Ethnicity is an important factor and in many countries the differences in use by ethnic groups has widened: 'English is used in almost 80 per cent of Websites and in the common user interfaces - the graphics and instructions. Yet less than 1 in 10 people worldwide speaks the language' (UNDP, 1999: 62).

From : Hamelink, Cees J. The Ethics of Cyberspace. SAGE Publications. 2000 (page : 81-82)

A Review of Western Literacy Technologies

2009-11-15T17:23:00.000+07:00

To be cyberliterate means that we need to understand the relationship between our communication technologies and ourselves, our communities, and our cultures. It may be hard to see the effects of the Internet and cyberspace on our daily lives, in large part because we are living in the midst of these changes. Already we take so much for granted. Email messages containing photos of your family in another state; real-time chats and instant messages; Web sites for almost every product, service, and idea imaginable—these features have quickly become part of our daily landscape. And even as these technologies shift into different shapes (new versions of software, faster Internet connections), they continue to affect how we view the world. Tyner’s observation is astute: “Some literacy technologies atrophy from widespread disuse, but the conventions they foster in form and content may linger for centuries” (1998, 40). Cutting and pasting, kerning, the standard size of a page (81 / 2 #11 inches)—all these ideas come from an older print technology but have made their way into new technologies like word processing and Web page design.

Many people have become familiar with the standard litany of communication technologies in Western history: most books about the Internet have sections that describe the printing press, telegraph, radio, telephone, television, and so on. Each particular narrative paints a story to the author’s liking, but most suggest in some way or another that these technologies led us to where we are today. The idea that today’s Internet is a direct descendent of Gutenberg was canonized when the Arts and Entertainment cable channel, in October 1999, named the thirteenth-century inventor and craftsman the “#1 person in the millennium” (after a long countdown of the “top 100”). Yet what is often missing from these popularized accounts is a look at the relationship between communication technologies, cultures, and worldviews. Many scholars (Walter Ong, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Arnold Pacey—to name just a few) have observed these relationships between our tools and our times. Inorder to gain perspective on cyberliteracy, it is useful to revisit the history of communication technologies and look at how these technologies have altered cultures.

In the Western story of literacy and technology, we often begin by looking at the stone counting devices used by ancient peoples to keep track of commerce, such as the sale of domesticated animals or grain (Faigley 1999). These technologies created what David Kaufer and Kathleen Carley (1993) call a “technological situation . . . a set of available [communication] technologies and their distribution across individuals in the society” (99). Along with word of mouth and memory, farmers and tradespeople could rely on these in scribed pieces of clay to remind them who owed them a sheep or some wheat or barley. This technology increased the “reach” of communication, because individuals did not need to be near each other to have a record of their transaction. A similar discussion takes place around the papyrus scroll; Aristotle’s manuscripts were the length that they were in part because they needed to ﬁt the size of a standard scroll (Aristotle 1991, 13). Social conditions changed, as Plato’s oft-quoted Phaedrus dialogue tells us, when people began to record oral discourse onto these paper scrolls. And when the Catholic Church controlled manuscripts, another set of social conditions emerged: knowledge was in the hands of the
priests and monks who maintained and copied these documents. As movable type and the Gutenberg printing press caught on, everyday people could own a Bible or a novel. Books and pamphlets, and issues of who could print and own them, became the subjects of many political battles, but in the end, the book—particularly the paperback—became what some would call a profound communication technology.

It is small and lightweight. It does not require batteries. You can read it and pass it along to someone else. Indeed, from stone etchings to paperback novels, the shapes we have given the technologies of reading and writing have in turn become the shapes of how we live with each other. Next in this narrative come electronic technologies, which speeded up the transmission of information, increased the number of people who received this information (see Chapter 2), and began to move information from tangible ink on the page to electriﬁed characters and sounds sent over wires. The impact of the telegraph and train, telephone, radio, and television has been studied widely by media critics, social historians, and historians and critics of technology. In fact, the telegraph brought with it changes very similar to those we see with the Internet: Tom Standage, in The Victorian Internet (1998), calls the telegraph the “mother of all networks” and describes how this technology hinted at what we now ﬁnd so profound about Internet communication: speed, reach, online romance, news and media coverage, and “a technological subculture with its own customs and vocabulary”.

Every communication technology, based on the choices made when it was designed and developed, changed our senses of space, community, and self. Each technology changed our sense of what we expect from our friends and our political leaders: until recently, for example, politicians needed to travel by plane or train to make personal connections with their constituencies. Later it was possible to use radio and television, but citizens were not able to talk back to these one-way technologies. Today politicians can stay in touch via the Web, and citizens fully expect to be able to do so; Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota, for example, has maintained a successful Web site both before and after his election.

People born in the midst of a new technology, before it becomes ubiquitous, are often keenly aware of these social and cultural changes (never more so than today, when commentary about the Internet is everywhere). Many of us who are now over 40 learned to write ﬁrst with paper and pencil, then with a typewriter. We adapted our writing styles and techniques as each iteration of word processor came along, from the dedicated machines of the 1980s (like the Wang) to the more intuitive software of Word Perfect and Microsoft Word. Despite great strides in user interfaces, screen resolutions, and processing speeds, many people—particularly in my age group—have trouble editing on screen. At a certain stage, we need to print out our memo, essay, or letter because of what researcher Christina Haas (1996) has characterized as the “text sense problem.” The people she studied indicated that when they used the computer to write, they had “a hard time knowing where [they were] ” and often felt disconnected and lost in the screen text.

Many of us who teach writing have noticed that a younger generation, surrounded by screens and buttons, are comfortable with writing, editing, and navigating completely within the digital text. They live in a world of digitized space. Before they could even speak, they watched people channel surf, press buttons to heat things in a microwave, and navigate the Web. This generation does not always create a document with the goal of printing it (a feature of early word processing); what they produce on the screen often is the ﬁnal product (a Web page, for example). Our technologies condition our comfort, and the more ubiquitous a technology is, the more natural it seems.

Discussions of electronic technologies often focus on how we read and write in this space. Perhaps because writing instructors were some of the ﬁrst to be confronted with computers in the class- room, a wide body of commentary and research has developed to consider this particular feature of e-technologies: how we work with text affects how we read and write. Linear ways of thinking go by the wayside the more one begins to be surrounded by chunks of information, sound bites, and “site bites” (Welch 1999).

Yet the relationship between our communication technologies and our lives is not only a cognitive one. It is a political one as well. New technologies are often used to reinforce, not change, current power structures. On the Internet, this phenomenon is readily apparent. Take Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the “global village.” Paul Levinson (1999) notes the aptness of this concept, originally
conceived with television in mind, for today’s Internet: “The advent of computer screens not only as receivers but initiators of information in homes and ofﬁces around the world . . . [fulﬁlls] another of McLuhan’s observations about the global village—namely, that its dispersion of information is creating a new power structure whose ‘centers are everywhere and margins are nowhere’”. But even
though the Internet inspires new global models, many of the best grassroots sites are being bought out and sold on the traditional stock market. They now have ceos, worry about proﬁt margins, and are subject to large mergers (like aol and Time Warner).

Another example is copyright, which should be opening up in light of the ability to share via the Internet. Instead, copyright is getting even more restrictive: U.S. legislation passed in 1998 (the so called Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act) was favored by powerful publishing and entertainment lobbies and extended the term of copyright by another 20 years. Most proposed legislation continues to favor copyright holders and not the public.

Cyberliteracy, then, takes into account many features. For years, educators have talked about a critical literacy in the context of students using printed books. Cyberliteracy electriﬁes the discussion, inviting us now, while the technology is growing all around us, to consider what is different about Internet communication. Cyberliteracy recognizes that on the Internet, communication is a blend of oral, written, and visual information: the technology, like many before it, shapes our social spaces, replacing the slower methods of handwriting and typing with the speed and frenzy of digitized text. The Internet has broad reach like television, but it is interactive like a conversation. While inviting a “global village,” the technology is embedded in a political and economic context of corporate mergers and government regulations.

EMILE DURKHEIM: The Economy as Moral Order

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It is not possible for a social function to exist without anymoral discipline. Otherwise, there is nothing left except individual cravings, which cannot regulate themselves because of their essential limitlessness and insatiability, but must be controlled from outside.

—Emile Durkheim

EMILE DURKHEIM belongs to that generation of sociologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who found the subject matter of sociological study in the process of social transformation and the conﬂictual transition from traditional agrarian societies to modern industrial societies that was caused by industrialization. The question of the possible social cohesion of societies that are marked by increasing individual freedom and the concomitant dissolution of relationships based on tradition had concerned political philosophy since the seventeenth century. Both contract theories and the theory of order of political economy sketched an optimistic scenario for the problem of social order in modern societies. The paciﬁcation of social relations is expected by giving up individual rights of sovereignty to the Leviathan or by market coordination, even if the members of society no longer belong to a moral community. This optimism was obviously counteracted by socioeconomic crises, which affected all industrializing societies in the nineteenth century. The misery of the proletarian masses documented in countless contemporary studies and literary descriptions and in the political conﬂicts—not only between capital and labor, but also between the middle-class, the clergy, and the nobility, or forces of restoration, reform, and revolution (Muller 1983)—make the incipient social structures seem profoundly anomistic.

The development of Durkheim’s sociology and the signiﬁcance of the economy in it must be understood from Durkheim’s double awareness of crises, which refers on the one hand to the economic, social, and political situation of France after the defeat in the war of 1870–71, and on the other to the failure of the humanities (sciences morales) to contribute to overcoming social anomie. The Third Republic was marked by political instability, which not only caused “elementary democratic rights [to be] institutionalized only hesitantly and comparatively late, but also prevented the strict formulation of a farsighted policy that could have con fronted the nascent socioeconomic problems” (Mu ¨ ller 1983:17). Durkheim saw the economic and political anomie of French society as an expression of a moral crisis, which was closely linked with the changes in economic structure. The development of the market as a dominant mechanism of economic coordination was read as social disembedding of the economy, which disconnects it from the moral order of society. If political instability and economic anomie in France represented elements of the objective social crisis, Durkheim saw the disparate state of the humanities as another aspect of the crisis, because they prevented a scientiﬁc contribution to overcoming the anomic conditions of society.

As for the liberal economic theory, the problem was that no reform initia tives could be derived from it because it expected markets to be self-regulating. Durkheim was convinced that only social reforms guided by scientiﬁc insight into the laws of society—and not revolutionary abolition or restoration — could overcome the social crises and contribute to the goal of a just social order. For Durkheim, following the tradition of thought of Saint-Simon, Comte, and Espinas, the task of sociology as the science of morality consisted of scientiﬁcally discovering social (moral) conditions and their institutional presumptions, which enable social integration and overcoming anomic states. For this, sociology must develop as a science that deals empirically with the bases of social integration. Thus, beyond the political and socioeconomic crises, Durkheim perceived an intellectual crisis in the transition from traditional to modern society, which is also responsible for the anomie in the Third Republic; and he saw reviving the moral sciences as a prerequisite to solving the crisis. Durkheim’s concern with the economy occurs against this sociopolitical background from the speciﬁc perspective of a theory that asks for the preconditions of social order in modern societies. The starting point for investigating economic relations is not the conditions of the efﬁcient functioning of the economy, but rather its contribution to the reproduction of social order or, respectively, its potentially destructive effect on social integration.

These general considerations show the three levels on which the debate with economics occupied a central place for Durkheim. First, Durkheim sees that, in the process of the development of modern industrial societies, the economy develops into the structurally most important social realm. At the same time, the penchant toward functional differentiation of the economy in industrial society represents a central cause of economic and social anomie. The development of the economy is read as an increasing deregulation of economic relations, which disconnects their moral links. Contractual relations that are felt by society as unjust become possible and thus contradict the goal of a just social order. The anomie of economic relations is an expression of a lack of social regulation and can be overcome only by restoring a moral rule to the economy. Durkheim’s ﬁrst reference to economics consists, therefore, of localizing the economy as a central cause of the social crisis in the transition from a traditional to a modern society, and labeling this crisis as moral.

The second reference to economics is methodological. Durkheim develops his outline of sociology as a science of morality in a debate with utilitarian approaches in social theory.

Starting from the primacy of society, Durkheim’s social theory breaks away from both the contract theory of political philosophy and the explanation of social order in political economy based on the harmony of interests of competing participants in the market; and here the critical debate with Herbert Spencer plays a prominent role. Durkheim sees the establishment of his program of sociology as a science of morality in clear opposition to concepts of order that start from the individual.

Third, closely related to this methodological level is an institutional level, where Durkheim argues with economics. Durkheim sees himself facing the task of legitimating sociology as a new scientiﬁc discipline vis a ` -vis the other social sciences and humanities, and so he had to demarcate its proper subject area and deﬁne its methodological approach. Economics assumed a special signiﬁcance for Durkheim because it claimed to have outlined a theory of social order of modern societies in the model of the market, and because it could resort to a well-developed theory.

Nevertheless, Durkheim’s rejection of the economicmodel of order goes along with the rejection of classical economics. In Durkheim’s view, the economy must also be analyzed from the perspective of a social order preceding individual behavior; hence, Durkheim’s sociology asserts imperialist claims over economics. From the explanation of the centrality of economics—as a social, methodological, and institutional domain—the debate with the functioning of the capitalist economy can be expected to assume a central value in Durkheim’s work. That is, however, only conditionally the case. The title of Durkheim’s best known monograph, The Division of Labor in Society (1984[1893]), does hint at the investigation of the structures and institutions of an economic order based on the division of labor. In opposition to this expectation, however, neither in The Division of Labor in Society nor in other writings is Durkheim concerned in detail with the structures of the market economy. Durkheim’s debate with economics is directed essentially at the consideration of economic institutions, which are, however, not studied empirically but are considered in the normative perspective of the function they should assume for regulating economic relations. The structure of economic relations in industrial society appears mainly as a pathological deviation from a normative model.

Concern with the signiﬁcance of economic institutions for the social cohesion of society occurs essentially in the two works, The Division of Labor in Society and Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (1992[1896–1900]). In the former, Durkheim raises the question of how modern societies that are characterized by increasing functional differentiation, can develop the necessary requirements for social cohesion. The analysis of economic institutions is embedded in the critique of Spencer’s utilitarian social theory, and only in the third book of The Division of Labor in Society are some aspects of the empirical structure of economic relations in the process of industrialization described. In the lectures, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, the historical and anthropological reconstruction of the development of the institutions of property and contract are in the foreground along with the justiﬁcation of the establishment of professional guilds for regulating economic relations in industrial societies. In addition, there are remarks on economics in the lectures published posthumously by Marcel Mauss, Le Socialisme (1971), and in Suicide (1951 [1897]), Rules of Sociological Method (1966 [1895]), and various programmatic writings, articles, and reviews (Durkheim 1885; 1900; 1908; 1978a; 1978b).

The incongruity between the causal signiﬁcance Durkheim ascribes to the economy for the contemporary social crisis and the negligible analytical attempt to understand the functioning of modern economic structures can be explained with reference to Durkheim’s sociological program itself, on the one hand, and with the division of labor within the Durkheim school, on the other. If it is understood as a premise of Durkheim’s sociology that, even under the conditions of modern social development, social order depends on the moral integration of the actors, and institutions are both an expression and a guarantee of this morality, then the perspective of the economy and its institutions almost necessarily results: economic institutions and economic action must also be bound up morally in mod- ern contexts. In this programmatic nexus of meaning, the analysis of such economic structures, which are regarded as anomic—because they lack the moral bond—loses centrality because it can depict only the data of the pathological condition, which is proved sufﬁciently in any event by the obvious socioeconomic crisis. It is enough to indicate the anomic condition of the economy and to interpret anomie as a deﬁcit of regulation.

A detailed analysis is worthwhile only for economic institutions like contracts and property, which can be interpreted as moral entities. So, the causality Durkheim ascribed to the economy for the social crisis does not contradict the negligible analytical attention to the existing anomic economic structures, because few additional clues for the necessary reform of the economy would result fromthe analysis. Attentionmust be directed instead to the structural characteristics of functioning economic formations. Their anatomy gives information about the necessary institutional reforms that can transform the pathological condition of the economy to a normal one and thus allow a socially acceptable organization of the economy.

But also keep in mind that, even during his lifetime, more than other sociologists in the early stages of the profession, Durkheim was able to form a school with his program of sociology. Important empirical studies in economic sociology, which refer explicitly to Durkheim’s program of sociology, were produced especially by Franc ¸ois Simiand and Maurice Halbwachs.

In the debate with Durkheim’s concept of the economy, this would suggest resorting to these studies from the Durkheim School. But because, in the context of systematic inquiry, this book is concerned with general concepts, it is precisely Durkheim’s theoretical and conceptual articles that are expected to yield the most information. What stands in the foreground is Durkheim’s premise that stable economic relations cannot be developed if the social bonds between actors are based solely on their selﬁsh interests.