Mark Poster at Irvine has written an interesting paper called CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere in which he asks:
He seems to be arguing that we need to revise the classical model of democracy and individual sovereignty to account for new modes of social and political relations mediated by cyberspace and enacted by virtual agents with mobile identities. Given the medium, I’d be interested to know what you guys think.
Joe, this is a little disorganized and lengthy, but I think it deals more or less with my feelings about the article you link to.
We ought to be skeptical about being witness to the dawn of a new age: the Information Age. Here are some reasons to doubt that a new era has been ushered in:
The new Information Age is an epoch of equality? Like the tracksuit, which can be worn by the young and the old, by men and women, by the rich and the poor; has the computer homogenized and leveled the unequal and discriminatory world characteristic of past ages? In, for example: chat forums, it is, granted, at first glance difficult to distinguish the gender, age and class of a poster. But, don’t we see these sort of posts?
But more importantly, the class which was in the past prevented from seeking higher education is still locked out. Although the underclass may take interest in using computers to explore Internet content, are they still not culturally dissuaded from pursuing an interest in the form of computers? Any one can learn HTML, but college and university level computer science courses cost money. And Computer Science is a male dominated field.
It is said:
Any computer user can now produce, with minimal capital, more copies of a product than a hundred thousand factories. But let’s not forget the source of these very computers: factories; where computers are produced by workers and financed by capitalists. This is a big issue for those interested in pirating media (the term ‘pirate’ here is in-it-self obviously created by the corporations), where media producers use various methods, including fines and incarceration, to prevent their copy-rights from being violated.
The same “invisible hand†is at work on the Internet. The mechanisms that order market economy are not different in cyberspace. ‘Real’ estate tycoons in Second Life being a case in point.
Furthermore, another of the characteristic elements of the Industrial Age: mass production, is very much alive and well on the Internet. Spam mail being just an insidious example. As Kirkpatrick Sale wrote: ‘’…computers are the locus of contemporary industrialism. Computers and information organize industry more efficiently than ever before.‘’
And, just as means of production has really not altered, means of resistance has changed just as little. Virus’ infecting Microsoft like “Concept,” “AccessiV,” “Laroux,” and “Melissa” are created in the same spirit of sabotage that infected industry throughout the Industrial Age.
Availability of information is supposed to mark this era off from that which proceeded it. Frankly, many major library systems continue to offer far vaster and much more complete information than the entire wed does. And even if information were more available via computers:
As the web is the easiest and cheapest way to get published, there is some truth to the claim that the DEM writers of the canon have, to some small degree, been invalidated. But, though, nearly every business and organization hosts a website, it is not possible to perform many civil functions online. File tax reports yes, but vote or marry: no. A book has a perceived legitimacy simply by the fact of its apparent greater reality than a web publication does.
Further, web publishing is so often oriented towards such a narrow fragment of society that it can only act as a sort of enforcer of a self-fulfilling reality for that particular sub-culture that ever has contact with the work. Idiosyncratic prejudices are hardly something unique to our time.
Let’s only look at language communities, as these statistics are very easy to access. We can surmise that micro-cultures and sub-groups within these language spheres are much more numerous and no less islandic:
These statistics are even slightly outdated, the number of English users is declining, while smaller language groups (categorized as ‘‘other’’ in stat tables) are growing quickly. But this is really nothing new; Moroccans enjoy the same music, fashion, style and news outlets as other Mediterranean, Arab and Moslem people; Taiwanese enjoy Korean dramas, Canadians British and American television and so on. Your average English speaker has no access what so ever to about three quarters of internet content simply by virtue of choice of script. Personally, as a great lover of LGs (see my avatar) I learnt to read Cyrillic and learnt the necessary Russian vocabulary to search out pictures on google.ru/ (Russian Google), Russian blogs and Russian photo-share sites, as American Google, and English language searches lead invariably to:
What might be original on the internet is the way information is organized --or disorganized. Have a look at this fascinating ‘article’ put together by Sanford Kwinter, via hypertext, we are led on a journey through pages which are organized in a free-associative way: kr.blog.yahoo.com/bnizh/265053.html?p=1 …
Here is another way that information becomes impossible to find: too much information. The author is speculating about a theoretical Revolutionary Porn Categorization Querying Meadatabase,
One would need a PhD in Porn Metadatabases to find what they were looking for.
But the inverse is also a problem, sites are nothing but quotes and mirrors of one another.
Another way that information is distorted on the internet is by way of Google Bombing, this is sometimes done intentionally, but more often not: if we search for ‘pornography collecting’ on Google.com, about 95 percent of the sites that come up are about Child Pornography, recall, we were looking for sites about collecting porn, not moral and legal articles about pedophiles. This same thing happens in one form or another for just about any search we make.
Going back to language communities, if we search for 독도 (Dokdo), on fresheye.com/ (Japanese search engine), predictably we get the Japanese version of the islet’s history.
Nothing could be less true than the idea that the internet will create a pan-global world-culture, on the contrary, exactly the opposite is the case.
Moove Interviews
There is a program named Moove. moove.com/. Moove is very similar to the Sims Online or Second Life and offers users a thirty day free trial. Although Moove is essentially a chat room, you create a character of more-or-less any description: black, white, Asian, tall, fat, long hair, suit, dress etc; you design and decorate a house, and then move through a rather realistic 3D environment. I went into Moove and interviewed several actors about how their character changes online. Almost everyone I interviewed was very happy to answer my questions. These are the questions I asked and a sketch of the answers I received.
Are you in fact similar to your Moove actor?
The answer was almost invariably yes. Men had male actors, women female actors, and a Caribbean woman used the black female actor. I was told that hair color, style and dress also matched the real appearance their of the Moove actors. However, I was more than once seduced by female actors who, despite their claims, I strongly suspect were men.
What is Moove? Why did you join? What do you do in Moove?
Moove is essentially a chatroom, one woman was talking to her real sister when I visited her house, in other houses I found groups of friends discussing one or another topic: computer programming for example, and also I visited a German speaking house. I learned that there had been a wedding in a Moove chapel, whether this was a real marriage I was not able to deduce. Many actors I met were flirtatious and I imagine that Moove serves as a meeting place for persons seeking real dates in an uninhibited, risk-free environment. Some Moove actors told me there were several adult-clubs, and I strongly felt that some actors seemed to be expecting me to talk dirty with them, not interview them about philosophy.
How would you describe your sense of presence in Moove?
Everyone answered that Moove seemed very real at times. I would concur with their judgment. You really feel as if you are in the Moove world. The graphics are superb and the interface is comfortable once you understand it.
Could you imagine improving Moove in any way?
Most actors were happy with Moove. Some asked for more hair-styles and such things.
Other observations:
The Moove character has a broad repertoire of actions, however, outside of dialogue, the emotional rewards in Moove operate differently than in the real world. You can not really throw a vase in Moove. You can not really hug a person in Moove. Although the actor can appear to do this, the feeling is different from really hugging someone.
When I went through the Moove world and misrepresented my character: i.e., I gave myself a female actor (I am a male in the real world) I was not warmly received by all. Some were content to chat with me in my G-string and be interviewed, however several actors showed surprise, even disgust, when they discovered by real world gender.
Does a person’s personality changes online? I strongly suspect that it does. Although most actors were probably similar to their real selves, for example; one actor I interviewed appeared to be a cowboy, he had a very tough manner, I could not determine if this was his real personality however, as he became agitated with me and left. Before he left though, he discussed his past career as a chef with me. Chefs are of course often rather moody and stand-offish people. On the other hand, the misrepresented women who tried to seduce me were probably altering their real personalities. When I went out to interview disguised as a woman, I was very tempted to act womanly, especially when actors responded to me as though I were a woman, even after I revealed to them my real gender.
Perhaps these properties of the internet serve to liquefy the memetic arena / make it more dynamic, facilitating the spreading / domination of memes in the thoughts, ideas, and behaviors of the populace. because the existential characteristic of a meme qua meme is its ability to spread (vis a vis its astuteness), this would general stupefy the cogniscium / pollute or saturate it with coarser constructs.
another thought that comes to mind (an idea a friend of mine had) is that pot works by over over-increasing the connectivity between neurons in the brain – the internet is therefore analogous to pot on a different scale… and if you add in the idea that humanity is the earth’s central nervous system, you get ‘the internet is gaia on pot.’
