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New and unrecognizable modes of
community are in the process of formation, and it is
difficult to discern exactly how these will contribute to
or detract from postmodern politics. The image of the
people in the streets, from the Bastille in 1789, to the
Sorbonne in 1968 and Tiananmen Square, Beijing in 1989
may be the images that will not be repeated in the forms
of upheaval of the 21st century and beyond. - 1994
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The concept of community is
connected with assumptions of face-to- face interactions
and leaves little room for electronic forms of
conviviality. Internet associations will, I believe,
claim more and more of our energy and commitment until
the point when the refusal of the term community becomes
silly. As you say, these commitments take away from other
activities, though I suspect mostly from television
watching. Nonetheless Internet associations are
competitive with all forms of sociability. - 1994
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We can't let the term
'community' be limited to its earlier (humanist)
meanings ... When human beings, with or without the
significant mediation of machines, interact and exchange
symbols, there is community of some sort. The problem is
not whether MOOs and bulletin boards are communities, but
how they are communities. And this is being studied ... A
lot of interesting work will begin to appear in 1995. I
don't think the 'alienation' of one-way media
will evaporate but that a slow cultural transformation is
in process, one that is very profound and which we need
to comprehend if we are to participate in it in a
political way. - 1994
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As I see it, we are already well on
the way toward cyborg identity simply by our reliance on
machines and our conjunction with them in so many
instances in daily life. This of course effects different
socio- economic and cultural groups differently, but a
massive secular trend seems to be affecting the human
race globally. The question then is not whether this is
bad or good, because that way of posing the issue
confronts us with nostalgia, in fact produces nostalgia
rhetorically. The question is, once we face the trend, is
how to understand its significance and how to respond to
circumstances in optimal ways, in other ways, to think
critically and act politically. But we are so far from
recognizing these issues in our political institutions
... that even suggesting a political response risks
drawing laughter. - 1994
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We are moving beyond the
"humanist" phase of history into a new level of
combination of human and machines, an extremely
suggestive assemblage in which the futures of the cyborg
and cyberspace open vast unexplored territories ...
Perhaps the new modes of self- constitution encouraged in
electronic forms of association will develop
"postmoral" gestures and figures of well-being,
in the sense of Nietzsche. - 1994
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We need to acknowledge the
importance of machines flat out and include them in our
generalized political positions ... I am not hopeful
about this prospect, but it is still necessary to make
the attempt. If no attempt is made, or if none is
successful, then surely the Internet will be configured
in the interests of the corporations and the nation
state, though of course there are inherent resistances
and intentional resistances under any circumstances. -
1994
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My view is that communications
machines alter the conditions of culture so that
'modern' utilitarian culture is eroded and
displaced. E- mail may substitute for the post office and
the word processor for the typewriter (as the typewriter
did for the pen) but only to some degree and in the end
not at all (if this makes any sense). Electronic
communication machines reconfigure space and time
coordinates, restructure the relation of the body and
mind to the practice (of writing), redesign relations of
inside and outside through what I call the wrappings of
language. In these ways the conditions of culture are
shifted. To maintain a subject in a utilitarian mode
within discursive practices structured by electronic
communication devices becomes more and more difficult.
Every statement of cultural criticism that bemoans the
lack of morality, the decline of cognitive skills and so
forth may be understood as a misrecognition of the
effects of new cultural formations. - 1995
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What is at stake in e-mail (and all
electronic writing) is precisely a reconfiguration of the
matter/spirit, human/machine relation, a change that I
see as having enormous consquence on the (re)construction
of the subject and cultural change in general ... We have
a new relation of human and machine, a new structure of
decentralized interaction and a completely new space/time
complex. Surely this apparatus emerges within capitalism
and within a terrorist state system; surely it is not all
equally distributed in the U.S., much less the world;
surely it affords voice to some very nasty forms of
sexism and racism - the detritus of the modern world. Yet
in so many ways it upset the normative configuration of
modern institutions, practices and cultures that it must
be regarded as providing an opening, a space of
transformation, without in any sense
"guaranteeing" the arrival of utopia or even
serious improvement upon the current order. - 1995
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What the Internet technology imposes
is a dematerialization of communication, and in many of
its aspects a transformation of the subject position of
the individual who engages within it. The Internet
resists the basic conditions for asking the question of
the effects of technology. It installs a new regime of
relations between humans and matter and between matter
and nonmatter, reconfiguring the relation of technology
to culture and thereby undermining the standpoint from
within which, in the past, a discourse developed - one
which appeared to be natural - about the effects of
technology. - 1995
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The Internet seems to discourage the
endowment of individuals with inflated status. The
example of scholarly research illustrates the point. The
formation of canons and authorities is seriously
undermined by the electronic nature of texts. Texts
become 'hypertexts,' which are reconstructed in
the act of reading, rendering the reader an author and
disrupting the stability of experts or
'authorities.' If scholarly authority is
challenged and reformed by the location and dissemination
of texts on the Internet, it is possible that political
authorities will be subject to a similar fate. If the
term democracy refers to the sovereignty of embodied
individuals and the system of determining office-holders
by them, a new term will be required to indicate a
relation of leaders and followers that is mediated by
cyberspace and constituted in relation to the mobile
identities found therein. - 1995
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If modern society may be said to
foster an individual who is rational, autonomous,
centered and stable ... then perhaps a postmodern society
is emerging which nurtures forms of identity different
from, even opposite to those of modernity. And electronic
communications technologies significantly enhance these
postmodern possibilities. - 1995
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Nation states are at a loss when
faced with a global communication network. Technology has
taken a turn that defies the character of power of modern
governments. - 1995
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Assuming the U.S. government and the
corporations do not shape the Internet entirely in their
own image and that places of cyberdemocracy remain and
spread to larger and larger segments of the population,
what will emerge as a postmodern politics? If these
conditions are met, one possibility is that authority as
we have known it will change drastically. - 1995
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