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More from Mark Poster
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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