The prediction, in brief:

Stories and their performance consolidate the “social bond” of the Internet “community,” much like the premodern narrative … The technology encourages a lightening of the weight of the referent. This is an important basis for the instability of identity in electronic communications, leading to the insertion of the question of the subject and its construction.

Predictor: Poster, Mark

Prediction, in context:

In his 1995 book “The Second Media Age,” Mark Poster, a member of the humanities faculty at the University of California at Irvine, writes:”Information technologies are complicit with new tendencies toward totalitarian control, not toward a decentralized, multiple ‘little narrativity’ of postmodern culture. The question may be raised then, of the narrative structure of second media-age communications: Does it or is it likely to promote the proliferation of little narratives or does it invigorate a developing authoritarian technocracy? … As we have seen, the Internet seems to encourage the proliferation of stories, local narratives without any totalizing gestures, and it places senders and addressees in symmetrical relations. Moreover, these stories and their performance consolidate the ‘social bond’ of the Internet ‘community,’ much like the premodern narrative. But invention is central to the Internet, especially in MUDs and virtual reality: The production of the unknown … is central to second media age communications. In particular the relation of the utterance to representation is not limited to denotation as in the modern language game of science, and indeed the technology encourages a lightening of the weight of the referent. This is an important basis for the instability of identity in electronic communications, leading to the insertion of the question of the subject and its construction.”

Biography:

Mark Poster wrote the paper “Cyberdemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere” in 1995 while teaching at the University of California, Irvine. He also wrote about technology for Wired magazine. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)

Date of prediction: January 1, 1995

Topic of prediction: Community/Culture

Subtopic: Virtual Communities

Name of publication: The Second Media Age

Title, headline, chapter name: Chapter Two: Postmodern Virtualities

Quote Type: Partial quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/mposter/writings/internet.html

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Schmidt, Nicholas