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.
Predictor: Poster, Mark
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 interview with a reporter from the online journal Seulemonde, Mark Poster, a member of the humanities faculty at the University of California at Irvine and author of “The Second Media Age,” says: ”I agree that more is at stake in e-mail than faster service and certainly that a process of de- and re-materializations are going on. In fact 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 … The mass media are a system of few producers and many consumers, few senders and many receivers, resulting in monologic speech … The Internet remains (after commercialization and political censorship) so far a system of many to many (although a majority remains without access). It is also a system that is rapidly deepening its ability to transmit signals – with images on the Web, then moving images with teleconferencing, then real-time voice with Internet Radio, now a virtual reality visual system (VRML) and soon many-to-many real-time moving images/sound/text. Thus 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.”
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: Communication
Subtopic: E-mail
Name of publication: Seulemonde
Title, headline, chapter name: Mark Poster Interview
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.cas.usf.edu/journal/poster/mposter.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Schmidt, Nicholas