Suggested Readings and Prose
One can only speculate about the possibility of regulation to prevent abusive behavior, as has been attempted in the case of the telephone system.
Archives: Expert Predictions
Censorship in Cyberspace
It may be time for the FCC to place a cop on the Information Superhighway.
Endnotes
I would like to see some discussion about the “dark side” of information technology – and perhaps in the process we can develop some insight into how we might avoid … pitfalls, while still deriving the very real benefits which it potentially provides
Endnotes
I don’t want to see my friends over a real-time video system, I want to be with them personally. Virtual sex? How repugnant – even the most intimate of human experiences now mediated through a machine. Not for me, thanks. The ultimate in alienation.
Endnotes
In the process of creating virtual “neighborhoods” we are withdrawing from our own very real localities. To me, this is a continuation of a several-decades-long trend in American society toward the withdrawal of the upper and middle classes from the public sphere, i.e. the streets and parks of our cities and towns. At the same time the online community is growing, real communities are collapsing.
Chapter 10: Identity Crisis
With mechanistic roots in the culture of calculation, psychoanalytic ideas become newly relevant in the culture of simulation. Some believe that we are at the end of the Freudian century. But the reality is more complex. Our need for a practical philosophy of self knowledge has never been greater, as we struggle to make meaning from our lives on the screen.
Chapter 10: Identity Crisis
People can get lost in virtual worlds. Some are tempted to think of life in cyberspace as insignificant, as escape or meaningless diversion. It is not. Our experiences there are serious play. We belittle them at our risk. We must understand the dynamics of virtual experience both to foresee who might be in danger and to put these experiences to best use.
Chapter 10: Identity Crisis
The culture of simulation may help us achieve a vision of a multiple but integrated identity whose flexibility, resilience and capacity for joy comes from having access to our many selves. But if we have lost reality in the process, we shall have struck a poor bargain.
Chapter 10: Identity Crisis
Virtual communities offer a dramatic new context in which to think about human identity in the age of the Internet. They are spaces for learning about the lived meaning of a culture of simulation. Will it be a separate world where people get lost in the surfaces, or will we learn to see how the real and virtual can be made permeable, each having the potential for enriching and expanding the other?
Chapter 10: Identity Crisis
We have seen the computer as a tool, as mirror, and as gateway to a world through the looking glass of the screen. In each of these domains, we are experiencing a complex interweaving of modern and postmodern, calculation and stimulation … As people have become more and more comfortable psychologizing computers and have come to grant them a certain capacity for intelligence, the boundary dispute between people and machines now falls on the question of life.