People have known for decades that each time they place an order from a mail-order catalogue or contribute to a political cause, they are adding information to a database. … People are isolated in their reflections about their electronic personae. On the Internet, such matters are more likely to find a collective voice.
Increasingly centralized databases provide a material basis for a vastly extended Panopticon that could include the Internet. Even now, there is talk of network censorship, in part through (artificially) intelligent agents capable of surveillance. From Foucault’s perspective, the most important factor would not be how frequently the agents are used or censorship is enforced. Like the threat of a tax audit, what matters most is that people know the possibility is always present.
The overall trend seems to be the creation of an information elite at the same time that the walls around our society’s traditional underclass are maintained. Perhaps people are being even more surely excluded from participation, privilege, and responsibility in the information society than they have been from the dominant groups of the past.
If the politics of virtuality means democracy online and apathy offline, there is reason for concern.
Searching for an easy fix, we are eager to believe that the Internet will provide an effective substitute for face-to-face interaction. But the move toward virtuality tends to skew our experience of the real in several ways. One way is to make denatured and artificial experiences seem real. Let’s call it the Disneyland effect … Another effect of stimulation, which I’ll call the artificial crocodile effect, makes the fake seem more compelling than the real … A third effect is that a virtual experience may be so compelling that we believe that within it we’ve achieved more than we have …To the question, “Why must virtuality and real life compete – why can’t we have both?” the answer is of course that we will have both. The more important question is, “How can we get the best of both?”
In the postwar atomization of American social life, the rise of middle-class suburbs created communities of neighbors who often remained strangers … We seem to be in the process of retreating further into our homes, shopping for merchandise in catalogues or on television channels, shopping for companionship via personal ads. Technological optimists think that computers will reverse some of this social atomization, touting virtual experience and virtual community as ways for people to widen their horizons. But is it really sensible to suggest that the way to revitalize the community is to sit alone in our rooms, typing at our networked computers and filling our lives with virtual friends?
For every step forward in the instrumental use of a technology (what the technology can do for us), there are subjective effects. The technology changes us as people, changes our relationships and sense of ourselves.
Although it provides us with no easy answers, life online does provide new lenses through which to examine current complexities. Unless we take advantage of these new lenses and carefully analyze our situation, we shall cede the future to those who want to believe that simple fixes can solve complicated problems. Given the history of the last century, thoughts of such a future are hardly inspiring.
The New York Times described new books on the subject by dividing them into three categories: utopian, utilitarian, and apocalyptic. Utilitarian writers emphasize the practical side of the new way of life. Apocalyptic writers warn us of increasing social and personal fragmentation, more widespread surveillance, and loss of direct knowledge of the world. To date, however, the utopian approaches have dominated the field. They share the techological optimism that has dominated post-war culture … In our current situation, technological optimism tends to represent urban decay, social alienation, and economic polarization as out-of-date formulations of a problem that could be solved if appropriate technology were applied in sufficient doses, for example, technology that would link everyone to the “information superhighway.”
We can easily move through multiple identities, and we can embrace – or be trapped by – cyberspace as a way of life.