Cryptographic protocols … could catapult our currency system into the 21st century. They may, in the process, shatter the Orwellian predictions of a Big Brother dystopia, replacing them with a world in which the ease of electronic transactions is combined with the elegant anonymity of paying in cash.
Women and men have different characteristic online styles … The styles are recognizably – even steoretypically – gendered. The male style is characterized by adversariality: put-downs, strong, often contentions assertions, lengthy and/or frequent postings, self-promotion, and sarcasm … The female-gendered style, in contrast, has two aspects which typically co-occur: supportiveness and attentuation … Other users regularly infer the gender of message posters on the basis of features of these styles … If our online communicative style reveals our gender, then gender differences, along with their social consequences, are likely to persist on computer-mediated networks. Entire lists can become gendered in their style as well. It is tactily expected that members of the non-dominant gender will adapt their posting style in the direction of the style of the dominant gender.
Female respondents overwhelmingly indicated less confidence in their ability to use computers, despite the fact that they had had the same number of years of computer experience as male respondents. Internalized censorship of this sort reflects deeper social ills, and it is naive to expect that technology alone will heal them.
These new frontiers of the next millennium are the uncensored, distributed self, and cyberspace – the location of the virtual self/community – Electric Gaia.
E-mail, Internet-based communication, is clearly potentially subversive as it allows bi-directional, unfiltered, uncensored mass communication … Are we witnessing the rise of an alternative cyberculture that propagates an uncensored self? (Not through alternative sexuality or drug use, but through a new geography of existence in uncensored cyberspace – change the geography of existence and you change the nature of the self.)
It is perhaps not by coincidence that the approach of the third millennium should be heralded by a new form of human behavior. This new form of human behavior is a technological John-the-Baptist … Significance in history is not the product of isolated events but the result of convergence among a multiplicity of forces. It is the thesis of this work that two isolated events – the end and beginning of a millennium, and the rise of mass participation in uncensored bi-directional mass communication – the Internet, will conjugate in such a way to give birth to a new form of human behavior and with novel behavior, a new form of human consciousness – the uncensored self.
As a society we failed to realize the democratizing potential of television, and risk the same failure with CMC, because we have focused literacy education too narrowly on the encoding and decoding of written text. Just as scandalous as the number of print illiterates in our society is the number of presumably “literate” Americans who have no critical understanding of electronic media. But it would be a mistake to assume that CMC in the form of a national digital network will necessarily replicate the experience of television.
As networks creep out across the globe we can expect to see more of this remote learning going on and desktop non-video-conferencing has a large supporting role to play. But when they’re being used for teaching and learning, systems based purely on text can sometimes fall short of the mark.
So when the big boys start moving into our cyberspace what are we going to do? Run away and hide somewhere else? That’s one option, but some of our Net pioneers have decided to meet them head-on. Take Metaverse for example … a subscription-based MOO … The trouble with video is that it’s expensive, it doesn’t travel well over the Internet and who wants to sit in front of a camera for an hour trying to look awake anyway? The parallels with [George] Orwell’s telescreen are obvious.
In any case, whether you think of yourself as a service provider or a performer, the future protection of your intellectual property will depend on your ability to control your relationship to the market – a relationship which will most likely live and grow over a period of time. The value of that relationship will reside in the quality of performance, the uniqueness of your point of view, the validity of your expertise, its relevance to your market, and, underlying everything, the ability of that market to access your creative services swiftly, conveniently, and interactively.