At the bottom are growing numbers of people who are unemployed, poor, undereducated and likely to be left on the shoulder of the information superhighway. If current trends in the communications media industry persist, the “unwired” in our society will in the near future become even more disenfranchised and neglected.
It doesn’t matter how good a game is, if there’s a free alternative that satisfies their basic needs, they’ll take it.
The coming of a global, technologically-mediated culture means that the boundaries we have been using to define our allegiances – national, religious, cultural – will break down. The greatest enemy to any fundamentalist regime is media, because media acts like water, slowly eroding ideological barricades. Meanwhile, individualists fear the coming of a monoculture, as iconography from the West washes over the unique landscapes of particular regions, while integrationists fear that 500 separate channels of cable television and hundreds of thousands of Internet Newsgroups will break up our world into isolated segments of like-minded individuals … Neither nightmare need occur … I see human culture becoming like a biological culture … where many individuals link together for common purpose, and where this linking … augments each member’s ability to influence the organism.
Reckoning with technology means reckoning with the fact that we no longer can rely on authority figures and moral templates to define the boundaries of our experiences. We must navigate our own path through the newfound cultural space, and this means trusting in our own ability to act appropriately in new situations.
The Internet will become more organized. Even under the extreme weight of all the commercial clutter it will become more stratified … Commercial indexes will continue to grow and get more organized, and the more organized they get, the more “hits” they’ll receive.
Coping in Cyberia means using our currently limited human language, bodies, emotions, and social realities to usher in something that’s supposed to be free of those limitations … The next earth-shattering meme to hit the newsstands or computer nets may be the result of a failed relationship, a drug bust, an abortion on acid, or even a piss over the side of the porch. Cyberia is frightening to everyone. Not just to technophobes, rich businessmen, midwestern farmers, and suburban housewives, but, most of all, to the boys and girls hoping to ride the crest of the informational wave. Surf’s up.
Be it a symptom of social decay, cyberian genesis, or both, the growth of new colonialism around and within our old systems and structures brings a peculiar sort of darkness-before-dawnishness to the close of this millennium.
Maybe the cyberian technologies are not intrinsically liberating. While they do allow for cultural change through principles such as feedback and iteration, it appears that they can almost as quickly be subverted by those who are unready or unwilling to accept the liberation they could offer. But others present convincing arguments that the operating principles of Cyberia eventually will win out and create a more just Global Village.
The Internet tomorrow … is going to be a kind of seamless mesh of transport networks, telephone networks, mass-media networks with the Internet tying it together, and every conceivable kind of interface to those networks will likely be used for navigating.
Just how close to digital anarchy we move depends as much on the way we perceive law and order in the datasphere as it does on what’s actually going on. While many young people with modems and personal computers are innocently exploring networks as they would the secret passages in an interactive fantasy game, others are maliciously destroying every system they can get into … No single attitude toward computer hacking and cracking will suffice.