While we’re wiring people up we’re destroying old cultures. It’s great to have the idea of a global village, but it can resemble (the 1950s TV show) “The Prisoner,” where everyone lives in a perfect village, but everyone is a number. Everyone is a prisoner.
Our saturation with information we don’t need, with noise that increasingly rattles us, will begin to pall … We will come ever more to resent the time it steals from our lives. Very few people any more want a real superhighway through their neighborhood, and perhaps it will someday be the same with megatube.
A rapidly expanding system of networks, collectively known as the Internet, links millions of people in new spaces that are changing the way we think, the nature of our sexuality, the form of our communities, our very identities. At one level, the computer is a tool. It helps us write, keep track of our accounts, and communicate with others. Beyond this, the computer offers us both new models of mind and a new medium on which to project our ideas and fantasies.
To what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? … These people have had their private matters made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; they are subjected to more examinations and are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them. They are more often reduced to mere numerial objects. They are being buried by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political organizations. The schools teach their children to operate computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more valuable to children … It is to be expected that the winners … will encourage the losers to be enthusiastic about computer technology … they tell them that their lives will be conducted more efficiently, discreetly neglecting to say from whose point of view or what might be the costs of such efficiency.
Ultimately, the communication possibilities offered by the Web can’t help but change human relationships. People no longer might identify with a physical neighborhood for companionship or advice; they can turn to a cyberspace neighborhood, based on mutual interests and association, as a source for support and information.
If network activity becomes a major form of human communication, people may associate more freely online because they are not slowed by geographical or temporal limits. How will our institutions (government, education, religious) change to accommodate these new associations? … If people can create their own group identity in the form of network-based alliances, how will this change offline institutions?
Attitudes favor interpreting the world along the lines of rapid change, networks of individuals, finely-calibrated meritocracy, individualism, privatization, and a dismissal of collective goods. These attitudes provide little resistance to the erosion of the remaining public sphere.
The problem with going out on the Internet is akin to creating a New York City and telling everybody to go there. The benefits will never get back to the small community because it’s a different dynamic. New York is just not St. Louis.
We need to acknowledge the importance of machines flat out and include them in our generalized political positions … I am not hopeful about this prospect, but it is still necessary to make the attempt. If no attempt is made, or if none is successful, then surely the Internet will be configured in the interests of the corporations and the nation state, though of course there are inherent resistances and intentional resistances under any circumstances.
The broader and perhaps more dramatic social impact of the hyperlearning revolution will be the large-scale displacement of traditional “employment” by a new form of human capitalism in which ownership of intellectual capital progressively replaces labor.