Elon University

Topic: Community/Culture

The Third Right: Hacking the American Way

We call it a Nightmare nothing between the underclass and the virtual class, No public control just virtual elites, Certainly no liberty for all just Newt and the boys in a perfect little techno-bubble clean, sterile and immunized from degrading American flesh Get wired, they say Get deregulated and upgraded Get netted and vetted Get multi-tasked, demassified and bit-netted Get backslashed, backtracked and backlit Let’s surf, merge, and purge Leave behind the First and Second Waves and welcome the famous Third Wave.

Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!

Together with the build-up of information superhighways we are facing a new phenomenon: loss of orientation. A fundamental loss of orientation complementing and concluding the societal liberalization and the deregulation of financial markets whose nefarious effects are well-known. A duplication of sensible reality, into reality and virtuality, is in the making … What lies ahead is a disturbance in the perception of what reality is; it is a shock, a mental concussion … The specific negative aspect of these information superhighways is precisely this loss of orientation regarding alterity (the other), this disturbance in the relationship with the other and with the world. It is obvious that this loss of orientation, this non-situation, is going to usher a deep crisis which will affect society and hence, democracy.

Building the Open Road: The NREN As Test-Bed for the National Public Network

Perhaps the most significant change the National Public Network will afford us is a new mode of building communities – as the telephone, radio, and television did … Digital media can serve as a local nexus, an evanescent meeting-ground, that adds levels of texture to relationships between people in a particular locale.

A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community: A Cybernaut’s-Eye View

People are going to do what people always do with a new communication technology: use it in ways never intended or foreseen by its inventors, to turn old social codes inside out and make new kinds of communities possible. CMC will change us, and change our culture, the way telephones and televisions and cheap video cameras changed us – by altering the way we perceive and communicate.

A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community: A Cybernaut’s-Eye View

The age of the online pioneers will end soon, and the cyberspace settlers will come en-masse. Telecommuters who might have thought they were just working from home and avoiding one day of gridlock on the freeway will find themselves drawn into a whole new society.

Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?

CMC does not, at this point, hold the promise of enhancing democracy because it promotes communities of interest that are just as narrowly defined as current public factions defined by identity (whether it be racial, sexual, or religious). Public discourse ends when identities become the last, unyielding basis for argumentation that strives ideally to achieve consensus based on a common good.

Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?

The likely result of the development of virtual communities through CMC will be that a hegemonic culture will maintain its dominance. Certainly, it cannot be assumed that the current political and technical elites would willingly cede their position of dominance or knowingly sow the seeds of their own destruction. Indeed, it seems most likely that the virtual public sphere brought about by CMC will serve a cathartic role, allowing the public to feel involved rather than to advance actual participation. Communities seem more likely to be formed or reinforced when action is needed, as when a country goes to war, rather than through discourse alone.