Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?

As CMC grows in popularity, there will be less need for face-to-face interaction. It is one of the supreme ironies of the utopian view of CMC that it is likely to reduce that felt sense of community that it so nostalgically seems to uphold as virtuous. In its place will be a community of interest in which members will be able to drift in and out. One of the key aspects of community is having to deal with and resolve conflicts. It is either the height of arrogance or defeat when one chooses or is forced to leave his or her community over an unresolved conflict. Typically, leaving a community is emotionally traumatic. Leaving a virtual community might be as easy as changing the channel on a television set.

Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?

We should not mistake a desire for communities of interest with a hope for a more just and egalitarian society … virtual communities can foster anomie … because virtual communities are likely to be private communities of interest, they will not readily or serendipitously be exposed to differing views that will help them and the larger society grow and adapt to a changing world.

Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?

The people who will make up the virtual communities will be the better educated, the financially endowed and those with time to commit to communication tasks. That presents a rather limited version of opportunities for building community in any real sense. It also places limits on the potential for virtual communities to represent anything new within the multiplicity of publics that comprise the American collectivity.

Big Brother and the Bad Boys: The Dark Side of the Net.

Are we headed toward a world filled with anemic drones, laboring away at sterile keyboards, never taking a moment to sniff the ragweed, never twisting an ankle while tossing a Frisbee to their flea-ridden dogs? Well, we might be. America, at least, has been headed there for some time, roughly since the invention of the fluorescent tube. The Internet, though, is just a symptom of our technological cocoonery, not the root cause.

Internet Evolution or Revolution?

In late 1997, electronic confrontations between religious conservatives and libertarians will erupt into physical conflict.

Scholars Try to Measure the Impact

Today, many people when they commute to work encounter people they wouldn’t otherwise, and so become aware that there is a homeless problem, a crime problem, a whole set of social ills. But if you work out of your home, shop out of your home, learn more out of your home – you might forget they exist. And who’s going to care for the disadvantaged when those who are online forget they exist?

Network Economics

Our primary difficulty in comprehending the global mind of a network culture will be that it does not have a central “I” to appeal to. No headquarters; no head. That will be most exasperating and discouraging. In the past, adventurous men have sought the holy grail, or the source of the Nile, or Prester John, or the secrets of the pyramids. In the future, the quest will be to find the “I am” of the global mind, the source of its coherence. Many souls will lose all they have searching for it – and many will be the theories of where the global mind’s “I am” hides. But it will be a never-ending quest like the others before it.

Network Economics

The particular thoughts of the global mind – and its subsequent actions – will be out of our control and beyond our understanding. Thus network economics will breed a new spiritualism.

Informing Ourselves to Death

In a world populated by people who believe that through more and more information, paradise is attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I maintain that all of this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent and energy. Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were turned to philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to education? Who knows what we could learn from such people – perhaps why there are wars, and hunger, and homelessness and mental illness and anger.

Informing Ourselves to Death

Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it since. But what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge of chaos … Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19th century to the silicon chip in the 20th has amplified the din of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems … Our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable. We don’t know how to filter it out; we don’t know how to reduce it; we don’t know to use it.