The computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most needed to confront – spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future … Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better – best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense.
MOO environments … stand as an answer to Socrates’ critique of writing, and to modern condemnations of electronic media … It is possible that MOO is the forerunner of technology that will provide the sort of structured environment needed for the “common place” of civilized society. If so, we would have a median between the oral and literate extremes.
Many computer professionals and academics say the electronic frontier needs a preacher as well as a sheriff. Like non-virtual reality, cyberspace needs self-regulating codes of behavior … “There is no technological fix for ethics.”
It seems morally hazardous to commune with far-flung tele-mates, if that means growing indifferent to physical neighbors. It is not encouraging to observe just such indifference in California’s Silicon Valley, one of the world’s most “highly wired” regions.
An entire virtual community can atrophy or perish in the wink of an eye. To the extent that membership in virtual communities proves less stable than that obtained in other forms of democratic community, or that social relations prove less thick … there could be adverse consequences for individual psychological and moral development.
Screen-based technologies (such as TV and computer monitors) are prone to induce democratically unpromising psychopathologies, ranging from escapism to passivity, obsession, confusing watching with doing, withdrawal from other forms of social engagement, or distancing from moral consequences.
The Internet culture has its roots so deep, I don’t think it’s going to disappear.
With millions of users pounding away on their keyboards, it may turn out that everybody is talking and nobody is really listening. By the same token, connecting with one and all in the electronic ether could leave people more disconnected than ever before, as the necessity of face-to-face contact diminishes. If a troubled or shy office worker easily finds solace and approval on the networks, will she be less inclined to seek out friends on the job?
I feel kind of sad about it. [The early Internet, before commercialization] was such a dynamic, pulsing thing. I wonder whether we shouldn’t have left it alone.
You’re always going to have hackers trying to get into the system … Hackers are smart and they’re bored. A lot of these people don’t have a life, or a job.