The Internet as Mass Medium

One of the Internet’s most widely touted advantages is that an audience member may also be a message producer. To what extent is that really the case? We may discover a fair amount about the producers of the messages from the content of their electronic messages, but what about the lurkers? Who are they, and how big is this group? To what extent do lurkers resemble the more passive audience of television sitcoms? And why do they remain lurkers and not also become information providers? Is there something about the nature of the medium that prevents their participation?

Newbie Bashing

The nightmare is that newcomers, once they discover the Net’s more trivial kicks, will lose sight of its broader potential. There will be enough newbies online to hi-jack the culture, and when they get lost in the bullshit they’ll drag the whole shooting match down with them. A precious opportunity will be lost forever, and big corporate media suits will lean back in their executive swivel seats and breathe a sigh of relief.

We Are the Wired: Some Views On the Fiberoptic Ties That Bind

Information has now become a form of garbage. We don’t know what to do with it, have no control over it, don’t know how to get rid of it. In the fact of this, we propose to spend billions on a super-information network. To do what? Instead of 60 TV channels, we’ll have 500, maybe a thousand. We’ll have access to more entertainment, more sports, more commercials, more news – faster, more conveniently, in more diverse forms. We will, in other words, flood our lives with that from which we are already drowning.

We Are the Wired: Some Views On the Fiberoptic Ties That Bind

A highway makes sure you can’t even stop at a restaurant that might serve something local. So with the communications superhighway, I think. Five hundred channels sounds wonderful – but the 500 channels, and the electronic bulletin board, and the CD ROM Louvre, will still be showing the same narrow band of human experience, the only parts that can come across a screen. Vast amounts of information – the kind one gets from contact with other human beings or with the natural world or with live performance or with one’s own navel – remains beyond even the fiber-optified magicians.

Endnotes

I would like to see some discussion about the “dark side” of information technology – and perhaps in the process we can develop some insight into how we might avoid … pitfalls, while still deriving the very real benefits which it potentially provides

Endnotes

I don’t want to see my friends over a real-time video system, I want to be with them personally. Virtual sex? How repugnant – even the most intimate of human experiences now mediated through a machine. Not for me, thanks. The ultimate in alienation.

Endnotes

In the process of creating virtual “neighborhoods” we are withdrawing from our own very real localities. To me, this is a continuation of a several-decades-long trend in American society toward the withdrawal of the upper and middle classes from the public sphere, i.e. the streets and parks of our cities and towns. At the same time the online community is growing, real communities are collapsing.

Chapter 10: Identity Crisis

With mechanistic roots in the culture of calculation, psychoanalytic ideas become newly relevant in the culture of simulation. Some believe that we are at the end of the Freudian century. But the reality is more complex. Our need for a practical philosophy of self knowledge has never been greater, as we struggle to make meaning from our lives on the screen.

Chapter 10: Identity Crisis

People can get lost in virtual worlds. Some are tempted to think of life in cyberspace as insignificant, as escape or meaningless diversion. It is not. Our experiences there are serious play. We belittle them at our risk. We must understand the dynamics of virtual experience both to foresee who might be in danger and to put these experiences to best use.