Elon University

Topic: Community/Culture

Meet Me In Cyberspace

So when the big boys start moving into our cyberspace what are we going to do? Run away and hide somewhere else? That’s one option, but some of our Net pioneers have decided to meet them head-on. Take Metaverse for example … a subscription-based MOO … The trouble with video is that it’s expensive, it doesn’t travel well over the Internet and who wants to sit in front of a camera for an hour trying to look awake anyway? The parallels with [George] Orwell’s telescreen are obvious.

Battle for the Soul of the Internet

The danger … is that people will withdraw within their walled communities and never again venture into the Internet’s public spaces. It’s a process similar to the one that created the suburbs and replaced the great cities with shopping malls and urban sprawl. The magic of the Net is that it thrusts people together in a strange, new world, one in which they get to rub virtual shoulders with characters they might otherwise never meet. The challenge for the citizens of cyberspace – as the battles to control the Internet are joined and waged – will be to carve out safe, pleasant places to work, play and raise their kids without losing touch with the freewheeling, untamable soul that attracted them to the Net in the first place.

The Commonplace MOO: Orality and Literacy in Virtual Reality

The true discourse, Socrates says, is that which is inscribed in men’s souls and is delivered through speech. What Socrates disparages in writing is exactly what critics of electronic media hope to defend from the further technologizing of rhetoric … 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.

Cyberspace Turned Inside Out

We could do absolutely whatever we pleased on the Net, perfectly confident that none of it would have any consequences in the real world – the world where people have real jobs, go broke, get sued, get elected, get fired, and so forth. All of this is changing, of course, and I think that a lot of the shock and horror that these changes are evoking have their origin in this particular kind of relationship to the world – privileged yet detached, central yet isolated, plugged in yet disconnected.

Cyberspace Turned Inside Out

Every community learns its own way of carrying on conversations in several media at once, and every individual comes to terms with the digital dimension of his or her social identity in his or her own particular way, with particular strategies born of the thousand kinds of creativity and agency that opportunity and adversity nurture within us. In the end, all of us become – indeed, all of us already were – hybrids, or cyborgs in Donna Haraway’s vocabulary, living our lives in many spaces at once.

Dropping Anchor in Cyberspace

Physically, you are very much here today and gone tomorrow, while cyberspace has become the anchor of your career and the linchpin of your reality. In 15 years, that will be a very common sentiment, so common that it will no longer seem odd or even remarkable.

Lessons from the Luddites

If the edifice of industrial civilization does not eventually crumble as a result of a determined resistance within its very walls, it seems certain to crumble of its own accumulated excesses and instabilities within not more than a few decades, perhaps sooner, after which there may be space for alternative societies to arise.