Computers may change the way we do things … or at least may change the scale and speed of transactions in … but the established rules – and moral principles embodied in those rules – cannot be ignored. Working out policies regarding computers calls, in part at least, for extending, modifying, or adapting extant rules.
They must realize that they have to cooperate more intensively than before: The stakes are extremely large; there is too much to learn and events are moving too rapidly; the resources and degree of stakeholder coordination involved are both very high.
Computers, like other technological creations, create undesirable as well as desirable possibilities. We now have a greater capacity to track and monitor individuals without their knowledge, to develop more heinous weapons systems, to eliminate the need for human contact in many activities.
Computers enable people to be active participants in debate, rather than passive observers; this can breed a sense of engagement in place of alienation, advocates contend. Because electronic debates are conducted in writing, they can be more substantive than face-to-face confrontations. “Today’s issues are too complex for oral debate.”
The society we erect [in cyberspace] will probably be quite different from the one we now inhabit, given the fact that this one depends heavily on the physical property of things while the next one has no physical properties at all. Certain qualities should survive the transfer, however, and these include tolerance, respect for privacy of others, and a willingness to the treat one’s fellows as something besides potential customers.
Stories and their performance consolidate the “social bond” of the Internet “community,” much like the premodern narrative … The technology encourages a lightening of the weight of the referent. This is an important basis for the instability of identity in electronic communications, leading to the insertion of the question of the subject and its construction.
The mediation has become so intense that the things mediated can no longer even pretend to be unaffected. The culture is increasingly simulational in the sense that the media often changes the things that it treats, transforming the identity of originals and referentialities. In the second media age, “reality” becomes multiple.
While there is no doubt that the Internet folds into existing social functions and extends them in new ways – translating the act of shopping, for example, into an electronic form – what are far more cogent as possible long-term political effects of the Internet are the ways in which it institutes new social functions, ones that do not fit easily within those of characteristically modern organizations. The problem is that these new functions can only become intelligible if a framework is adopted that does not limit the discussion from the outset to modern patterns of interpretation.
As I see it, we are already well on the way toward cyborg identity simply by our reliance on machines and our conjunction with them in so many instances in daily life.
Even when gender or whatever are someone fixed by the nature of the board, there is the question of the structural effects of the culturally constituted technology. Another question to raise is whether the individuals on these boards know each other in face-to-face relations before joining the board. I suspect each of these conditions will influence quite a bit the question of subject constitution.