Howard Rheingold
The Virtual World
"Because the changes have been
fundamental, the concepts -- and even
the vocabularies and images in which the concepts tend to be framed no
longer seem to objectify a real world. It is as though progress were
making the real world invisible. "This book is about the ways culture
has changed in the past century, changing the identities of all those
born into it. Its metaphor for the effect of change on culture is
'disappearance.'" Is the idea of what it is to be
human disappearing, along with so many other ideas, through the modern
skylight?"
1947-?
education in Computer technology
trained at MIT
Premises:
-implications
for social and political life of increasingly internetted world
& communications
-possibility of
simulated contact rather than personal contact sl
-characteristics
of digital world and digital society
- new form of
discourse possible through technology
ex. chaos theory, artificial intelligence, emergent
technology
A. builds on
Haraway's theories that machine/human have merged,
1. bio-technology is new metaphor for social/political organization
2. decentralized nodes of activity, self-organized, transient,
constantly changing
a. conflict and collaboration both possible
b. importance of cooperation and decentralization as strategies
B. changes in
basic metaphors and structures of society
1.
public/private takes on new meaning in virtual world
2.
surveillance is constant (cell phones, facebook. twitter)
3.
communication and community change microchips
4.
time/space become relative
a. (asynchronous rather than synchronous)
b. contact is fiber-optic connection away
C.
Implications:
1. communications are faster, non-linear, more truncated, fragmented
2. society is less hierarchical, more decentralized
3. political movements form, react more quickly
a. ex. smart mobs & affinity groups (collective intelligence)
ex
b. metaphor of the virus contagion
1. more difficult to fight, capture
2. ex. Moldava election results 2009,
twitter revolt
4. less reliance on "Experts"- much more participatory youtube
a.
internet email petitions to influence laws
D. social diversity and difference becomes the new "normal"
1. everyone is deviant, so everyone is "Normal"
a. break down of class/race/religion
divisions
1.
convergence rather than conflict (good)
2.
homogenization of all distinctions (bad)
2. we live with irony and unresolved contradictions
a. Marx wrong about class struggle
b. much more diffuse & fragmented,
localized struggles
E. national boundaries become obsolete- new methods of creating change
1. subnational groups join w/ intranational groups to
pressure govts
a. ex. Tibet has no 'real'
existence- occupied by China
b. independent Tibet exists as
alternative, virtually
c. internet-organized Olympic
protest, globally publicized
2. Armenian diaspora more power than armenian population
a. internet-organized campaign against Turkey, act 301
b. virtual efforts to resolve turkish-armenian conflict
What does it mean to have human relationships mediated through machines?
a.
anonymity or simulation possible
b.
must develop different methods of determining authenticity
c.
myspace com facebook podcams chatrooms - all change
human interactions
What
happens to concepts of property ownership?
1. creative possibilities of disconnected people building on each
other's work brainstorms
2. private property is outmoded concept, good and bad
a. intellectual
property hard to establish
b. easier to
recognize collaboration, building on other's work
What
is the impact of simulated interactions vs face to face interactions?
1.
virtual harassment vs in-person harassment cyberbullying
2.
child pornography laws- is it crime if 'simulated' child, not real one?
Choices available as to how the 'virtual community' develops
1. disinformocracy
a. connections remain only
on-line- no real person community, isolation
b. private companies come to
dominate interactions (censorship of subversive ideas)
c. citizens have primary identity
as commodities, potential consumers
2. true "virtual community" can develop
a. network can become basis for engaged 'civil
society', discursive democracy (Habermas's ideal speech situation)
b. viral organizing to fight the conformity
imposed by industry
c. new forms of engagement, collaboration,
enabled by the internet kiva
Two powerful and opposed
images of the future characterize the way different observers foresee
the future political effects of new communications technology. The
utopian vision of the electronic agora, an "Athens without slaves" made
possible by telecommunications and cheap computers and implemented
through decentralized networks like Usenet and FidoNet, has been
promoted by enthusiasts, including myself, over the past several years.
I have been one of the cheerleaders for people like Dave Hughes and
Mitch Kapor as they struggled to use CMC to give citizens some of the
same media powers that the political big boys wield. And I admit that I
still believe that this technology, if properly understood and defended
by enough citizens, does have democratizing potential in the way that
alphabets and printing presses had democratizing potential.
What is the impact of the cell phone? facebook? twitter?
Constructing identity by wearing symbolic objects is
the inward tension associated
with fashion. The outward face of the tension between identity and
society
is the public dimension of telephone use – the act of conducting a
private
conversation with a physically absent partner, in front of copresent
strangers.
The performative aspects of our personalities find a new dimension of
expression
with the mobile phone, but in the act of using it, we are changing the
nature
of the stage of public behavior. As Fortunati put it:"life is still a
theater,
but the difference between when we are acting and when we are being
ourselves
is on the whole less distinct, if only because the mobile gives us the
possibility,
when necessary, to stage ourselves."
What
happens to the 'real' if we move into a internet-mediated world?
-possibility of simulation to replace real
Another category of critical claim deserves mention, despite the rather
bizarre and incredible imagery used by its most well known
spokesmen--the hyper-realist school. These critics believe that
information technologies have already changed what used to pass for
reality into a slicked-up electronic simulation. Twenty years before
the United States elected a Hollywood actor as president, the first
hyper-realists pointed out how politics had become a movie, a spectacle
that raised the old Roman tactic of bread and circuses to the level of
mass hypnotism. We live in a
hyper-reality that was carefully constructed to mimic the real world
and extract money from the pockets of consumers: the
forests around the Matterhorn might be dying, but the Disneyland
version continues to rake in the dollars. The television programs,
movie stars, and theme parks work together to create global industry
devoted to maintaining a web of illusion that grows more lifelike as
more people buy into it and as technologies grow more powerful.
Virtual
communitarians, because of the nature of our medium, must pay for our
access to each other by forever questioning the reality of our online
culture. The land of the hyper-real begins when people forget that a
telephone only conveys the illusion of being within speaking distance
of another person and a computer conference only conveys the illusion
of a town hall meeting. It's when we forget about the illusion that the
trouble begins. When the technology itself grows powerful enough to
make the illusions increasingly realistic, as the Net promises to do
within the next ten to twenty years, the necessity for continuing to
question reality grows even more acute.
What should
those of us who believe in the democratizing potential of virtual
communities do about the technological critics? I believe we should
invite them to the table and help them see the flaws in our dreams, the
bugs in our designs. I believe we should study what the historians and
social scientists have to say about the illusions and power shifts that
accompanied the diffusion of previous technologies. CMC and technology
in general has real limits; it's best to continue to listen to those
who understand the limits, even as we continue to explore the
technologies' positive capabilities. Failing to fall under the spell of
the "rhetoric of the technological sublime," actively questioning and
examining social assumptions about the effects of new technologies,
reminding ourselves that electronic communication has powerful illusory
capabilities, are all good steps to take to prevent disasters.
How do we remain 'grounded' in the 'real'
vs hyper-real world?
-focus needs to be on how virtual organizing can help actual communities
-application to many, multiple, varying types of community
-conscious effort to maintain public, not commodified discourse
