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Overview
How are
computer technologies impacting on and even changing human beings living
with other human beings? What impact have they had on the way in
which humans view themselves and on the values they hold? The
technologies have already produced quite noticeable impacts on most social
institutions: the family, the community, the religious communities,
government, the educational institutions and so on. There is no
social institution where there is no sign of change due to the existence
of computers and the internet.
The
technologies have had an impact on the way in which humans learn, work and
play and govern themselves. The technologies have empowered human
beings and increased the potential that each has and that groups have to
communicate with and influence others and to create and share with others.
Computer
networks have impacted on the way in which humans hold traditional values
as they present both expansions upon potentials and also threats to either
diminishing or altering the positioning of some
values humans have long held. While humans can do more now due to these technologies, on the
other hand humans are perceiving genuine threats to their autonomy as
privacy becomes more difficult to defend and preserve. With threats to
autonomy and privacy comes the resultant threat to Democracy as a form of
government and social organization. While the technologies support a
democratic form of association and communication at the same time they
reduce privacy needed for some groups to form and to operate as critics of
the current political order and government. This constitutes a
paradox of sorts that will be covered in the next chapter.
It is
important for human beings to gain as much understanding of the impact of
computer technologies and of their potentials so that humans might be
better positioned to create deliberate efforts to influence the direction
of change in the service of those values held most highly.
Humans now
have the ability to communicate with billions of others and they can view
the communications and creations of an ever growing number of people who
express themselves through computers and the internet.
People are becoming authors and creators of letters, poems, plays, books,
songs, videos and films at an unprecedented pace and the technologies make
it possible for nearly every human to produce contributions to the world
wide community. What does having this potential due to humans? How
has the social nature of the human being changed?
Humans have been
significantly empowered by the still unimaginable extensions in capacity
that computer technologies have presented to the human species that has
created them. The technologies have had adaptations that specific
creators had not envisioned and in turn those adaptations have inspired
even larger numbers of humans to envision and then to create even more
adaptations and uses for the technologies. Computer technologies
have now been adapted and adopted to a variety of uses in homes, schools,
businesses, nearly every form of transportation, financial institutions,
industries from farming to power generation, the military and even
religious institutions. The arts and humanities have been impacted
by the adoptions and adaptations as well. Both access to and
participation in all the major social institutions has been significantly
altered by computer technologies.
People can pray online
and participate in religious services and gain access to scriptures and
sacred texts from laptops and notebook computers. They can also gain
access to information for the construction of weapons of mass destruction.
Medical information is available even when practitioners are not.
Medical specialists are available to colleagues at times and across
distances that heretofore would have prohibited collaborations and
consultations. Surgeons can perform surgery even when they are thousands
of miles distant from those undergoing the procedure.
Personal relationships
can be kindled and developed with some uses of computers and some
relationships can be destroyed by other forms of use. People can
meet online and others can be unfaithful in new ways to their most
significant partners.
Children have
educational opportunities and resources available to them on a scale
unprecedented in all human history and at the same time they can be
targeted by those who would exploit and abuse them by those who gain
access to them through the technologies.
Consumers can learn of
and have access to a wider range and number of products and services than
ever before and they can be targeted by unscrupulous agents who would
practice larceny and theft in new forms made possible though the
technology.
As the technologies
increase human capacity the divisions amongst peoples of the world created
by those with means and access to means for acquisition and manipulations
of their environments and those without such means can be further widened
as access to and possession of computer technologies varies with the
wealth of individuals, groups and nations. Attention needs to be
given to this matter of exacerbation of the differences between the
wealthy and the poor exemplified by issues of access to the computer
technologies, sometimes referred to as the "digital divide". There
is already evidence that in some countries that have valued social
equality there has been significant alteration in the lessening of the
severity and of the nature of the divide in their borders.
Computer technologies
make possible human participation in simulations and virtual realities
that offer emotional experiences previously obtained only through
relationships and interactions with other humans and non-human biological
life forms. How have such experiences impacted humans and what might
they offer in the future in terms of either further realization of those
valued experienced or the diminishing of those values themselves or the
displacement of the primary modes in which they are realized
by humans? The human species has only just begun to create such
virtual realities and to consider the impact of having done so.
There is appreciation
being acknowledged for the call for attention to the impact of computer
technologies on the various forms of association and on social
institutions and on the basic conceptions of society and self and the
values held by humans that guide decisions for change. The impact of
the technologies has been so considerable and significant and the
potential so enormous that humans are realizing that there is little
defense for ignoring what is happening and what may be coming. The
more difficult task is in the exploration of the most efficacious
conceptualizations of changes and potential changes while acknowledging
that knowledge of what the future holds as potential adoptions,
adaptations and developments are impossible. Some directions of change may
be capable of being altered, some impacts diminished in intensity,
and only some threats averted if there is sufficient attention and
communications and marshalling of the force of consensus building and
collective action and enforcement through statutes, regulations and acts
of moral suasion.
In the
The Virtual Community
by
Howard Rheingold READ Chapter
Ten: Disinformocracy the section titled
the The Hyper-realists
Hyper-realists see the use of
communications technologies as a route to the total replacement of the
natural world and the social order with a technologically mediated
hyper-reality, a "society of the spectacle" in which we are not even
aware that we work all day to earn money to pay for entertainment
media that tell us what to desire and which brand to consume and which
politician to believe. We don't see our environment as an artificial
construction that uses media to extract our money and power. We see it
as "reality"--the way things are. To hyper-realists, CMC, like other
communications technologies of the past, is doomed to become another
powerful conduit for disinfotainment. While a few people will get
better information via high-bandwidth supernetworks, the majority of
the population, if history is any guide, are likely to become more
precisely befuddled, more exactly manipulated. Hyper-reality is what
you get when a Panopticon evolves to the point where it can convince
everyone that it doesn't exist; people continue to believe they are
free, although their power has disappeared.
Televisions, telephones, radios, and
computer networks are potent political tools because their function is
not to manufacture or transport physical goods but to influence human
beliefs and perceptions. As electronic entertainment has become
increasingly "realistic," it has been used as an increasingly powerful
propaganda device. The most radical of the hyper-realist political
critics charge that the wonders of communications technology
skillfully camouflage the disappearance and subtle replacement of true
democracy--and everything else that used to be authentic, from nature
to human relationships--with a simulated, commercial version. The
illusion of democracy offered by CMC utopians, according to these
reality critiques, is just another distraction from the real power
play behind the scenes of the new technologies--the replacement of
democracy with a global mercantile state that exerts control through
the media-assisted manipulation of desire rather than the more
orthodox means of surveillance and control. Why torture people when
you can get them to pay for access to electronic mind control?
During the events of May 1968, when
students provoked a revolt in the streets of Paris against the
Gaullist regime, a radical manifesto surfaced, written by Guy Debord.
The Society of the Spectacle made a startling tangential leap
from what McLuhan was saying at around the same time. Cinema,
television, newspapers, Debord proclaimed, were all part of worldwide
hegemony of power in which the rich and powerful had learned to rule
with minimal force by turning everything into a media event. The
staged conventions of the political parties to anoint politicians who
had already been selected behind closed doors were a prominent
example, but they were only part of a web of headlines,
advertisements, and managed events.
The replacement of old neighborhoods
with modern malls, and caf‚s with fast-food franchises, was part of
this "society of the spectacle," precisely because they help destroy
the "great good places" where the public sphere lives. More than
twenty years later, Debord looked back and emphasized this aspect of
his earlier forecasts:
For the agora, the general
community, has gone, along with communities restricted to
intermediary bodies or to independent institutions, to salons or caf‚s,
or to workers in a single company. There is no place left where
people can discuss the realities which concern them, because they
can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of
media discourse and of the various forces organized to relay it. . .
. What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly
eliminating any possible reference to the authentic. And what is
genuine is reconstructed as quickly as possible, to resemble the
false.
Another French social critic, Jean
Baudrillard, has been writing since the 1960s about the increasingly
synthetic nature of technological civilization and a culture that has
been irrevocably tainted by the corruption of our symbolic systems.
This analysis goes deeper than the effects of media on our minds;
Baudrillard claims to track the degeneration of meaning itself. In
Baudrillard's historical analysis, human civilization has changed
itself in three major stages, marked by the changes in meaning we
invest in our symbol systems. More specifically, Baudrillard focused
on the changing relationship between signs (such as
alphabetical characters, graphic images) and that which they
signify. The word dog is a sign, and English-speakers
recognize that it refers to, signifies, a living creature in the
material world that barks and has fleas. According to Baudrillard,
during the first step of civilization, when speech and then writing
were created, signs were invented to point to reality. During
the second step of civilization, which took place over the past
century, advertising, propaganda, and commodification set in, and the
sign begins to hide reality. The third step includes our step
into the hyper-real, for now we are in an age when signs begin to
hide the absence of reality. Signs now help us pretend that they
mean something.
Technology and industry, in
Baudrillard's view, succeeded over the past century in satisfying
basic human needs, and thus the profit-making apparatus that
controlled technology-driven industry needed to fulfill desires
instead of needs. The new media of radio and television made it
possible to keep the desire level of entire populations high enough to
keep a consumer society going. The way this occurs has to do with sign
systems such as tobacco commercials that link the brand name of a
cigarette to a beautiful photograph of a sylvan scene. The brand name
of a cigarette is woven into a fabric of manufactured signifiers that
can be changed at any time. The realm of the hyper-real. Virtual
communities will fit very neatly into this cosmology, if it turns out
that they offer the semblance of community but lack some fundamental
requirement for true community.
Baudrillard's vision reminded me of
another dystopian prophecy from the beginning of the twentieth
century,
E. M. Forster's chilling tale "The
Machine Stops." The story is about a future world of
billions of people, each of whom lives in a comfortable multimedia
chamber that delivers necessities automatically, dispenses of wastes,
and links everyone in the world into marvelously stimulating web of
conversations. The only problem is that people long ago forgot that
they were living in a machine. The title of the story describes the
dramatic event that gives the plot momentum. Forster and Baudrillard
took the shadow side of telecommunications and considered it in light
of the human capacity for illusion. They are both good cautionary
mythmakers, marking the borders of the pitfalls of global,
high-bandwidth networks and multimedia virtual communities.
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.
If electronic democracy is to succeed,
however, in the face of all the obstacles, activists must do more than
avoid mistakes. Those who would use computer networks as political
tools must go forward and actively apply their theories to more and
different kinds of communities. If there is a last good hope, a
bulwark against the hyper-reality of Baudrillard or Forster, it will
come from a new way of looking at technology. Instead of falling under
the spell of a sales pitch, or rejecting new technologies as
instruments of illusion, we need to look closely at new technologies
and ask how they can help build stronger, more humane communities--and
ask how they might be obstacles to that goal. The late 1990s may
eventually be seen in retrospect as a narrow window of historical
opportunity, when people either acted or failed to act effectively to
regain control over communications technologies. Armed with knowledge,
guided by a clear, human-centered vision, governed by a commitment to
civil discourse, we the citizens hold the key levers at a pivotal
time. What happens next is largely up to us.
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