The “magic” of the Internet is that it is a technology that puts cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms, in the hands of all participants; it radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, filmmaking, radio and television broadcasting, in short the apparatuses of cultural production.
Predictor: Poster, Mark
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 paper titled “CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere,” Mark Poster, a member of the humanities faculty at the University of California at Irvine and author of “The Second Media Age,” writes: ”On the Internet, individuals construct their identities, doing so in relation to on-going dialogues not as acts of pure consciousness. But such activity does not count as freedom in the liberal-Marxist sense because it does not refer back to a foundational subject. Yet it does connote a ‘democratization’ of subject constitution because the acts of discourse are not limited to one-way address and not constrained by the gender and ethnic issues inscribed in fact-to-face communications. The ‘magic’ of the Internet is that it is a technology that puts cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms, in the hands of all participants; it radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, filmmaking, radio and television broadcasting, in short the apparatuses of cultural production.”
Biography:Mark Poster wrote the paper “Cyberdemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere” in 1995 while teaching at the University of California, Irvine. He also wrote about technology for Wired magazine. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Global Relationships/Politics
Subtopic: Democracy
Name of publication: Mark Poster's Web site
Title, headline, chapter name: CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/mposter/writings/democ.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Schmidt, Nicholas