The prediction, in brief:

Assuming the U.S. government and the corporations do not shape the Internet entirely in their own image and that places of cyberdemocracy remain and spread to larger and larger segments of the population, what will emerge as a postmodern politics? If these conditions are met, one possibility is that authority as we have known it will change drastically.

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:”Because the Internet ascribes the new social figure of the cyborg and institutes a communicative practice of self-constitution, the political as we have known it is reconfigured. The wrapping of language on the Internet, its digitized, machine-mediated signifiers in a space without bodies, introduces an unprecedented novelty for political theory. How will electronic beings be governed? How will the power relations on the Internet combine with or influence power relations that emerge from face-to-face relations, print relations and broadcast relations? Assuming the U.S. government and the corporations do not shape the Internet entirely in their own image and that places of cyberdemocracy remain and spread to larger and larger segments of the population, what will emerge as a postmodern politics? If these conditions are met, one possibility is that authority as we have known it will change drastically.”

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: Anderson, Janna Quitney