What the Internet technology imposes is a dematerialization of communication, and in many of its aspects a transformation of the subject position of the individual who engages within it. The Internet resists the basic conditions for asking the question of the effects of technology. It installs a new regime of relations between humans and matter and between matter and nonmatter, reconfiguring the relation of technology to culture and thereby undermining the standpoint from within which, in the past, a discourse developed – one which appeared to be natural – about the effects of technology.
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: ”If one places in brackets political theories that address modern governmental institutions in order to open the path to an assessment of the ‘postmodern’ possibilities suggested by the Internet, two difficulties immediately emerge: (1) there is no adequate ‘postmodern’ theory of politics and (2) the issue of democracy, the dominant political norm and ideal, is itself a ‘modern’ category associated with the project of the Enlightenment … In the absence of a coherent alternative political program, the best one can do is examine phenomena such as the Internet in relation to new forms of the old democracy, while holding open the possibility that what might emerge might be something other than democracy in any shape that we may conceive it given our embeddedness in the present … If the technological structure of the Internet institutes costless reproduction, instantaneous dissemination and radical decentralization, what might be its effects upon the society, the culture and the political institutions? There can be only one answer to this question and that is that it is the wrong question … What the Internet technology imposes is a dematerialization of communication, and in many of its aspects a transformation of the subject position of the individual who engages within it. The Internet resists the basic conditions for asking the question of the effects of technology. It installs a new regime of relations between humans and matter and between matter and nonmatter, reconfiguring the relation of technology to culture and thereby undermining the standpoint from within which, in the past, a discourse developed – one which appeared to be natural – about the effects of technology.”
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