The Net is something entirely new, and its effects on democratic politics can’t be predicted using historical precedent. The Internet threatens the government (unmonitorable conversations), mocks private property (the infinite reproducibility of information), and flaunts moral propriety (the dissemination of pornography). The technology of the Internet shouldn’t be viewed as a new form of public sphere. The challenge is to understand how the networked future might be different from what we have known.
Predictor: Poster, Mark
Prediction, in context:In an article that Mark Poster – a member of the humanities faculty at the University of California at Irvine and author of “The Second Media Age” – wrote for Wired Magazine in 1995, he addresses the issue of an Internet community through chat identities: ”True, the Net allows people to talk as equals. But rational argument rarely prevails, and achieving consensus is seen as impossible. These are symptoms of the fundamentally different ways identity is defined in the public sphere and on the Net … The Internet … allows individuals to define their own identities and change them at will. A person might be an aging hippie known as john@well.com one day, a teenage girl called kate@aol.com the next. This kind of protean identity is not consonant with forming a stable political community as we have known it. Dissent on the Net does not lead to consensus: It creates the profusion of different views. Without embodied copresence, the charisma and status of individuals have no force. The conditions that encourage compromise, the hallmark of the democratic political process, are lacking online. On the Internet, since identities are mobile, dissent is encouraged, and ‘normal’ status markers are absent, it is a very different social ‘space’ from that of the public sphere. These changes must be examined without nostalgia. True, the Net marks a break with tradition. But that does not necessarily make it incompatible with political thought … The Net is something entirely new, and its effects on democratic politics can’t be predicted using historical precedent. The Internet threatens the government (unmonitorable conversations), mocks private property (the infinite reproducibility of information), and flaunts moral propriety (the dissemination of pornography). The technology of the Internet shouldn’t be viewed as a new form of public sphere. The challenge is to understand how the networked future might be different from what we have known.”
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: November 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: General, Overarching Remarks
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: The Net as a Public Sphere?
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.11/poster.if.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Schmidt, Nicholas