The current saturation of relatively inexpensive multimedia communication tools holds tremendous potential for destroying the monopoly of ideas we have lived with for so long… A personal computer can be configured to act as a publishing house, a broadcast-quality TV studio, a professional recording studio, or the node in an international computer bulletin board system.
Hope springs eternal, even in cyberspace. Jammers are heartened by the electronic frontier’s promise of a new media paradigm – interactive rather than passive, nomadic and atomized rather than resident and centralized, egalitarian rather than elitist.
The parallel world of cyberspace will take on a liquid architecture. But the inhabitants will be as liquid as their environment. They will therefore be occupied with both the design of shape and surroundings … What the street used to be to historical dandies like Brummell, Baudelaire and Wilde, the Net is to the electronical one. Cruising along the data boulevards cannot be prohibited and clogs the entire bandwidth in the end. The all-too-civilized conversation during the rendezvous stirs up some misplaced and inconvenient information, but never leads to dissidence. Willfully wrong navigation and elegant joy riding in somebody else’s electro-environment is targeted to trigger admiration, jealousy and confusion, and self-assuredly heads toward a stylized incomprehension. One fathoms the beauty of one’s virtual appearance.
We call it a Nightmare nothing between the underclass and the virtual class, No public control just virtual elites, Certainly no liberty for all just Newt and the boys in a perfect little techno-bubble clean, sterile and immunized from degrading American flesh Get wired, they say Get deregulated and upgraded Get netted and vetted Get multi-tasked, demassified and bit-netted Get backslashed, backtracked and backlit Let’s surf, merge, and purge Leave behind the First and Second Waves and welcome the famous Third Wave.
The inevitiblity of the computer should no more be allowed than letting television become a life necessity. Which is why it would be better – even if it’s no longer possible – not to be caught up in the computer-net. Only then can the new media offer a useful option. Everything else is coercion … There will now be a media-criticism that is finally informed, and which, insofar as this criticism will take place in the nets, will finally be part of the new media themselves.
You are not in control of Cyberspace, it is not there for your comfort and convenience, and no one is driving it. There is no suggestion in the notion of Cyberspace that, should human beings suddenly cease to exist – or destroy themselves in some nuclear folly – the network of machines that constitute Cyberspace would vanish with them. Cyberspace assumes that the machines we have built will soon, in some leap of almost magical synergy, break free of their creators to constitute, by means of the communications networks we are generously building for them, a universe or nature of an entirely new and different order.
Here lies a new and major risk for humanity stemming from multimedia and computers. Albert Einstein, in fact, had already prophesized as much in the 1950s, when talking about “the second bomb.” The electronic bomb, after the atomic one. A bomb whereby real-time interaction would be to information what radioactivity is to energy. The disintegration then will not merely affect the particles of matter, but also the very people of which our societies consist … One may surmise that, just as the emergence of the atomic bomb made very quickly the elaboration of a policy of military dissuasion imperative in order to avoid a nuclear catastrophe, the information bomb will also need a new form of dissuasion adapted to the 21st century. This shall be a societal form of dissuasion to counter the damage caused by the explosion of unlimited information.
What will be gained from electronic information and electronic communication will necessarily result in a loss somewhere else. If we are not aware of this loss, and do not account for it, our gain will be of no value.
We have global time, belonging to the multimedia, to cyberspace, increasingly dominating the local time-frame of our cities, our neighborhoods. So much so, that there is talk of substituting the term “global” by “glocal,” a concatenation of the words local and global. This emerges from the idea that the local has, by definition, become global, and the global, local. Such a deconstruction of the relationship with the world is not without consequences for the relationship among the citizens themselves.
Together with the build-up of information superhighways we are facing a new phenomenon: loss of orientation. A fundamental loss of orientation complementing and concluding the societal liberalization and the deregulation of financial markets whose nefarious effects are well-known. A duplication of sensible reality, into reality and virtuality, is in the making … What lies ahead is a disturbance in the perception of what reality is; it is a shock, a mental concussion … The specific negative aspect of these information superhighways is precisely this loss of orientation regarding alterity (the other), this disturbance in the relationship with the other and with the world. It is obvious that this loss of orientation, this non-situation, is going to usher a deep crisis which will affect society and hence, democracy.