The Critical Net Critic (original) (raw)
Related papers
2012
Question passionnante que celle posee par cet essai, tant elle interroge un element devenu incontournable de nos vies actuelles. Nicholas Carr est d’ailleurs lui-meme un adepte et un utilisateur intensif du net, ce qui l’a amene a reflechir sur l’impact du web vis-a-vis de notre facon de penser. Son livre a la prose vivante, comme bon nombre d’ouvrages du meme type dont les Etatsuniens sont particulierement friands (on pense par exemple aux livres de Bill Bryson), est d’une lecture aisee, ac...
Not withstanding some inconsistencies and unconvincing elements in his argumentation, Keen’s book does constitute a welcome critical voice amongst existing egovernment literature by pointing out the downside of online democracy. Over the years, the democratic potential of the internet has managed to gain a firm position on the research agenda of egovernment scholars. Even though several of these research projects show successes in the field of interactive policymaking, increased transparency of government policy, and new ‘bottomup’ democratic initiatives, the general tendency in egovernment research is to conclude that the democratic potential of the internet is by far not realised yet. Not only are scholars active in this field convinced that the internet has the possibilities of reinforcing democracy, but they inexplicitly advert the normative assumption that this would be a good thing for society. The main merit of Keen’s book for egovernment research is that his objections towards the democratisation on the internet provides a welcome new perspective on this topic which may inspire a more critical attitude when researching the democratic potential of the internet.
Blurb: The Internet in its present form has undergone a number of ‘conceptual evolutions,’ yet at its base it remains an open network of computers programmed to exchange packages of data. In the 1960s Cold War hysteria prompted the United States to create a decentralized network capable of withstanding a nuclear strike. By the 1990s the Internet had developed into a world wide web for mainstream use. While inventors saw the technological potential of the network, it has been the ideological enthusiasm of developers that has propelled the Internet through the last two decades with the promise of its utopian applications. We are now living amongst a certain cynicism of commentators on the scope and application of Internet culture that marks a regression of the hype surrounding online potentialities. Unintended Consequences aims to discuss to what degree it is necessary for us to rethink our current ideological and practical conceptions of the Internet. Its speakers will address and explore issues surrounding the following: - From both a capitalist and counter-cultural perspective, did the Internet develop in the 1990s into, what Georges Sorel would call ‘social myth,’ an inspiring fiction? - If so, how have our aspirational visualisations of the Internet developed since the 1990s (e.g. as a democratizing space, as the free market in its purest form)? - Are the Western values of freedom and the individual that underpin our expectations of the Internet being subverted by its unregulated nature? - Is there a common ‘intentionality’ to the Internet and if so, how can we mitigate against the various ‘unintended consequences’? - Are good intentions ‘good enough’ to explore the limits of ‘hive mind’ and ‘crowd-sourcing’ projects? Or will these concepts come into their own through more corrupt means? - Are we witnessing the establishment of a global social brain? - In what sense is ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ becoming endorsed (or not) as relative concepts online (e.g. through ‘play,’ social media profiling, collaborative editing - Wikipedia)? - Is social networking introducing a new paradigm for morality in our everyday lives? - What exactly are we sharing when we ‘share’ online? To what extent do we affirm or concede parts of our own identity in discursive practices on social media platforms? - To what extent is intrusive, Internet surveillance tolerated by the general public who wish to benefit from combined online connectivity and locality to ‘personalize’ place? Presenters: Marcus Breen of Bond University exposes the social myth of ‘web 2.0 society’ by confronting us with two dystopian aspects of Internet culture: pornography and jihadism. Breen argues that transgressive knowledge circulates freely through the individual’s private engagement with Internet via the computer monitor, thereby dissolving the previous collective nature of media consumption and its societal principles. Artist, games researcher and media scholar at La Trobe University, Hugh Davies is the creator of the Alternate Reality game, The Darkest Puzzle, a game that explores the ethical limits of serious gamification. Inspired by the events of 9/11, The Darkest Puzzle leads gamers through a labyrinth of evidence, conspiracies and game meta discussion. Davies offers a critical approach the “hive mind” and popular phenomena, such as “crowd-sourcing”. Scott McQuire, media scholar and urban theorist at the University of Melbourne, focuses on the permeating impact of networks on situated and material spaces of the urban everyday. McQuire addresses the ambivalent nature of pervasive networks in terms of the spontaneity and serendipity so important to the modern city, as well as their utilization as intensive integrated surveillance. Alex Lambert probes aspects of the mediated gaze and intimacy on Facebook through his research into social media at Melbourne University. Many have identified the voyeuristic enticements of Facebook publicity, though this is only part of the story. Lambert explores how users experience a paradoxical moral backlash against mediated watching. This 'desire not to see' has socio-cultural significance that escapes popular theories of privacy on social network services. Based at Swinburne University, social media researcher, Jenny Kennedy, critiques the rhetoric of sharing in social media with special emphasis on the cultural imaging of these practices. She argues for the need to examine how 'sharing' is used discursively to frame particular activities in a digital or communicative context in particular. Moreover, sharing is being utilized as a rhetorical neutralizer between three social media actors: those that provide content to social media platforms; those that 'own' such data; and those that access and make use of it.
The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet
It does not by itself guarantee democracy, but the last several decades of Internet evolution offer a set of shared experiences that serve as political object lessons about democracy. Thomas Streeter (2011, p. 187) Central to Thomas Streeter's arguments is that the development of the Internet in the United States since the 1960s has largely been shaped by the social imagination
Posthumanities: The Dark Side of “The Dark Side of the Digital”
The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 2016
In What is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe insists "the nature of thought itself must change if it is to be posthumanist." 1 Our argument, made manifest by this special issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing, is that it is not only our ways of thinking about the world that must change if they are to be posthumanist, or at least not simply humanist; our ways of being and doing in the world must change too. In particular, we view the challenge to humanism and the human brought about by the emergence of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, robotics, bioscience, pre-emptive, cognitive, and contextual computing, as providing us with an opportunity to reinvent, radically, the ways in which we work, act, and think as theorists. In this respect, if "posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatics, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore," 2 then it generates an opportunity to raise the kind of questions for the humanities we really should have raised long before now, but haven't because our humanist ideas, not just of historical change and progression (i.e. from human to posthuman, to what comes after the human), 3 but of the rational, liberal, human subject, and the associated concepts of the author, the journal, and copyright that we have inherited with it, continue to have so much power and authority. Our use of disruption in this context thus goes beyond the usual definitions of the term. This includes those characterizations of technological disruption associated with Clayton Christensen and his colleagues at the Harvard Business School, and with the rhetoric of Silicon Valley. It is not our intention to try to sustain and develop the current system for creating, performing and circulating humanities research and scholarship, its methodologies, aesthetics, and institutions, by emphasizing the potential of disruptive technologies to generate innovations that are capable of facilitating the production of a new "digital" humanities, or even "posthuman Humanities studies." 4 As the title of this special issue indicates, rather than helping the humanities refresh themselves with what Joseph Schumpeter