Peter Ludlow, Ed., High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues In Cyberspace (original) (raw)

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Peter Ludlow's collection of essays critiques various social and political issues surrounding computers and the Internet, presenting a mix of insightful and misguided arguments. The essays explore topics like intellectual property rights in cyberspace and the nature of community online, yet often lack rigorous analysis and fail to address fundamental questions regarding the digital medium. The work highlights the ongoing debates in this young field while pointing to significant weaknesses in understanding cyberspace's implications.

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Review of Boyle, James. Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society; Doheny-Farina, Stephen. The Wired Neighborhood; Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity In The Age Of The Internet.

Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 1998

I spend a lot of time in bookstores looking for books that talk about computers and the Internet from a cultural perspective, and I am often disappointed. There are a lot of books that explore the intersection of culture and technology, but so many of these cyberculture books take one of two oversimplistic perspectives. Many take what Stephen Doheny-Farina in The Wired Neighborhood calls the "techno-utopian" stance (x}, musing over "what will be" and "the road ahead" and concluding that technology; despite its minor (and fixable) flaws, is leading us inevitably in ever more positive directions to a wired culture in which individual freedom is complete and free-market capitalism is unfettered (Dertouzos; Gates, Myhrvold, and Rinearson; Negroponte; Tapscott). Others adopt a more negative stance, warning against 11 silicon snake oil" and the influx of /1 data smog" and arguing that computers and the Internet will be the death of culture (Postman; Shenk; Stoll).

From the myth of cyberspace to the political economy of computer communication

Comunicação e Sociedade, 2005

The development of computer communication in the 1980s and 90s gave a new impetus to the set of myths connecting information technologies to the end of space, the end of time, the end of politcs and the end of history. Based on the Political Economy perspective, this article challenges the foundations of this symbolic construct and explains its unsustainability. Along these lines, it will be argued that cyberspace results from the mutual constitution of digitalization and commodification. Due to its potential to combine universial language with customized products, digitalization expands the commodification of content by expanding opportunities to measure and monitor, package and repackage entertainment and information. Mythic cyberspace might therefore might be little more than an highly commercialized space with scarce room for diversity and debate.

Ethics and Information Technology 2: 147–152, 2000. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Our moral condition in cyberspace

2015

Abstract. Some kinds of technological change not only trigger new ethical problems, but also give rise to questions about those very approaches to addressing ethical problems that have been relied upon in the past. Writing in the aftermath of World War II, Hans Jonas called for a new “ethics of responsibility, ” based on the reasoning that modern technology dramatically divorces our moral condition from the assumptions under which standard ethical theories were first conceived. Can a similar claim be made about the technologies of cyberspace? Do online information technologies so alter our moral condition that standard ethical theories become ineffective in helping us address the moral problems they create? I approach this question from two angles. First, I look at the impact of online information technologies on our powers of causal efficacy. I then go on to consider their impact on self-identity. We have good reasons, I suggest, to be skeptical of any claim that there is a need fo...

FROM THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER TO THE ANTHROPOCENE: A CONVERSATION WITH FRED TURNER

This conversation tracks and critiques the human journey from the electronic frontier to the Anthropocene through the lens of the history of digital media. The first part of the conversation reveals complex trajectories between countercultures of the 1960s and their predecessors in the 1950s and 1940s. It links information technologies with historical struggles against totalitarianism, and inquires their contemporary potentials for creating a more tolerant society. The second part of the conversation analyses the main differences between the New Communalists and the New Left of the " Psychedelic Sixties. " Using the example of the Burning Man festival, it outlines trajectories of these movements into present and future of our consumerist society. The conversation explores the complex relationships between counterculture, cyberculture, and capitalism, and asks whether the age of information needs its own religion. Looking at mechanisms in which traditional inequalities have been reproduced in the communes of the 1960s, it touches upon contemporary Silicon Valley's " soft discrimination. " The third part of the conversation explores contemporary transformations of various occupations. Looking at journalism, it shows that consequences of its transformation from watchdog of democracy into a tool of global neoliberalism are yet unclear, and seeks one possible solution in " computational journalism. " It also explores how the arts have often legitimated ideologies peddled by information technologies. Looking at human learning, it inquires the role of teachers in the contemporary society, and links it to the role of public intellectuals as writers of scholarly texts and builders of human networks. The last part of the conversation explores the main issues with cyber-knowledge. It examines traditional divisions between disciplines, and links them to cybernetics. It introduces the " biological metaphor " for describing the Internet and compares it to the traditional " computational metaphor. " It discusses the main pros and cons of Donna Haraway's cyborg metaphor, and inquires whether the Internet needs to be

Cyberspace, International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory & Philosophy

This entry traces the origins, development, and decline of the use of the term cyberspace as applied to computer-networked communication since the 1980s. It pays particular attention to the blurring, in critical studies of cyberspace, of fictional visions and futures from SF literature and film, with actual technological and cultural applications and practices.

The Internet in Question

The purpose of this chapter is to affirm the democratic potential of the Internet. Affirmation is called for by the context of contemporary critical theory, in which the Internet figures increasingly as the problem rather than the solution to the crisis of democracy. This marks a change from early optimistic assessments which still inspire a diminishing band of commentators. But mainstream academic opinion has turned against what is now considered "hype," the exaggerated expectation that the Internet would contribute to the democratization of society.

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Shaping the philosophy of the Internet

PHILOSOPHY BRIDGING CIVILIZATIONS AND CULTURES Universal, Regional, National Values in United Europe PROCEEDINGS XXIV Varna International Philosophical School June, 1st –3rd 2006, Editor – Sonya Kaneva, IPhR-BAS, Sofia, 2007, pp 329-334., 2007