Reflections on networks, human behaviour, and social dynamics in the digital age (original) (raw)
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Cyberspace as a New Existential Dimension of Man
Cyberspace [Working Title], 2019
Since the second half of the twentieth century, especially from the 1990s to the present, we have seen significant sociocultural changes that have mostly been influenced by information technology. In the area of information technology, it is mainly the Internet that is the essential part of all modern communication technologies such as smartphones, iPads, and so on. The Internet is a new communication space, also called cyberspace, in which we not only communicate but also work, learn, buy, have fun, and so on. It does not seem to be a mere "tool" of our new way of communication, but a dimension that becomes part of our existence. We then have to ask how our existence is changing under the influence of new technologies. How do we change the value system in cyberspace communication? What are the possibilities and risks of communication in cyberspace? These are just some of the issues that arise in connection with communication in cyberspace to which we will seek answers. In the chapter we use the phenomenological and hermeneutic method. Through the phenomenological method, we examine the basic structure of cyberspace (Clark, Ropolyi) and, using a hermeneutic method, examine the differences between communication in cyberspace and old media (Lohisse, Postman, Bystřický).
Pereira Martins, C. (ed.) Cyberpolitics IEF Coimbra University, Coimbra
But also the admiration I feel for his work and study. He is the most brilliant mind I have ever met and its been almost 30 years witnessing his intelligence as a musical storm and his discourse as an embrace. His passion for thinking is still today an inspiration for many of us and an impossible challenge to fit in his shoes. Without him and his continuing support none of this would have been possible. Also a very special note of esteem to Bruno C. Duarte who is one of the most intense and progressive thinkers in Philosophy and Aesthetics but who, by some strange twist of fate, keeps being subsumed by the silent noise of the world that unfairly refuses to recognize and acknowledge his value. For what it's worth, I would like to pay him my homage. Last but not the least, Professor Mário Santiago de Carvalho, Director of IEF in Coimbra University, for the support and making possible that the book could exist in a open access form. This book would not have been possible without the financial support of the FCT Foundation regarding my study and time. X FOREWORD 0. Humbleness. The task we have set ourselves here is not a light one. We aim at connecting present and future, at drawing that invisible line between possibility and actuality. At trying to see among all the shadows and fog in a transition stage. That is no easy venture. And aside from all the odds, aside from all the unpredictable developments we are as yet unable to see right now, aside from testifying to the survival process of possibilities and witnessing which of our hypothesis will become real, aside from all that, there is an overallfeeling, almost a palpable sensation, that something is changing. Drastically, rapidly, and deeply. Last year, around this same date, I was at the Kyoto airport trying to kill time before returning to Lisbon in what was to be a very long flight. Whenever you spend a lot of time in the same exact place, a vast territory of experience awaits you before and after boredom befalls you. You are suddenly able to see how small the world is, all the different types of persons, you enter in a void regarding yourself, your body and mind are out of synch, you wander through multiple horizons of time and memory, you walk when you start feeling numb, you eat, you listen to music, you read, but the full weight of time eventually kicks in, and either you sleep or you stroll a bit observing your fellow travellers who find themselves there, imprisoned, like yourself. During one of these rambles, I decided to enter a bookshop. Browsing through all the covers and titles, whilst thinking how much writing and reading have become a hobby when it comes to killing time, designed for empty areas of life like traveling, I found a strange book with a great title by Yuval Noah Harari. As I read the index, I was shocked to recognize a lot of my ideas and thoughts. There it was, a world best seller, or so it was announced, that synthesized what had cost me so much work and time to study and develop. I left the bookshop in horror, disappointed at my own intellectual achievements. But then, suddenly a strange thing happened. Following that initial state of perplexity, I started to digress about coincidences, life, and how truly wonderful is the fact that ideas are common and free entities, that they belong to no one. Here I was at Kyoto, after having studied so much about Political Philosophy in Lisbon, face to face with a mirror in the words of a Professor sitting at a Jerusalem University. I was blown away. And even more blown away with a sudden, sharp and profound experience of humbleness. In fact, these two instances, humility and the possibility of thinking for oneself, allow both for the autonomy of Philosophy and for the dialogue between us and the ones that are no longer with us. We can reach the same conclusion as Kant or Kierkegaard, have meaningful visions with Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, feel alone or in context: such amplitude is very rare in the academic universe, especially in our present time. In the corridor of the Kyoto airport, I was humbly reminded by that book why I love philosophy: absolute freedom, something I never experienced in a scholarly atmosphere. It is that same freedom that brought us together in presenting this book to readers. And it's a very ambiguous book from the start: while it provides and intends to ground some key concepts and discussions, it is already fighting for its own theoretical survival in a world where the cyberpolitical XI shock, along with its inevitable shift of paradigm, is going through several waves and stages of development. We are starting with something that a few years ago was a mere hypothesis and suspicion, but may easily be found to be obvious and irrelevant a few years from now. In very brief terms, then, I would suggest a twofold preliminary analysis: a) Dematerialization of the political process. Taking metamorphosis as a central concept, alongside the notion of speed (addressing and improving the old politics always a step behind, that insists in the relationship with geopolitics as an essential analysis tool for preventing the establishment of Cyberpolitics as a new academic method that could also integrate and improve political analysis: the real world vs the virtual world); b) Immaterialization of the political universe. Probably the last phase of this stage, which will imply the coexistence of parallel worlds, the surpassing and death of mass media systems, an almost utopian political world built in accordance with specific group or individual positions and interests. These two landmarks, with all the controversy and discussion they might generate, even if it now seems tenuous and ambivalent, will reveal itself to be inevitable, and one could even say it is already in motion. When I started working in this research area, the mere word Cyberpolitics was fragile and uncertain. Since then, many changes have occured. From the immense doubts and insecurities observed in the past, numerous certainties have been reached in the establishment of the concept and field of studies. It is the importance of that conquest and those concepts, which are now in plain view, that this book wishes to address and to underline both for the present and, most especially, for the future. all, namely the one between technology and theology. I believe that event will be the most dramatic change in the history of mankind. 3. Prognosis: time, affect, economy. One of the most fascinating things in the world are the periods of crisis. With all the pain and suffering they entail, but also the overcoming surprise and discoveries they always reveal. We could probably simplify all human evolution by considering its crisis as a profound pattern. However, regardless of the form it takes, an acute crisis is a singular historical moment of great intensity and anxiety, precisely in view of the fact that such moments demand more critical thinking. Maybe crisis and critic should be the subtitle of this final preamble, since we are clearly dazzled by the absolute crisis and change that the transition from the 20th century to the new millennium has brought upon us. It appears that this massive transformation is immune to critical analysis, and that it has occurred with a strange naturalness and a technological neutrality or passiveness. Science installed itself as the great new god without opposition, and established its imperial dominion without any major wars, no hordes of barbaric invasions, and paradoxically without any alarm. The future and its risks seem oblivious to the elapsing of time that peacefully observes and watches its own destiny unfolding like a movie spectator. As we all know, science fiction movies seem to be just two steps ahead of reality, and one of the biggest dangers of Cyberpolitics, regarding the temptation of total control, even towards accident and randomness, consists of witnessing the artificial intelligence, genetic manipulation, and parallel questions, in a degree of predictability never before encountered. But not even all the folds of cyberspace can hide the dimension of the problems that lie ahead (we should probably have to follow Kant's categories and mention also cybertime and the distortions, expansions and retractions, of time on the net). And time was, is and will always be, the central question of life. The net, the web, and all the expressions that sew our lives, desires, hopes, dreams and nightmares, also enforce the return of the same old dilemmas: trust, truth, freedom, safety, loneliness, sex, love and all the major philosophical questions that endure through the ages. The future and its risks should also be about the risk of oblivion, the fact that the electrical metaphysics that has been carried out so far, should not make us forget the basis of life, water, air, and face ecology as a fundamental ethics. The current Coronavirus pandemic seems to confirm that we have entered a second stage of Cyberpolitics. The urgent need for a deeper development towards health issues merging robotics and A.I., the emergence of a faceless society like a Levinas nightmare, it's like we almost feel we cannot maintain the status quo by its own, meaning humanity on its own, by itself. The automation of the social and labor fabric will probably be our next step in the chain of this new era. But besides all this speculative ultimate attempt of peeking into the future, and beyond any functionalist, metaphysical or pragmatist point of view, it's now visible for everyone that we are in an moment of enormous civilizational leap, that, much like the Hegelian process of self-consciousness, Cyberpolitics is the affirmation of that transitional stage. The impact of a paradigm shift is always fertile ground for the XX savagery of our imagination, and YouTube, in the erosion between private and public sphere, will certainly be a tremendous archive for academic research: conspiracy theories, political-science...
Manifesto de Ciência Social Computacional
Mediações - Revista de Ciências Sociais, 2013
The European Physical Journal Special Topics -Change of the population structure (change of birth rate, migration); -Financial and economic instability (trust, consumption and investments; sovereign debt, taxation, and inflation/deflation; sustainability of social welfare systems, and so on); -Social, economic and political divide (among people of different gender, age, education, income, religion, culture, language, preferences); -Threats against health (due to the spreading of epidemics, but also to unhealthy diets and habits); -Unbalance of power in a multi-polar world; -Organized crime, including cyber-crime, social unrest and war; -Uncertainty in institutional design and dynamics (regarding regulations, authority, corruption, balance between global and local, central and decentralized systems); -Unethical usage of communication and information systems (cyber risks, violation of privacy, misuse of sensitive data, spam). In the last couple of years, social scientists have started to organize and classify the number, variety, and severity of criticalities, if not pathologies and failures, recurring in complex social systems . These are amongst the most severe social problems, difficult to predict and treat, and raising serious social alarm.
Cyberpolitics Political Philosophy of the future by Constantino Pereira Martins ( ed.) (z-lib.org)
2021
But also the admiration I feel for his work and study. He is the most brilliant mind I have ever met and its been almost 30 years witnessing his intelligence as a musical storm and his discourse as an embrace. His passion for thinking is still today an inspiration for many of us and an impossible challenge to fit in his shoes. Without him and his continuing support none of this would have been possible. Also a very special note of esteem to Bruno C. Duarte who is one of the most intense and progressive thinkers in Philosophy and Aesthetics but who, by some strange twist of fate, keeps being subsumed by the silent noise of the world that unfairly refuses to recognize and acknowledge his value. For what it's worth, I would like to pay him my homage. Last but not the least, Professor Mário Santiago de Carvalho, Director of IEF in Coimbra University, for the support and making possible that the book could exist in a open access form. This book would not have been possible without the financial support of the FCT Foundation regarding my study and time. X FOREWORD 0. Humbleness. The task we have set ourselves here is not a light one. We aim at connecting present and future, at drawing that invisible line between possibility and actuality. At trying to see among all the shadows and fog in a transition stage. That is no easy venture. And aside from all the odds, aside from all the unpredictable developments we are as yet unable to see right now, aside from testifying to the survival process of possibilities and witnessing which of our hypothesis will become real, aside from all that, there is an overallfeeling, almost a palpable sensation, that something is changing. Drastically, rapidly, and deeply. Last year, around this same date, I was at the Kyoto airport trying to kill time before returning to Lisbon in what was to be a very long flight. Whenever you spend a lot of time in the same exact place, a vast territory of experience awaits you before and after boredom befalls you. You are suddenly able to see how small the world is, all the different types of persons, you enter in a void regarding yourself, your body and mind are out of synch, you wander through multiple horizons of time and memory, you walk when you start feeling numb, you eat, you listen to music, you read, but the full weight of time eventually kicks in, and either you sleep or you stroll a bit observing your fellow travellers who find themselves there, imprisoned, like yourself. During one of these rambles, I decided to enter a bookshop. Browsing through all the covers and titles, whilst thinking how much writing and reading have become a hobby when it comes to killing time, designed for empty areas of life like traveling, I found a strange book with a great title by Yuval Noah Harari. As I read the index, I was shocked to recognize a lot of my ideas and thoughts. There it was, a world best seller, or so it was announced, that synthesized what had cost me so much work and time to study and develop. I left the bookshop in horror, disappointed at my own intellectual achievements. But then, suddenly a strange thing happened. Following that initial state of perplexity, I started to digress about coincidences, life, and how truly wonderful is the fact that ideas are common and free entities, that they belong to no one. Here I was at Kyoto, after having studied so much about Political Philosophy in Lisbon, face to face with a mirror in the words of a Professor sitting at a Jerusalem University. I was blown away. And even more blown away with a sudden, sharp and profound experience of humbleness. In fact, these two instances, humility and the possibility of thinking for oneself, allow both for the autonomy of Philosophy and for the dialogue between us and the ones that are no longer with us. We can reach the same conclusion as Kant or Kierkegaard, have meaningful visions with Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, feel alone or in context: such amplitude is very rare in the academic universe, especially in our present time. In the corridor of the Kyoto airport, I was humbly reminded by that book why I love philosophy: absolute freedom, something I never experienced in a scholarly atmosphere. It is that same freedom that brought us together in presenting this book to readers. And it's a very ambiguous book from the start: while it provides and intends to ground some key concepts and discussions, it is already fighting for its own theoretical survival in a world where the cyberpolitical XI shock, along with its inevitable shift of paradigm, is going through several waves and stages of development. We are starting with something that a few years ago was a mere hypothesis and suspicion, but may easily be found to be obvious and irrelevant a few years from now. In very brief terms, then, I would suggest a twofold preliminary analysis: a) Dematerialization of the political process. Taking metamorphosis as a central concept, alongside the notion of speed (addressing and improving the old politics always a step behind, that insists in the relationship with geopolitics as an essential analysis tool for preventing the establishment of Cyberpolitics as a new academic method that could also integrate and improve political analysis: the real world vs the virtual world); b) Immaterialization of the political universe. Probably the last phase of this stage, which will imply the coexistence of parallel worlds, the surpassing and death of mass media systems, an almost utopian political world built in accordance with specific group or individual positions and interests. These two landmarks, with all the controversy and discussion they might generate, even if it now seems tenuous and ambivalent, will reveal itself to be inevitable, and one could even say it is already in motion. When I started working in this research area, the mere word Cyberpolitics was fragile and uncertain. Since then, many changes have occured. From the immense doubts and insecurities observed in the past, numerous certainties have been reached in the establishment of the concept and field of studies. It is the importance of that conquest and those concepts, which are now in plain view, that this book wishes to address and to underline both for the present and, most especially, for the future. all, namely the one between technology and theology. I believe that event will be the most dramatic change in the history of mankind. 3. Prognosis: time, affect, economy. One of the most fascinating things in the world are the periods of crisis. With all the pain and suffering they entail, but also the overcoming surprise and discoveries they always reveal. We could probably simplify all human evolution by considering its crisis as a profound pattern. However, regardless of the form it takes, an acute crisis is a singular historical moment of great intensity and anxiety, precisely in view of the fact that such moments demand more critical thinking. Maybe crisis and critic should be the subtitle of this final preamble, since we are clearly dazzled by the absolute crisis and change that the transition from the 20th century to the new millennium has brought upon us. It appears that this massive transformation is immune to critical analysis, and that it has occurred with a strange naturalness and a technological neutrality or passiveness. Science installed itself as the great new god without opposition, and established its imperial dominion without any major wars, no hordes of barbaric invasions, and paradoxically without any alarm. The future and its risks seem oblivious to the elapsing of time that peacefully observes and watches its own destiny unfolding like a movie spectator. As we all know, science fiction movies seem to be just two steps ahead of reality, and one of the biggest dangers of Cyberpolitics, regarding the temptation of total control, even towards accident and randomness, consists of witnessing the artificial intelligence, genetic manipulation, and parallel questions, in a degree of predictability never before encountered. But not even all the folds of cyberspace can hide the dimension of the problems that lie ahead (we should probably have to follow Kant's categories and mention also cybertime and the distortions, expansions and retractions, of time on the net). And time was, is and will always be, the central question of life. The net, the web, and all the expressions that sew our lives, desires, hopes, dreams and nightmares, also enforce the return of the same old dilemmas: trust, truth, freedom, safety, loneliness, sex, love and all the major philosophical questions that endure through the ages. The future and its risks should also be about the risk of oblivion, the fact that the electrical metaphysics that has been carried out so far, should not make us forget the basis of life, water, air, and face ecology as a fundamental ethics. The current Coronavirus pandemic seems to confirm that we have entered a second stage of Cyberpolitics. The urgent need for a deeper development towards health issues merging robotics and A.I., the emergence of a faceless society like a Levinas nightmare, it's like we almost feel we cannot maintain the status quo by its own, meaning humanity on its own, by itself. The automation of the social and labor fabric will probably be our next step in the chain of this new era. But besides all this speculative ultimate attempt of peeking into the future, and beyond any functionalist, metaphysical or pragmatist point of view, it's now visible for everyone that we are in an moment of enormous civilizational leap, that, much like the Hegelian process of self-consciousness, Cyberpolitics is the affirmation of that transitional stage. The impact of a paradigm shift is always fertile ground for the XX savagery of our imagination, and YouTube, in the erosion between private and public sphere, will certainly be a tremendous archive for academic research: conspiracy theories, political-science...
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