The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory, edited by A. Herman and T. Swiss (original) (raw)

The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism

The United States and the world are now a good two decades into the Internet revolution, or what was once called the information age. The past generation has seen a blizzard of mind-boggling developments in communication, ranging from the World Wide Web and broadband, to ubiquitous cell phones that are quickly becoming high-powered wireless computers in their own right. Firms such as Google, Amazon, Craigslist, and Facebook have become iconic. Immersion in the digital world is now or soon to be a requirement for successful participation in society. The subject for debate is no longer whether the Internet can be regarded as a technological development in the same class as television or the telephone. Increasingly, the debate is turning to whether this is a communication revolution closer to the advent of the printing press.1

POSTMODERN VIEW OF THE NATURE OF THE INTERNET AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION

Proceedings of the International Scientific Conference on MMK 2013, 2013

Above all, the Internet is perceived as a consequence of information tools development. Its image, however, is also a result of socio-economic changes that are of greatest importance when it comes to behaviour represented by the Web users. This wide context of analysis makes the nature of the Internet complex and characteristic for postmodern description of reality. The objective of this article is to present the contemporary nature of this medium and to define behavioral tendencies of its users. The attempt that has been made to describe all the problems mentioned appears to be valuable also from the point of view of entrepreneurs, both in the context of the way of running business and understanding the conduct of other market participants.

Chapter - Post-internet - Braidoti and Hlavajova (eds.)

Posthuman Glossary, 2018

Post Internet incorporates many histories. Following the particularities of a highly heterogeneous set of art practices the term has become more nebulous, referring adjectively to a broad "cultural condition." (Archey, 2012) Understood in Art through the experience and appearances of the user-focused interfaces of web 2.0, these critical artistic enquiries showed the Internet to be far from an autonomous site of user-agency. The term's usage as a 'cultural condition' indicates how the surface layer is increasingly seen through the non-linear and protocol-defined set of relations and affects (Galloway and Thacker, 2007). These are in turn the expression of the gendered, and racially and geographically grounded infrastructures, rare-materials and subjectivities at work on Internet (Nakamura, Chow-White, 2012, Sanderson, 2013). Thus, critical attention to all these factors brings to the fore the attendant radical redefinition of the geo-politics (Bratton, 2015) and the economies that sustain and structure them. This ongoing "cultural condition" tessellates with historic models of the posthuman, which stressed theories of embodiment so as to counter the growing abstraction of information (Hayles, 1999). It also contains, however, important implications for recent theorisations of a post-anthropocentric sensibility and the necessity of an evolution of ethical awareness under advanced capitalism (Braidotti, 2014).

THE INTERNET’S UNHOLY MARRIAGE TO CAPITALISM-POL 1001 INTRODUCTION TO POLITICS

INTRODUCTON The coming of the information technology by the internet was seen as a break through to the freedom and knowledge of the masses where citizens would be empowered and given one politics avenue to voice their political rights. However today the internet is in a marriage with Capitalism which really very interesting and raises the question,”Why and where did it all go wrong or start”. How did the government see the internet turning the tables to make a public good go into the hands of the private sector yet it was public funds that played a major role in its development? The blame can be put on the public who were not supportive or even so no need in securing the technology by denying private companies controlling it for profit. So in looking at the article critically will help relation the role of government in the public sphere of its citizens and from evaluating it one can say the interests if the people if they are a threat to government there is always concern and hence the need to control the internet. CRITIQUE The article raises issues about how America over the last two decades saw the growth and development of the internet age. There are many active players level like Facebook, Amazon, Google, and EBay. The internet was seen as a break through to freedom, however the full impact of its future has not become apparent although it has been a digital revolution, it has failed to deliver on much of its promises as was expected to be able to provide a competitive atmosphere for markets, accountable businesses and even open up government by ending corruption, inequality and increased happiness. What is very interesting is that with all the excitement in the beginning, the information available to everyone would break barriers to censorship and existing institutions would be open to scrutiny. The economic aspect of the capitalist society has taken over the internet subjecting it to a means of capital accumulation and what was a public sphere is gradually becoming close to monopolistic companies. Although the argument is not about what is good for the public wealth, there is a strong case that if it is left in private hands then there should be a better way of developing the internet around capital accumulation for the public good. In a capitalist environment the forces of the market would dictate free trade regardless of the negative externalities.

The Internet as public sphere or culture industry? From pessimism to hope and back

International Journal of Media &# 38; Cultural …, 2005

The vision of communication systems supporting public sphere(s) of discursive contestation has in recent times been embraced by many critical theorists as the ideal democratic role for the media. However, there has also been much pessimism about the realization of this vision. This pessimism extends from 'big brother' fears to hyperrealist scenarios -from the development of a global surveillance society to the implosion of reality in an electronically generated and sustained system of pure fabrication.

Rock the Internet Blues! A critical view of the evolution of the Internet from civil society

2020

Starting from an analysis of the differences between virtual communities and social networks, a critical description is developed of how the Internet has evolved in the last 20 years towards a situation marked by the end of dialogue and the obsessive promotion of visions centered on egocentric interests. The historical singularity from which this situation was triggered is identified in Google's decision, in the early 2000s, to make advertising the focus of its business strategy and how it transformed, with the help of others Technology Giants, users in user-products and then agents of their own marketing, with the use of their egomation. The paper investigates the role played by civil society specialized in global information society issues, where it has presented little resistance to the changes that have arisen along the way. In addition to representing a divorce with the shared initial utopias, this evolution is a threat with important repercussions in the non-virtual world, including the weakening of the democratic foundations of our societies. After showing some dystopian perspectives, some concrete guidelines are proposed to change course, highlighting the most important measure: that of declaring a digital emergency that contemplates massive education programs to insert citizens in the ethical challenges, the potentialities and risks of the global knowledge society and especially in what information literacy means.

The Hypothesis of the End of the Internet Revolution

Masaryk University journal of law and technology, 2008

I will use four theoretical sources in this paper: two constructivist approaches developed within sociology of technology during 1980' (namely Actor-Network Theory and Theory of Large Technological Systems); my previous analyses of the process of social construction of the Internet technology; and Manuel Castells' analyses of social effects of information technologies. First of all, the fact that the Internet revolution has taken place is sine qua non of this paper-we will only question here whether this revolution is still developing or just finishing. I am not going to argue here for what I consider to be a fact-convincing arguments can be found for example in the late work of Manuel Castells. 1 The second step is to clarify what I mean by the term "the Internet revolution". Generally, the word revolution refers to relatively sudden changes that mark a discontinuity between two substantially different time periods. These changes must be somehow radical; in other words, they must represent a change in those principal characteristics of respective periods that are crucial for their historical identity. Here we are interested in the Internet revolution, so the question is what to take as a general definitional criterion that helps us to date this process. In general, the common denominator of most projections and reflections of computer networks diffusion is 1 Castells understands the Internet evolution as a key part of information technologies revolution "because communication is the essence of human activity" and the Internet transforms the topology of social interaction and organization (Castells 2000, 2001).