articles...
Is the internet creating a new underclass?
Feb 24, 12:37 AM · Jo Choi
Source: Is the Internet Creating a New Underclass?
Author: Wade Rowland
Last accessed: 16.02.2007
Rowland’s article mainly focused on the effect of the Internet to the world society. As new media were everywhere in our lives, it showed precisely that we slide inexorably into the information age. Rowland mentioned that linking the world by internet would lead to the salvation of benighted and backward people. Moreover, the invention of the Net which was simply an extension of a group of technologies had been widely used for years to provide people an all-rounded and better communication. However, it was also pointed out that an uneven distribution of computer literacy emerged undeniably. While the information became much economically valuable, underclass would become much poorer. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Furthermore, as the role of the internet and communications technology expedites the development of globalization, a cultural imperialism was formed and dominated by rich countries. Poor countries could not survive in this growth of cyber-authoritarianism that led a rapid expansion of underclass. To confront this situation, Rowland emphasised that we had to concentrate on the traditional social goals like education and income redistribution.
Obviously, technology creates opportunities, but they can turn into problems if people fail to manage them properly. Marshall Mcluhan emphasizes that all media as extensions of ourselves serve to provide new transforming vision and awareness. But, Murray states that in fact, the birth of new media is both exhilarating and frightening. Therefore, with the intention to resisting the inequality happened and making use of new media properly, what we have to focus on education are to lead children thoroughly understanding the behind context, history and theory of the language of new media (Manovich 2001); simultaneously, to introduce children the right as well as the responsibilities in accurately utilising the new media. Rowland strongly believes that technologies have maximum impact only if they fit well with existing practices. What do we need in the existing practices in 21st century? Be conscious and autonomous in this numerous and complicated cyberspace.
Museum plaque, Kigali. By Rwanda June, 2005.
The real situation among the underclass in poor countries 
We Shall Not Be Moved!
People see the internet as an opportunity to gain access to know more about the need of the developing countries.
References:
Manovich L. (2001) The language of new media, United States of America: The MIT Press.
Murray J.H. (2000) Hamlet on the Holodeck, New York: The Free Press.
Are Weblogs Innocent?
Feb 23, 11:16 PM · Eugenia Tragaki
By searching through the internet, I realised that many people are obsessed with the new trend of publishing their private lives. By using weblogs and online diaries , either by posting pictures from their personal diaries they keep a strange balance between the private and the public, the physical materiality and the embodiment information, the owning and sharing, the self-expression and the self-exposure, the experience and the memory , the personal relationships and communication.
As a continuum of the argument that the settlement of informatics can cause radical worldwide changes (Haraway 1991, Hayles 1999); Jose van Dijck in the web article Composing the Self: Of Diaries and Lifelogs, identifies the cultural and social changes that new technology brings by focusing on the transition of the traditional diary writing to the fashionable weblogging. She also argues that this alternative way of self-confession and communication contains and distinguishes the old and the new technologies, the forms and practices into hybrid practices. These practices combine and tranform new social and cultural patterns that lead to the emergence of new values.
The instability of transition of the traditional cultural and social practises into the cybernetic era is well illustrated by the description of the following cartoon coming from Dijck’s article:
Analyzing further the impacts of this transition, the bloggers or the cyborgs (Haraway 1991, Hayles 1999) have not yet realise the risk of their actions. By sending personalised signals into a multicoded network, they consider themselves as users(signifiers) rather than as stooges(signified). They do not realise their participation in an underground political manipulation of economy and sociaty by the global network rulers; as Dijck mentioned in her article, about internet’s marketability and as Haraway(1991) implied about affinity.
Therefore, within this changeover madness can anyone keep her/his authentic identity and be up-to-dated at the same time by avoiding this necessary evil ?
References
Dijck v.J.(2007), Composing the Self: Of Diaries and Lifelogs source:journal.fibreculture.org, online: http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue3/issue3_vandijck.html
Hayles N.K. (1999), How we became posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics ,Chicago,IL: University of Chicago Press http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/321460.html
Haraway D. (1991), A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in Simians,Cyborgs,Women:The Reinvention of Nature , London: Routledge http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
Digital Duality
Feb 23, 05:28 PM · Susan Agnew
One of the paradoxes of communication technologies is that at the point of adoption, the technology seems to slip from our perception. Katherine Hayles (1999a, 1999b) is concerned that this focus on information is reliant on dualisms which overlook the inter-dependant relationship of information and materiality, so obscuring our physicality. Donna Haraway (1991) has also argued that we need to be liberated from dualistic thinking, which has dominated western thought.
An alternative approach is explored in Catherine Richard’s I was scared to death / I could have died of joy (2000) which dissolves boundaries by making visible the invisible to reveal a more complex network of relationships.
The work references both 19th century scientific experiments and futuristic visions of disembodied life staging the flow between the past, present and future. The cultural associations of the objects acknowledge that dreams and fictions shape the development and perception of science.
For these reasons, Dot Tuer’s essay (2004), influenced by Bruno Latour, describes the ways in which I was scared to death / I could have died of joy blurs the boundaries between objectivism and subjectivism so that the two become inseparable. Tuer’s experiences constantly move between historical, cultural and personal narratives describing an intimate embodied experience.
Although the objects play an active role in directing these narratives (Latour, 2005), Simon Penny (1995) suggests that interactive art more directly manipulates the viewer’s behaviour. In this work, the extent to which the viewer has control and is controlled is manifest. Light is paired with its absence to produce the content of the work; patterns of information designed for affect. Within these binary codes the extreme polarities of human emotion are reproduced. The boundary of fear / joy is but a dash.
This aspect of the work problematises the premise of discarding dualisms. As recognised by Donna Haraway (1991), there is an irony in deconstructing the boundaries of dualisms through digital technologies.