Death Of The Cyberflaneur Analysis

The article, “The Death of The CyberFlaneur” written by journalist Evgeny Morozov, discusses the social implications of technology. Morozov’s purpose is to inform the reader bout what a cyberflaneur was and how in 1998 some people believed cyberflaneur would progress and become known to many others. What is cyberflanuer, well cyberflaneur is a person who surfs the internet no intentions to finding something. Morozov demonstrates through ethos how cyberflaneur has declined. He utilizes a tone of credibility throughout his essay by quoting and naming important web sites and people.

At the beginning of Morozov essay, he lists a web site that he thought was interesting called “Ceramics Today.” This web site was meant to celebrate the growth of

“We want everything to be social, Sheryl Sandberg said” (Morozov par. 17). He used this quote to explain that society wants people to interact with one another by using the internet as a source of communication. So by being social is completely defeats the purpose of what cyberflaneur means. Socializing with other means caring about what others think, this is affecting cyberflaneur in many ways. He keeps explaining how Facebook could be one of the many causes of why cyberflanuer no longer seem to exist. As he quoted Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Sheryl Sandberg. He addresses the issue that Mark Zuckerberg had when he was being interviewed. Mark Zuckerberg sated the following, “do you want to go to the movies by yourself or do you want to go the movies with your friends? he asked, immediately answering his one question: You want to go with your friends’” (Morozov par. 18). This is where Morozov disagreed with Mark Zuckerberg’s statement, He was not pleased to state the following, “Facebook wants to build an Internet where watching films, listening to music, reading books and eve browsing is done not just openly but socially and collaboratively.” (Morozov par.19). He went on and gave an example of what he means saying, “well, because if you took an open poll of his friends, or large enough group of people, Satantango would almost always lose out to something more mainstream, like War Horse”

27). With this Morozov indicates to the readers that the internet has really changed society and explained how cyberflaneur soon disappeared to the point where nobody has ever heard of cyberflanuers. When starting to tell the reader what cyberflaneur was, they start to get intrigued because they have not heard of it before. Using all of those sources helps the readers know that not only doe she knows what he is talking about, but now they start to relate to what experiences they had while on the