Ontological Shift
In Michael Heim’s essay “The Cyber Space Dialectic”, he discusses how our culture is going through an ontological shift fashioned by the Internet. Heim articulates his theory of what dialectic is and how this ontological shift is creating a new dialectic. The Internet is the main place today where people from all over the world exchange and communicate their ideas and feelings. The Internet is a new community in itself. The ontological shift into the cyberspace times will change the way we think, and the way we act; it will change our overall sense of being. These change that Heim calls an “ontological shift” has brought on questions about changing society. These are similar to the questions that Peter Drucker and Benjamin Barber brought up when they discussed about creating a new society. Will society benefit from this new society in which its central being is cyberspace? This is a serious question since we are living in the phase that is changing into the cyber world now. How will this change affect this new technologically inclined society?
We have all used the Internet to talk to other people, either using chat or emails. We converse with people with different backgrounds and cultures. When interacting with different types of people, it means that we are working in groups and collaborating. This is what the Internet is all about. Interacting with each other in new ways, and learning how to open yourself to other points of views and new ideas. In his essay Heim states,
“Computer networks foster virtual communities that cut across geography time zones. Virtual community seems a cure-all for isolated people who complain about their isolation. Locked in metal boxes on urban freeways, a population enjoys socializing with fellow humans through computer networks”(Heim 374).
As Heim explains in his essay, the Internet can bring together communities that are isolated from the rest of the world. It helps communities and different types of people communicate with each other. It creates the idea of group work through computer networks. This was also one theme in Barbers essay; Group work is what makes ideas carry through and productive. In Barber’s “Making Civil Society Real” he states,
“Civic responsibility, being a partnership between government, civil society, and the private market necessarily depends on the active collaboration of political leaders, citizens and business people”(Barber 106).
Our responsibility as a society is to collaborate our selves with all the groups that make this society function.
In “Modern Romance,” Celeste Biever describes romantic relationships in the Internet community. She describes how people can romantically be involved on the Internet and how the Internet teaches one to learn about a person from the inside out.In “Cyberspace and Identity,” Sherry Turkle also expresses her interest in the Internet and how it allows for the act of self-exploration. Even though their focus on what the Internet is used for are different from the perspective of one another, Biever and Turkle both see the Internet as a place for exploration in a general sense.
As capitalism runs its course and develops new technologies, society is left to pick up the pieces and figure out where these new technologies will lead them. Ever since I learned to use the Internet as a child, I have become accustomed to seeing more and more fascinating technology developments that have changed the way I communicated as the years went by. Now that the Internet has infiltrated more aspects of human life, it has become necessary to reflect on how this critical juncture will continue to affect our society. In Digital Disconnect, Robert McChesney provides an analysis of the arguments that the celebrants and skeptics used to express their views of the Internet. McChesney then moves past these arguments to explain how the PEC plays a key role in determining the direction that the Internet is heading towards. By assessing McChesney’s views, I hope to develop my own interpretation of the Internet’s impact on society.
Through social networking, we can instantly chat with someone across the globe. With internet access, we can access news stories from nearly every country on earth. Marche worries that this unlimited sense of connectedness may have the adverse effect in society. He states, “We live in accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are (Marche 2).” Between the unlimited amount of information available to us and the speed at which we can access it, many people feel that there is no time for meaningful connections or even no point to making
Howard Rheingold, who established the definition of the virtual community, touches on his personal experiences in being deeply involved on an emotional level with people he has never personally met before: “The idea of a community accessible only via my computer sounded cold to me at first, but I learned quickly that people can feel passionately about email and computer conferences. I’ve become one of them. I care about these people that I met through my computer, and I care deeply about the future of the medium that enables us to assemble” (273). He considers these people his “family of invisible friends” (Rheingold 273), a group of individuals that he goes out of his way to connect with on a daily basis. The computer is as advanced as it gets; the internet is still in its beginning stages at this point, and already the founding threads of make up the virtual community are being woven together. Aside from the advent of the home telephone, this is the first time that people don’t have to be face to face with each other in order to interact with purpose. What begins as only a small, tightly-knit community can progress into something exponential and all-encompassing as the age of technology thrives. It is the role of not just one community, but many, to develop their own customs and traditions and
The overall view of this essay is whether cyberspace should be accepted or not. This is like another form of a community except in a virtual form. This type of community could be intentional and involuntary because people can get attached by accident or change because that’s what they see around them. The author of the essay said his community was built unexpected. Change is going to happen to happen regardless, and the author shows that. In the beginning, he was like no cyberspace, and then he found this website and was entertained. Cyberspace is a community that people like.
In “Cyberspace and Cyberculture” Ken Hillis describes cyberspace as “imaginary and metaphorical” (Hillis 324) and cyberculture as “the cultural practices which occur in cyberspace” (Hillis 324). To which he claims that cyberspace and cyberculture are must exist as a pair. Because cyberculture must happen in a space, this space is by definition, virtual, and so it must have no physical dimensions (Hillis 324-325). Nevertheless, cyberspace is still space: A place where people can gather and share ideas. This is particularly true in reference to the Internet. Environments such as facebook.com, the fading Myspace.com, and specialty sites such as Last.fm, which cater to music enthusiasts, all operate in an effort to lubricate human interaction, and depend on those interactions to stay active. Their business depends on it. For example, Facebook.com is worth an estimated 300 million US dollars a year (Forbes).
"Finding One's Own in Cyberspace." Composing Cyberspace. Richard Holeton. United States: McGraw-Hill, 1998. 171-178. SafeSurf. Press Release.
First, the Internet has affected us socially and allows people to communicate with friends and family across the
Rheingold, Howard. "The Virtual Community." The Wired Society. Ed. Carol Lea Clark. New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999. 92-97.
An explosion in information access and exchange is fueling the Information Superhighway that was created as a result of the computer revolution. If technology has truly become a god, then cyberspace is definitely its bible. Its scope is endless; its breadth enormous. Although the foundation of cyberspace, the computer, definitely serves to dehumanize culture, the Information Superhighway itself does not. If anything, cyberspace is re-humanizing the computer revolution. The World Wide Web, through pictures and graphics, has added personality and more personal contact to a technology that for years was ‘just the facts.’ Although the statement might be made that this is a pseudo-rehumanization that masks true human characteristics with digital ones, this is at least a step in the right direction. Something that removes the human qualities or attributes from culture can be said to dehumanize it.
“Digital technology will fundamentally transform education, the way we work, play and interact with one another suggest that these new media will have an even greater impact on our culture than the invention of writing and reading” (Furedi, 2014). Social change is the transformation over time of the institutions and culture of a society. In today’s culture, technology and social media is something that effects everyone. These days, everyone is involved with technology of some kind. There have been many social and cultural changes in the past ten years due to social media and technology. The Internet has changed communication and relationships, everyday life, education, subcultures, and social protests (Ch. 20).
In today’s world, the internet is a widely used utility, with a wide variety of uses. One of the biggest affordances is that it lets people communicate with people from all around the world, people who they would not normally be able to connect with. There are many platforms which allow people to do this; there is Twitter, Facebook, Email, and many more. It is now possible to find people from different cultures who share in the same interests, and become friends with them, even though they could be on the other side of the world. Technology also lets
Should the most selfish elite individual take heed and meditate on the ideology behind community, he/she may awaken to the fact that many persons looking after one person has more advantages and a better survival rate than one trying to preserve one. The needs of the one will never outweigh the needs of the collective group. In the end individuality inevitably leads to self-destruction; therefore, commitment to community is a requirement for contemporary Americans and vital to its survival.
Holeton, Richard. Composing Cyberspace: Identity, community, and knowledge in the electronic age. New York, San Francisco, St. Louis: Stanford University, 1998 (Wolves of the plateau. 132-142)
Society has over time, developed many means of communication starting with the word of mouth to writing letters, the telephone, and now the internet. The internet has developed its own form of communication, which is a social network. Social networks have created a way for people across the world to communicate with each other at the same time, all in one place, thus making it the internet the reason behind the revolution known as Social Network.