Week 2 - Global Connections from the Telegraph to Cyberspace

Telegraph - Cyberspace.  They sound like a dichotomy, poles apart.  Telegraph sounds neanderthal like something from the dark ages and seems to represent something so grounded.  Yet cyberspace conjures notions of the future, an escape from our physical body signifying the potential of our imagination, or perhaps it convinces us that we can fly or leave earth.  Yet the reality between the two is cables.  Australia, for example, had three cables for the telegraph in the mid 19th century and today has also three cables for the internet and cyberspace.  Physically, nothing has changed yet socially and culturally we perceive enormous change over this period.  Why this disparity between the physical and the perceived?  What does it mean?  What does it represent over time?

In the lecture both the wires and cables, and the network pattern of the internet, were likened to a nervous system and a brain, like inside the human body.  Is there a connection between 'physical global space' and 'inside' our body, kind of like where the 'outside' meets the 'inside'?  Or where the global meets the local (glocal)?  Is this cybercultural embodiment?  Will have to think about all these things.

The readings seemed to question boundaries, borders and norms.  The Four Puzzles From Cyberspace (Lessig 2006) seemed to explore the boundaries of where cyberspace meets structural issues of law, physical place, ethics and privacy which are associated with autonomy and Socratic notions of knowledge and awareness.  These are the basis of democracy and I think meta-narrative, progress, Western enlightenment and Modernism.  The culture of the online 'actor network' seems to be challenging the very necessity of having a 'ground/base'.  This tension seems to be challenging traditional notions of hierarchy and Modern society.  The 'actor network' society though seems to demand the inclusion of groups traditionally excluded according to race, class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity, and in doing so broadens the norms, expands what is acceptable and changes what we perceive as centre.  Then why do philosophers, political scientists and sociologists remain sceptical about the democratising potential of postmodern culture.  Aren't these disciplines concerned with equality and freedom?  Or are they concerned about escalating media and corporate power, thus a loss of democratic power in the long term?  Perhaps these disciplines are tools which will become redundant in a re-centred society, leaving popular culture without any further recourse to power and at the mercy of capitalist imperatives.  It's like society at large has 'split' into two, like subcultures used to 'split' connotation and denotation of words and norms of society.  That subcultural logic has been applied to social theory itself.  I can see both sides but wonder what kind of society can embrace the best of both these worlds.  How can these seemingly incommensurate worlds become congruent, but they must, because we created them!

References:

Lessig, L 2006, Four puzzles from cyber space, accessed 27/7/2011, https://www.socialtext.net/codev2/four_puzzles_from_cyberspace