Article: 5407 of fa.future-culture Path: ifi.uio.no!internet-mailinglist From: adam fast Newsgroups: fa.future-culture Subject: The Essential Internet (fwd) Date: 21 Nov 1993 11:53:18 +0100 Organization: Internet mailing list Lines: 173 Sender: news@ifi.uio.no Message-ID: <2cnhau$172@ifi.uio.no> Reply-To: Future Culture Return-Path: <<@UAFSYSB.UARK.EDU:owner-futurec@UAFSYSB.UARK.EDU>> Original-Message-Id: <19931121105303.1242.ifi@ifi.uio.no> Original-Date: Sun, 21 Nov 1993 02:50:18 -0800 Comments: To: future culture To: Multiple recipients of list FUTUREC The Essential Internet: The Rise of Virtual Culture and the Emergence of Electric Gaia By Michael Strangelove Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellow, University of Ottawa Publisher, The Internet Business Journal This essay originally appeared in the October 1993 issue of Online Access: The Internet Special Issue: Your Guide to the Information Super Highway, guest edited by Michael Strangelove. For information regarding this special issue, contact 70324.343@compuserve.com At the heart of the Internet phenomenon is not terabytes and technology, but culture. The Internet is really about the rise of not merely a new technology, but a new culture, a global culture where time, space, boarders, and even personal identity are radically redefined. In a world obsessed with style and oppressed by the fear of the other and the alienation of the self, the Internet represents a return to the fundamental dynamics of human existence: communication and community. What makes the Internet such a powerful catalyst for change is the almost banal, but nonetheless real, truism that we are living in the midst of the Information Age. Everything critical to Western civilization rests upon information. The creation, legitimation and propagation of information informs and directs all structures of modern existence: democracy, religion, careers, personal identity, even our sexuality depends upon the flow of information. Information informs and creates us much in the same way that DNA orchestrates the structure of life. One infinitesimally small change to the DNA chain and the results can be as dramatic as they are unpredictable. So it is with the Internet. By gradually moving us away from a paper-based society to an electronic-text based society, by altering the way information flows and is accessed, by massive participation in the Internet, the "Net" stands to have an all encompassing impact on our socially constructed and information-reliant realities. What people do on the Internet, above all else, is communicate. They exchange e-mail. They talk to each other. They do the low ASCII dance. The result of this exchange is an emerging Internet culture: a distinct social phenomenon with identifiable members, heroes and villains, rules, metaphors, values, shared history and growing subcultures. One of the more prominent Internet subcultures is the cyberpunk movement -- the spiritual heirs of the flower child generation who challenge the present on its own terms: information and the right to freely access and share it among all peoples. It is a beautiful twist of fate that the youth of the nineties have named information as the key issue and see the computer networks as the new battle ground for the struggle to maintain democratic freedoms. One of the earliest and most active users of computer networks is the Native American community. A people with a strong sense of community which have been marginalized by society have found that the Internet is a means to maintain a distinct identity and foster community across vast distances. This should stand as an indication of what the Internet is all about: not high tech and hot machines, but communication, community, and identity. Until roughly three years ago, Internet culture was largely rooted in the scientific, academic, military and technical realms of the Western nations. But the vast majority of Internet growth has occurred in the past two years, resulting in an explosion of a great diversity of user groups. Today, the commercial world constitutes over 50% of the Internet and is the fastest growing part of the Net. The research, government, educational and defense community make up the remaining 50% of the Internet community. All this means that the Internet is both a catalyst for change while at the same time undergoing enormous transformation itself. We can speak of the Internet as being in the process of becoming both the ultimate tool of "Big Brother" and the new hope of the dispossessed. We can be certain that like the printing press, the Net will be used to inform democratic action and politize a fragmented and disempowered population. It will most certainly also be used to manipulate the consumer and assist the giant engines of dehumanizing beauracracy and big government. As with the introduction of television and the rise of mass culture, we stand ignorant before the uncertain future of the massive forces presently at work. Only a few decades after the invention of the Gutenberg Press, there were fifty million books in Europe. The result of this, for better and worse, was the Age of Enlightenment and the rise of modern civilization. Unlike the coming interactive cable TV systems, which may only allow us to interact with our wallets and 500 channels of shit on TV, the Internet represents not simply a new era of entertainment, but a new era of communication and self publication. The era of electronic pamphleteers has quietly begun. With a computer, modem and an Internet connection, every person has the potential to become a publisher, a mass distributor of knowledge, information and misinformation, fact, fancy and fiction. Never before in history have so many people been able to communicate so much to so many. The ability to communicate to mass audiences has been the privilege of the elite -- now it is within the grasp of the person on the street. How governments and international corporations will attempt to control this new power is uncertain, but such power and freedom will certainly not escape the attention of those "in control" for long. For now at least, the Internet is the largest uncensored medium of communication in history, and may indeed become the last stand for free speech -- an otherwise historically rare phenomenon. Within the Internet a convergence is taking place that will shake the foundations of the powerful. Free-Nets, community telecomputing networks that provide urban areas with free Internet e-mail accounts and access to government information, are spreading across North America. Before this millennium comes to a close, most major urban areas in North America will be connected through a global web of Free-Nets. These Free-Nets will provide a new generation with their first experience of e-mail and the Internet. At the same time, state after state is beginning to offer free Internet accounts to students and teachers. Where I was taught to use a slide-rule, my children will play and learn in the fields of the Internet. What will happen when the Free-Net population erupts onto a diverse and matured Internet culture is certain to be as dramatic and far reaching as the invention of mass printing. The dawn of the next century will reveal a truly networked nation of citizens demanding greater access to government information, elected officials, and corporate decision makers. The convergence of the children of silicon valley with the emergence of Free-Nets and the larger Internet will redefine our concept and experience of community, reshape our relationship to information, see the triumph of content over style, and forever change our perception of self, time, space, and the Other in much the same way as seeing the earth from outer space has irreversibly changed the modern mind. We are at one and the same time the children of Mother Earth and the midwives of Electric Gaia. Our children are destined to participate in a new form of global consciousness that is the birthright of a people who are in the process of defining themselves as one community on one planet. Behind the technology, behind the hidden dangers, behind tomorrow is this -- the essential Internet. Michael Strangelove (Mstrange@Fonorola.Net or 613-747- 6106) is the founder of Strangelove Internet Enterprises, an entreperneurial company that publishes The Internet Business Journal and How to Advertise on the Internet: An Introduction to Internet-Facilitated Marketing.