The Arcadias of the eighteenth-century Romantics or the sixties
counterculture are not a viable option for the vast majority in cyberculture,
who have no desire to return to a pretechnological life of backbreaking
labor, chronic scarcity, and unchecked disease.
Simultaneously, the gleaming futures of technophilic fantasy …
look increasingly like so much unreal estate. -- Mark Dery The street finds its own uses for things. -- William Gibson |
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While everyone is arguing
about what WILL BE, a number of individuals have taken up the cause
of using existing technology in order to shape the new reality.
Not willing to wait for the limitless possibilities of
virtual this or virtual that, and certainly
more afraid of the implications of a nostalgic return than of the
technological doomsday prophecies of the techno-stallers, they
embrace that Baudrillardian return
to "lived experience," and couple it
with the Ballardian notion of the
reversal of inside/outside and
imagination/reality. Then, they put it all out there on the Web.
In the postmodern world, not only is
it ok to be fragmented and multiple, but it's pretty much required. These
Web diarists construct their "selves" through their Web pages by regularly
(or, in some cases, semi-regularly) posting diary entries, displaying
pictures of themselves, etc. -- pretty much taking the simple tools of HTML
and the QuickCam, and asserting who they are or who they want to be.
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On the Internet, "people are able to build a self by cycling through many selves... In the past, such rapid cycling through different identities was not an easy experience to come by... Of course, people assumed different social roles and masks, but for most people, their lifelong involvement with families and communities kept such cycling through under fairly stringent control... Now, in postmodern times, multiple identities are no longer so much at the margins of things... The Internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life. -- Sherry Turkle
Social and scientific trends are converging to shape a new
conception of the self, a new construction of what it means to
be a human being. The matter-of-fact acceptance of one's "natural"
looks and one's "natural" personality is being replaced by a growing
sense that it is normal to reinvent oneself.
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