WESTERN WORLD & THE INDIVIDUAL
|
www seems
compensated
global economies
religious feeling
economic units
unique individuals
www seems postmodernism
Back to summary
Neither complete pessimism nor egocentric individualism seem to show us our place in the world. However much we may know theoretically that society cannot exist without its "irrational data", the individual subjects of whom none conform to the mean, it is hard to see this. Perhaps the WWW can serve as a model by which to reinscribe ourselves into our societies.
One thinks and speaks of the WWW as something "out there", an institution, a library. One may as well ask "Where is society?" as ask "Where is the web?" It is not on your computer at home, it is not on your server, it is not even "in America": it is everywhere and nowhere. It is literally - and observably - its component parts, each irrational datum. Moreover, it has no centre in the way society places government at its centre. No-one is to blame for its contents or gaps except ourselves, and even then not collectively but individually. In the midst of the institutions of global economies and McFascist chains, in which we seem nothing more than equally packaged, replaceable, economic units, the Web appears to be a collective utopia of individuals, where both the irrational datum and the collective identity can co-exist.
A new medium invariably generates such enthusiastic hype as this, and an equally passionate backlash, such as Sven Birkerts’s Gutenberg Elegies, in which he despairs of the loss of "the more analytic sequences of print". Each new medium - the telephone, film, film with sound, television - is expected to herald the dawn of a great new era or spell out the end of intelligent thought. In "The Web as an Instrument of Power and a Realm of Freedom: A Report from Ljubljana, Slovenia", Janez Strehovec writes,
Cyberspace is less and less a portent of messianic escape; it has become a colonised and "McDonald’s-ised" field for enforcing the totalitarianism, web fascism, machismo, and trabalism of new, distinctively yuppified elites.
Before rushing to either extreme, we should examine the new medium more carefully. Earlier, I argued that the collective work of individual alchemists compensated for the conscious one-sidedness of Christianity. Albertus Magnus wrote eight precepts for alchemists, of which the last two state, "He should be sufficiently rich to bear the expenses of his art" and "He should avoid having anything to do with princes and noblemen." (quoted by Ramsay, 22) That is, a patron would compromise his ideological freedom: only the rich can be alchemists. Similarly, the democratic utopia of the Web is negated by its assumption of economic means.
Although serverspace is often offered free, as is Internet Mail, this does not make the web free or universally accessible. Access to the web, and especially presence on the web, require access to a computer, modem, and telephone line, electricity to run all of the above, literacy and computer literacy, and in the case of web-authoring, a knowledge of programming language or a user-friendly package such as DreamWeaver. The speed with which software is upgraded requires hardware to be upgraded proportionately: with a slow modem and a 486, the user will wait several minutes for each page to be downloaded. Rather than generating a new utopia, the web generates a new social hierarchy of technoyuppies: the ‘digital divide’ of the new literacy.
Even within the web, all is not utopian. Rather than waxing lyrical or pontificating about what the web "is", we should observe how we use it, and remember that we are not homogenous. First, most web-sites are hierarchical: rather than associative trails, "a mechanical analog of the way the brain works" (Johnson, 119), hypertext links are used to create sections and sub-sections. Second, e-commerce is dominant, from Amazon.com which operates exclusively on the web, to department stores such as Debenhams, most of whose sales goods are chosen by their physical criteria (clothes, perfumes, vases, and the like). These web-sites are either directly profit-driven, or supported by the real-space stores and act as extended catalogues. Third, profit-driven sites such as lastminute.com, providing travel offers, rely on conventional advertising with posters, television, and radio - a considerable expense. Fourth, the maintenance of web-sites is expensive, and most sites featuring "free" offers, such as Hotmail, include advertising banners to support the site. The advertisers, in turn, want assurance that their banners are seen, and the site’s advertising-value derives from the number of "hits" it recieves - that is, how many times it is accessed. Fifth, although one may access a site directly, for instance through an AltaVista word-search, much of its publicity depends on being mentioned on other web-sites, on meta-pages, or - most annoyingly - on spam e-mail. Economic means, profit, advertising, and "who’s who" are as prevalent on the web as they are in our society.
At the same time, the web provides communication for minority and resistance groups, from the networking of feminist organisations, to the orchestration of protests against the World Trade Fair, to e-mail lists on DH Lawrence, vegetarianism, and various religions. A subversive element is present on the web, just as it is in non-electronic society, but this is not to say the web is subversive: rather it has the potential to be used as such. Whatever its potential, the web in its current use suggests not a utopia but a replica of our society of global economies, dominated by commerce and economic means, with pockets of ideological resistance. Material change without ideological change only translates the existing structures into a new medium. A deeper shift in thinking is required, and hence we must return to postmodernism.
compensated global economies religious feeling economic units unique individuals www seems postmodernism
Postmodernism
Jung's Alchemy
Western World & The Individual
Hypertext Fiction
Process of Transformation