Evaluating the social and cultural implications of the internet

Since the Internet's breakthrough as a mass medium, it has become a topic of discussion because of its implications for society. At one extreme, one finds those who only see great benefits and consider the Internet a tool for freedom, commerce, connectivity, and other societal benefits. At the other extreme, one finds those who lament the harms and disadvantages of the Internet, and who consider it a grave danger to existing social structures and institutions, to culture, morality and human relations. In between one finds the majority, those who recognize both benefits and harms in the Internet as it currently exists and who recognize its usefulness while worrying about some of its negative impacts.As an example of a positive appraisal of the Internet, consider what Esther Dyson, one of the early enthusiasts for the Internet, states in her book Release 2.0. There, she claims: "The Net offers us a chance to take charge of our own lives and to redefine our role as citizens of local communities and of a global society. It also hands us the responsibility to govern ourselves, to think for ourselves, to educate our children, to do business honestly, and to work with fellow citizens to design rules we want to live by." (Dyson, 1997). Dyson argues that the Internet offers us the chance to build exciting communities of likeminded individuals, enables people to redefine their work as they see fit, fosters truth-telling and information disclosure, helps build trust between people, and can function for people as a second home.For a negative appraisal, consider the opinion of the Council of Torah Sages, a group of leading orthodox rabbis in Israel who in 2000 issued a ruling banning the Internet from Jewish homes. The Council claimed that the Internet is "1,000 times more dangerous than television" (which they banned thirty years earlier). The Council described the Internet as "the world's leading cause of temptation" and "a deadly poison which burns souls" that "incites and encourages sin and abomination of the worst kind." The Council explained that it recognized benefits in the Internet, but saw no way of balancing these with the potential cost, which they defined as exposure to "moral pollution" and possible addiction to Internet use that could quash the motivation to learn Torah, especially among children. ( See Ha'aretz, January 7, 2000.)Even the greatest critics of the Internet, like the Council of Torah Sages, see benefits in the technology, and even the greatest advocates recognize that there are drawbacks to the medium. People have different opinions on what the benefits and disadvantages are and also differ in the way in which they balance them against each other. Underlying these different assessments of the Internet are different value systems. Esther Dyson holds a libertarian value system in which the maximization of individual freedom, property rights and free market capitalism are central values. Her positive assessment of the Internet is based on the potential she sees in this technology to promote these values. In contrast, the values Council of Torah Sages are values of Hareidi, a variety of orthodox Judaism, according to which the highest good is obedience to God's law as laid out in the Torah, and they concluded, based on these values, that the Internet is harmful.Yet, it is not just differences in value systems that determine one's appraisal of a technology like the Internet. Such an appraisal is also determined by one's empirical understanding of how the technology works and what its consequences or implications are. People often come to unduly positive or negative appraisals of technology because they assess its consequences wrongly. For instance, some people believe that Internet use increases the likelihood of social isolation, but empirical research could conceivably show that in fact the opposite is the case. Disagreements about the positive and negative aspects of the internet may therefore be either normative disagreements (disagreements about values) or empirical disagreements (disagreements about facts). Of course, it is not always easy to disentangle values and empirical facts, as these are often strongly interwoven.Next to contested benefits and harms of the Internet, there are also perceived harms and benefits that are fairly broadly acknowledged. For instance, nearly everyone agrees that the Internet has the benefit of making a large amount of useful information easily available, and nearly everyone agrees that the Internet can also be harmful by making dangerous, libelous and hateful information available. People have shared values and shared empirical beliefs by which they can come to such collective assessments.My purpose in this essay is to contribute to a better understanding of existing positive and negative appraisals of the Internet, as a first step towards a more methodical assessment of Internet technology. My focus will be on the appraisal of social and cultural implications of the Internet. Whether we like it or not, policy towards the Internet is guided by beliefs about its social and cultural benefits and harms. It is desirable, therefore, to have methods for making such beliefs explicit in order to analyze the values and empirical claims that are presupposed in them.In the next two sections (2 and 3), I will catalogue major perceived social and cultural benefits and harms of the Internet, that have been mentioned frequently in public discussions and academic studies. I will focus on perceived benefits and harms that do not seem to rest on idiosyncratic values, meaning that they seem to rest on values that are shared by most people. For instance, most people believe that individual autonomy is good, so if it can be shown that a technology enhances individual autonomy, most people would agree that this technology has this benefit. Notice, however, that even when they share this value, people may disagree on the benefits of the technology in question, because they may have different empirical beliefs on whether the technology actually enhanced individual autonomy.Cataloguing such perceived cultural benefits and harms is, I believe, an important first step towards a social and cultural technology assessment of the Internet and its various uses. An overview of perceived benefits and harms may provide a broader perspective on the Internet that could be to the benefit of both friends and foes, and can contribute to a better mutual understanding between them. More importantly, it provides a potential starting point for a reasoned and methodical analysis of benefits and harms. Ideas on how such an analysis may be possible, in light of the already mentioned facts that assessments are based on different value systems, will be developed in section 4. In a concluding section, I sketch the prospects for a future social and cultural technology assessment of the Internet

Believable Unbelievable Internet Based Information

The world around us has changed over recent years with the evolution of cyberspace and the development of the internet. Information in cyberspace is like an endless repository of information of various kinds, where there are no checks on who uploads the information and who downloads the same. Cyberspace thus practices equality in its most pristine form, though at the same time it also has the potential of fomenting communal hatred, inciting violence, and affecting public opinion. The fundamental challenge here is how to establish what information in cyberspace is useful, authentic, and original and what is not. Given the growing popularity of the internet, there is a need to address the regulation of its use so that our society is not divided on social, cultural, and economic lines. This paper discusses the issues concerning openness and authenticity of information found in cyberspace, and its impact on the world around us. It illustrates the point that certain level of control is essential to minimise the detrimental social, cultural, and economic impacts from the multifaceted information available in cyberspace. This may even require re-examination and re-structuring of the traditional institutions that we have come to rely on to resolve the basic issues of society

The Technological Expansion of Sociability: Virtual Communities as Imagined Communities

The reception of Benedict Anderson’s ideas was very fruitful in many disciplines, and his work provided key concepts that can now throw a clarifying light in some blurry matters. The expression “imagined community” has known a remarkable proliferation, a situation that led to both the formation of a research direction and to the perpetuation of a cliché. In this respect, my article pointed out some suggestive characteristics of virtual communities, explaining why the imagined community is a valuable subject for the theorists of new media. The impossibility to know in person all the members of a big community is just one factor that determines its imagined face. Moreover, the set of values and inner presuppositions that guide the members are important bricks in the construction of community. In my opinion, the virtual community is imagined as a multi-layered experience (technological, conversational, relational etc.). The dynamic of a virtual community contains the tension amongst these layers and the degree of its imagined side depends on multiple factors. In order to illustrate these aspects, I gave a brief example by analysing a Romanian virtual community, using the triad common language – temporality – high centers. In spite of its limitations, the perspectives offered by this concept are still useful for understanding the nature of online communities. Thus, the imagined community is a valuable set of beliefs and practices that underlie and bolster the effective meaning and functioning of the virtual communities

When the Periphery Meets the Core of a Party-Press System: Remember Comrade Lei Feng in China's Shifting Media Kaleidscope

At the epicenter of China's reform, media adapt their propagandist role to different extents. They present distinct images about China's Communist past. Against the backdrop, we examine media reconstructions of Lei Feng, a Communist icon CCP created in the 1960s. Drawing on media reform and collective memory literature, we find party-organ newspapers draw on altruism and loyalty in his original image to promote social stability and economic development for present purposes. Meanwhile, user generated contents in cyberspace question the authenticity of Lei Feng's official records. Different reconstructions collide in online discussions. When commemoration is linked to chronicling, Lei Feng becomes a demoralizing lie; when not, a symbol for much-needed virtues in the present. Implications for understanding China's media reform and for China's collective memorization of revolutionary heroes are discussed

Performing the “quing of berlin”:transnational digital interfaces in queer feminist protest culture

This paper employs the figure of the “interface” to explore the work of German feminist rapper and spoken-word performer Sookee (Nora Hantzsch), who constitutes an ideal case-study for examining the interface between digital technologies, transnational feminisms, and local activism. Sookee is an underground hip-hop artist and queer political activist in Berlin, a location which features in her work as a site of subcultural dissent and contested identities. Sookee is also an academic; a youth outreach worker; a significant online presence; and an international creative collaborator. As such, she navigates the interfaces between multiple social groups, media, discourses, and cultural contexts—regional, national, and transnational. This article focuses on the digital circulations of Sookee’s material against the backdrop of her local performative and activist work. Her transnational collaborations with women MCs and poets from South Africa and America, as well as Europe, celebrate cultural, linguistic, racial, and ethnic difference by bringing in a diverse range of feminist voices to the German context

The gendered body in virtual space : sexuality, performance and play in four Second Life spaces

This work is principally an investigation into visual and screen culture, using four specific regions of the three-dimensional virtual world of ‘Second Life’ as case studies. The analysis follows a thematic application of discourse analysis as a basis for critiquing Western screen culture, most importantly the cultural and social conditions that replicate dominant paradigms of power and agency. Of particular pertinence to this study are the framing, representational and spatial practices of gendered and sexual identities within ‘Second Life’ spaces. As is typical of the internet, sexual freedom is a given, yet representational performance (how one appears through their embodied avatar) is predicated on significations from the corporeal. So, within potentially subversive spaces, there is a normativity that persists which reiterates the ideological foundations of identity that are historically and culturally ascribed to. This is particularly prevalent in gendered representation – avatars tend to hyper-gendered expression and the excesses of Western bodily presentation and adornment, so that bodies are seen to move beyond all biological capacity of attainment. That these representational practices carry over into sexually diverse regions is perhaps unsurprising given that gay and lesbian culture has been in a large way subsumed into contemporary mass culture. It is the tensions that occur as a result of the normative acting upon the subversive that forms the basis of investigation, specifically the relationship between corporeal normativity and screen culture as well as the tensions between cultural conservatism, subversive representation and gender conformity

Consensus on community guidelines: an experimental study on the legitimacy of content removal in social media

The popularization of social media has led to a considerable increase in the importance of discursive expressions of violence, especially when directed at vulnerable communities. While social media platforms have created rules to regulate such expressions, little information is available on the perception of the legitimacy of these rules in the general population, regardless of the importance of the former for the latter. It is therefore the objective of this study to analyze the perception of the seriousness of such content and the degree to which the population has established a consensus on the withdrawal of restricted discursive behaviour on three major social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter). For this purpose, 918 participants were immersed in an experimental paradigm in three different groups (n1 = 302; n2 = 301; n3 = 315). Each was presented with stimuli containing discursive behaviour that is banned by community guidelines. The stimuli were presented differently to each group (i.e., description of the banned behaviour, description and accompanying example, example only). Our experimental data reveals that the degree of consensus on the need to remove content is quite high, regardless of the style of presentation. It furthermore suggests that the behaviour in question is perceived as very serious, due to the harm that our participants presume it to cause. These results have important implications for the debate on freedom of expression on the Internet and its regulation by private actors

The Continuous Materiality of Blockchain

Both cryptocurrency researchers and early adopters of cryptocurrencies agree that they possess a special kind of materiality, based on the laborious productive process of digital ‘mining’ [1]. This idea first appears in the Bitcoin White Paper [2] that encourages Bitcoin adopters to construct and justify its value in metaphoric comparison to gold mining. In this paper, I explore three material aspects of blockchain: physical infrastructure, human language and computer code. I apply the concept of 'continuous materiality' [3] to show how these three aspects interact in practical implementations of blockchain such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. I start from the concept of ‘digital metallism’ that stands for ‘fundamental value’ of cryptocurrencies, and end with the move of Ethereum to ‘proof-of-stake’, partially as a countermeasure against ‘evil miners’. I conclude that ignoring material aspects of blockchain technology can only further problematize complicated relations between their technical, semiotic and social materiality. Both cryptocurrency researchers and early adopters of cryptocurrencies agree that they possess a special kind of materiality, based on the laborious productive process of digital ‘mining’ [1]. This idea first appears in the Bitcoin White Paper [2] that encourages Bitcoin adopters to construct and justify its value in metaphoric comparison to gold mining. In this paper, I explore three material aspects of blockchain: physical infrastructure, human language and computer code. I apply the concept of 'continuous materiality' [3] to show how these three aspects interact in practical implementations of blockchain such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. I start from the concept of ‘digital metallism’ that stands for ‘fundamental value’ of cryptocurrencies, and end with the move of Ethereum to ‘proof-of-stake’, partially as a countermeasure against ‘evil miners’. I conclude that ignoring material aspects of blockchain technology can only further problematize complicated relations between their technical, semiotic and social materiality.© Hochschule Mittweida. All rights reserved.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Enacting a Path from Despair to Happiness: A Critical Analysis of the It Gets Betters Project

Rhetorical agency is critical for addressing perceived community crises, especially for marginalized populations. Rhetorical agency, as it is used in this dissertation, refers to the capacity to act in a way that is recognizable and intelligible within the context in which it is presented (Campbell, 2005; Rand, 2014). Understanding rhetorical agency in this way recognizes that its enactment involves a complex interplay between the rhetor, his/her audience, and the rhetorical conditions characterizing the discursive context. Using a social media movement, the It Gets Better Project, as a case study, I analyze the LGBT population’s strategic response to address the issue of anti-gay bullying and LGBT youth suicides. Through critical analysis, I examine the relationship between the rhetorical goal of a marginalized population and the use of a particular Internet technology to address a situation that seemed urgent and uncertain. Specifically, I argue that drawing upon the enactment of lived experiences in the form of personal video testimonies creates discursive possibilities and limitations for rhetorical agency particular to the rhetorical situation in which it emerges

Challenging Party Hegemony: Identity Work in China’s Emerging Virreal Places

The Chinese Communist Party has chosen to base the legitimacy of its rule on its performance as leading national power. Since national identity is based on shared imaginations of and directly tied to territory – hence place, this paper analyses both heterodox models for identification on the national and potentially competing place-based collective identities on the local level. This analysis, based on communication within a number of popular communication forums and on observation of behavior in the physical reality of today’s urban China, shows that communication within the virtual and behavior in the real world are not separated realities but form a new virreal spatial continuum consisting of imagined places both online and offline. I argue that ties to place are stronger and identities constructed on shared imaginations of place are more salient the more direct the experience of place is – be the place real, virtual or virreal. Hence in China challenges to one-party rule will probably accrue from competing localized collective identities rather than from heterodox nationalism.to explore the variety and complexity of functional antagonisms in the social subsystems.China, Internet, political power, collective identity, nationalism, place, bulletin, board system, online communication, online community