CyberUtopia

Today's session started off with a short video clip on Johnny Mnenomic (sp?) starring Keanu Reeves - why does he seem to be in all these weird sci-fi/futuristic type movies?! Anyhow, I didn't really get the point of that clip because I didn't understand what we were supposed to take away from it.

The main topic of today's lecture was cyber utopia; the idea that the internet can create some sort of an ideal virtual reality environment that people can escape into, to get away from their every day lives. Adam discussed two main electronic media ages, the first being centralised dissemination and the second being decentralised interaction. Mark Poster proposed that centralised dissemination is characterised by the use of one source and many receivers. A good example of this is a DJ broadcasting a radio segment to millions of listeners. The invention of the telephone equalised the positions of the sender and receiver of information, because it allowed anyone to send or receive messages with a minimum of technical and financial resources. The second media age broke down restrictions, with the internet making it possible for individuals to "publish" to a huge audience (just like what I'm doing now).

It is no secret that the internet has increased in users dramatically in the past few years. Nonetheless, these following statistics are still pretty amazing:
- In Australia...
1996: 286,000 internet users
1999: 1.1 million internet users
Early 2000: estimated 262 million internet users worldwide

However, as with all other technology, the internet will probably eventually blend into the background and we won't notice it anymore. The development of new communication technologies leads to the development of another set of mythologies involving transcending death, nature and humanity. What exactly does this mean? My take on it is that these new communication technologies forces us to develop a new mindset and a new language to keep up with the technology.