Session 1: Theories and Concepts of Cyberspace and Cyberculture
7th Global Conference
Thursday 3rd May – Saturday 5th May 2012
Prague, Czech Republic
Is There Any Space in Cyberspace?
Harris Breslow
Department of Mass Communication, The American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
This paper will discuss the literature and theories of community, memory, space, and representation, in terms of Castells’ and Appadurai’s individual theories of flow, in order to inquire whether there is any space in the cyber. It will do so through the following arguments:
An interrogation of the literature that discusses online communities: For almost two decades there has been a proliferation of literature that has discussed, described and assessed online communities through the use of spatial metaphors. Authors such as Rheingold, Turkle, Baym, and Jones, and many others, have critically assessed the nature of online communities. What has not been critically assessed, however, are the spatial metaphors that are used to discuss these communities. This becomes even more important when one considers the fact that these communities are being produced within a communications infrastructure, an infrastructure of flow, which dematerializes relationships across both time and space.
A discussion of memory and its relationship to space: I will argue that the relationship between space and memory is a key aspect of any community. This relationship is produced on a communal level through reference to “the Third”, a stabilising meta-pragmatic authority that mediates interlocution, enabling the generation of memory within a specific space. As I have argued in terms of memory, flow dematerialises this reference point, and in so doing destabilises the inherent spatial referent.
An interrogation of representation and its relationship to space: I will argue that theories of representation consistently neglect the spatial dimension of the relationship between subject and object. I argue that meaning is a product of a spatial relationship between subject and object that is stabilised across a semio-spatial dimension. This is crucial when discussing the cyberspace, given that this term has been understood and articulated in terms of the virtual representation of material space. This neglect of space is itself, however, a function of flow, which dematerialises space, thus destabilising the semio-spatial foundation upon which cyberspace would exist.
“Technocracy”
Ivan Churnosov
Moscow State Academy of Law, Russia
Nietzsche once mentioned that “there is a world of difference between the reason for something coming into existence in the first place and the ultimate use to which it is put” (On the Genealogy of Morals, Oxford University Press, p. 57). Broadly speaking, it would signify that not everything always is now as it was in the past or will be in the future. Things are constantly being reinvented or suppressed by new power superior to them.
Thus, in our search for meritocracy (or the rule of the best) the aristocratic form of government (when the criterion for the participation in the state affairs was your blood) was overcome by the democratic one (for which the criterion is the choice of the voters) but would it be justified to assume that the democracy is the pinnacle of political development, rather than just another stage of it?
My answer is that democracy is already giving way to the more efficient form of government – technocracy, lead not by those who was elected by the popularity contest but by those who hold the knowledge of the techniques of domination. And as aristocracy was based on the notion of military strength; democracy – on the notion of law; technocracy will establish its domination through control of all encompassing information flow channel – the internet.
My article will discuss the cyberisation of political life:
How the internet becomes the privileged and irreplaceable means of communication;
How every political action automatically becomes cyberaction;
How the internet undermines former power hierarchies, creating new ones at the same time;
How the internet simultaneously furthers individual freedom and ensures that new power relations cannot be easily contested;
Finally I will endeavor to demonstrate what techniques are employed to achieve the above mentioned results.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Accelerating the Human: The Cybercultural Roots of the “Technological Singularity”
Artur Matos Alves
Universidade Atlântica / Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
Contemporary “Singularity” thinking has its origins in Vernor Vinge’s influential proposal of the emergence of greater-than-human artificial intelligence (AI) as an “event horizon” in human history. This notion finds its technological basis in the exponential development of information technology during the 20th century, as expressed in “Moore’s Law”. However, the pace of development of information technologies is uncertain, and the predictions for the date of emergence of a “Singularity” are pushing it farther into the future. An analogy can be established with religious eschatology and its trademark anxiety for a form of Rapture.
“Singularity” thinking’s ancestry can be traced back to the utopian thinking of Campanella, as well as positivistic utopianism, the works of eschatological thinkers such as Teilhard de Chardin, and the speculative writings of computer scientists. More recently, it has become a common trope in speculative fiction. This heritage is acknowledged in the writings of V. Vinge, which have laid the conditions for the rise of a “technological singularity”. As an heir to the utopian tradition, “singularitarianism” espouses a theory of human history as progress towards better forms of existence. Scientific and technological development would be destined to accelerate humankind into a post-human condition, with the creation of artificial intelligence as the milestone signalling the beginning of that new era.
The acceleration thesis of “singularitarianism” and its inherent uncertainty have given rise to a variety of positions, ranging from the enthusiastic (as, for example, N. Bostrom, R. Kurzweil, or H. Moravec), to the sceptic (including B. Joy, J. Lanier, R. Penrose). Rarely have they been the object of a sustained philosophical approach (an exception would be D. Chalmers’ The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis).
The “Singularity” scenario integrates images, metaphors, notions, and hopes also present in cyberculture: the central element of technology, its interfaces with humans, hybridization, mind-body dualism, the moral nature of AI, and the coexistence between humanity and AI. As a result, this paper addresses a needed critical characterization of “Singularity” thinking, exploring some of its rhetorical and historical links with the wider phenomenon of cyberculture.
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