[Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Mike Featherstone: The Citizen and Cyberspace
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Mike Featherstone: The Citizen and Cyberspace
The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture
http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=608031&textreg=1&id=FeaCiti1-1
The growth of "global cities"--megacities at the heart of the
information networks of the global economy--and the continued
development and spread of information technologies raise profound
questions about public life and the civic engagement necessary for
citizenship. Will there be a progressive privatization of public life,
Featherstone asks, with the replacement of the citizen by the
consumer, a McCitizen without means or basis for association? On the
one hand, Featherstone argues, if we conceive of the public sphere, as
Habermas does, as essentially a dialogical one, with individuals
interacting in a shared locale as equal participants, then the
prospects for new spaces of participation and citizenship appear to be
dim. On the other hand, the new information technologies also appear
to have the potential to create new forms of solidarity and bases of
deliberation, suggesting a need to rethink citizenship in a broader
key. Featherstone considers both the possibilities and problems of
cyberspace for generating the trust and empathy necessary for
democratic community.
Mike Featherstone is Professor of Sociology at Nottingham Trent
University. He is the editor of the journal, Theory, Culture, and
Society, as well as the author and editor of many books, including,
most recently, Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and
Identity and Consumer Culture and Postmodernism.
John Thompson's book The Media and Modernity was published in
1995, yet it fails to discuss the Internet and the development of
cyberspace. These are important developments in terms of his typology
of face-to-face interaction, mediated interaction, and mediated
quasi-interaction.[3]^1 The Internet is clearly a form of mediated
interaction, sharing some of the characteristics of the letter and
telephone. Like the letter it is a scriptural form, yet it is almost
like the telephone in that the exchanges between parties can be almost
instantaneous and relatively simple to initiate. It is like a
conversation, except that it uses the written word; it is also
possible for multiple users to participate in the same "conversation."
Yet the next stage of the Internet, which we are just seeing
emerge, really deserves a classificatory category of its own; for
simplicity we can call it virtual interactivity, although this only
captures limited dimensions of its characteristics. It is a multimedia
form, combining text, speech, music, video, and images; hence it has
the combined characteristics of the telephone, radio, video,
television, newspapers, books, etc., yet with a massive potential
difference from the conventional media in the extent of programming
and archive material available for access through increased
"bandwidth." Also important is the capacity to configure material in
databases, which can be accessed and searched rapidly from many points
of view. The data is hypertexted or hyperlinked so that non-narrative
modes of investigation entailing jumps within and across texts become
the habitual mode, in contrast to the linear mode we are used to with
reading books and other texts. New discontinuous, parallel-accessing
modes of reading and viewing akin to channel-hopping with television
are in the process of being developed.
In the first place, these developments promise the fulfillment
of a long-held dream of humanity, that of completeness--every piece of
written or recorded knowledge (image/music/text) will be immediately
available. Yet the corollary is the problem of navigation,
selectivity, and sense: now that everything is available, where do we
go and why do we go there?
But along with completeness there is an important second feature
to this next stage of the internet: interactivity. This does not mean
that the Internet can be used like a telephone, but that the material
downloaded, or used in conversational mode, can be edited and
reformed. With text it is possible to write in the middle of other
people's text--to effectively become a co-author--which threatens to
make available a whole mass of co-written hybrid versions of texts, as
well as to undermine the authority of book writers and intellectuals.
In addition similar possibilities of co-production are possible with
imagistic forms--it will be easy to alter, morph, and reconstruct
existing film and television output, or construct new output which is
not based on montage, but mixing or morphing through digitalization.
A third and potentially radical feature of the new medium is the
possibility of three-dimensional representation and fuller sensory
replication. There are already three dimensional programs available on
the Internet that have the potential to reconfigure the existing flat
page format to a move-through data-architecturally constructed space
(VRML, it is predicted, will replace HTML). Yet the potential of
cyberspace, by incorporating virtual reality into the process, is to
simulate a highly realistic space, which offers a high degree of
instantiation or immersion--a space which one can rapidly move or
"fly" through, which is highly realistic and transmits not only aural
and visual information, but touch and feelings of force or gravity.
What are the implications for public life and citizenship? In
such a (parallel) world there are clearly new possibilities of public
space. In the first place the prospects of a Habermasian public sphere
emerging with the Internet and cyberspace do not look very good. How
can one have public interaction when one will never meet the other
interactants, when the routine tests of sincerity or goodwill we
operate with in everyday interactions become impossible? How can trust
be generated?
Yet there are those like Rheingold[4]^2 who argue that virtual
communities can revitalize citizenship democracy. People will form
personal relationships in cyberspace; indeed it is interesting to read
the accounts of BBS (bulletin board), MOO, and MUD (multi user domain)
friendships, where people develop intimate, emotionally rewarding
attachments with complete strangers, reversing some of our long held
sociological assumptions about primary and secondary relationships.
For Rheingold the loss of community which many bemoan in contemporary
societies will now be regenerated through BBSs and MOOs, which have
relatively democratic access and modes of address undistorted by
external power and authority.[5]^3 One can rediscover one's
citizenship rights and involvement in a whole range of issues. One can
escape from the rigid interdependencies and power balances within
which one is normally placed and escape the significant others and
superiors who "know what you think" and feel entitled to "speak on
your behalf." Violence--both actual and symbolic--which silences the
voices of the less powerful becomes more difficult to operate. New
forms of trust may become generated. In a society where many of the
major dangers are cumulative and invisible--e.g., ecological threats,
pollution, radiation, AIDS, etc.--we rely more and more on information
about them. A technology which is in part a "super-telephone" can aid
verification of information by the ease with which it can be exchanged
and checked.[6]^4
These are the conditions for the development of what some would
call the postmodern public sphere[7]^--a notion that contests the myth
of the extendibility of the Enlightenment public sphere and asks us to
see the democratic potential of the mass media and cyberspace forms.
Hartley asks us to reflect on and reconsider an intellectual tradition
which has favored production over consumption, urban over suburban,
masculine over feminine, authority over the popular, truth over
desire, word over image, and the printed archive over the popular
screen.[8]^6 The Internet and cyberspace, then, may well force us to
rethink our notions of citizenship and public space.
Yet there are also clear problems with this pioneering and
subversive vision. In conventional terms, as we have just mentioned,
trust is generated over time as we get to know people, as we digest
their actions and words and observe their gestures and bodily
betrayals in co-present interactions. Liminal moments are usually well
circumscribed, at least if one lives in Anglo-Saxon, North European,
or North American cultures, although consumer culture and advertising
generate a wider range of liminoid repertoires and sense of the
constructability of persona and performing selves, which invade
everyday life. In the Habermasian discourse on the public sphere,
masks and disguises are misinformation to be filtered out; they are
resonant with the lack of seriousness of the carnival, or with the
artfulness and deception of the courtier in the court society, to be
contrasted with the solid, serious, purposeful bourgeois
gentleman--the clarifier of truth.[9]^7
The Internet and cyberspace will make masking and disguise both
easy and routine. Already we see that in MOOs and BBSs there is the
phenomenon of computer cross-dressing: age, gender, ethnicity are all
seen as reconstructable. Indeed there are also accounts of people
interacting on the Internet with `bots' (computer programs which
masquerade as persons, being coded up to give a sophisticated and
flexible range of responses).[10]^8 If one develops regular
interactions with a person who is in disguise, or with a machine, how
does this effect trust? There are clearly gains as well as losses to
be considered here, for example, the loss of the ideal of pure
communication, of complete truthfulness and trust: a romantic ideal of
complete and self-sufficient identity which draws on Rousseau and
others. Instead of the masculine and bourgeois ideal, there may well
be more realistic possibilities for communication and participation by
accepting masking and performance as part of everyday life and not
seeking to eradicate it. Many academics and intellectuals often
inhabit the tradition of Rousseau and have a long-standing prejudice
for sincerity over acting.[11]^9
Likewise, it has been argued that the Internet and cyberspace
will encourage us to accept the notion of multiple selves.[12]^10 The
Windows format many of us operate with when using personal computers
already encourages parallel processing, carrying out many tasks at
once. The lack of a strong identity, the possibility of fragmentation
and splitting into multiple selves, formerly regarded as a pathology,
it is argued, is now increasingly normalized and brought into the
psychological orthodoxy and surfaces in the popular psychology
how-to-do-it literature.[13]^11
There exists a further problem in terms of the generation of the
"civic bodies" Sennett speaks about.[14]^12 The simulated puppet
bodies we use to represent ourselves in virtual reality seem a long
way from the body in pain, the aging body which reminds us of our
common human fate and vulnerability. One can know little about the
body in pain from the representation the person chooses to employ: it
could well be a sick and invalid person who chooses a youthful, active
body to represent him-or herself. One can seemingly escape the lived
body and interact only with the virtual body, something which, it has
been argued, reveals a continuity between the cyberspace aficionados
and the idealistic tendencies of Western thought with its long-held
preference for the mind over the body. Cyberspace offers the seductive
possibilities of pure, unencumbered mind, able to travel and transform
itself, to float free of the messiness and disgust of decaying bodies,
of what is contemptuously referred to as "the meat."[15]^13 It offers
a technological dream of mastery, of the elimination of death and
suffering bodies, which Sennett is critical of in respect to the urban
plan: the city swept clean of the refuse of human misery. Yet it may
well be that the new forms of association have potential to go beyond
the type of opposition Sennett speaks of and that technological
mastery of the planned kind ceases to have a coherent world view
anymore in a time of greater pragmatism and syncretism. Indeed, some
of the dichotomies between human beings and nature, humans and
machines, are being actively deconstructed by social developments and
theoretical formulations. We may well develop respect and emotional
solidarity with a range of pre-and post-human natural and mechanic
forms and fusions[16]^14--something which points to a range of
citizenship possibilities and takes us away from the unitary models.
________________________
[17]^1 See John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory
of the Media (Cambridge: Polity, 1995). ] [18]^2 See Howard Rheingold,
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993). ] [19]^3 Jim McGuigan, Culture
and the Public Sphere (London: Routledge, 1996) 182. ] [20]^4 Lynn
Hershman Leeson, "Jaron Lanier Interview," Clicking In: Hot Links to a
Digital Culture, ed. Hershman Leeson (Seattle: Bay, 1996) 51. ] [21]^5
See John Hartley, Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular
Culture (London: Arnold, 1996); and Mark Poster, "Postmodern
Virtualities," Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of
Technologial Embodiment, ed. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows
(London: Sage, 1995) 79-97. ] [22]^6 Hartley 156. ] [23]^7 See Jürgen
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity,
1989). ] [24]^8 Lynn Hershman Leeson, "Sandy Stone Interview,"
Clicking In: Hot Links to a Digital Culture, ed. Hershman Leeson
(Seattle: Bay, 1996) 105-115. ] [25]^9 Norbert Elias's The Court
Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) is an important correction to this
tradition; see also the discussion in Richard Sennett, The Fall of
Public Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) and in
Gerhard Vowinckel, "Command or Refine," Theory, Culture & Society 4
(1987): 2-3. ] [26]^10 See Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity
in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995). ]
[27]^11 See John Shotter, Cultural Politics of Everyday Life: Social
Constructionism, Rhetoric and Knowing of the Third Kind (Milton
Keynes: Open University Press, 1993). ] [28]^12 See Richard Sennett,
Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New
York: Norton, 1995). ] [29]^13 See Mike Featherstone, "Post-Bodies,
Aging and Virtual Reality," Images of Aging: Cultural Representations
of Later Life, ed. Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick (London:
Routledge, 1995) 227-244; and Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows,
introduction, Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of
Technological Embodiment (London: Sage, 1995) 1-20. ] [30]^14 See Mike
Featherstone, "Beyond the Postmodern Future? Posthuman Development and
the Question of Citizenship," ISS Global Futures Lecture, The Hague,
June 19, 1997; and Mike Featherstone, "Global Networks and the
Question of Technology: Some Considerations Arising from the Work of
Norbert Elias," Elias 100 Years Conference, UNICAMP, São Paulo,
November 21, 1997. ]
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