The frontiers of challenge ... should be ... able to free them from the constraints of the old order and life itself as we know it. In the Mexico of this cyber imaginary, there ought to be no place for a painted, half-clad six-year-old with grass in his hair standing in a hotel lobby, alien to his world, desperate among strangers, futilely gesticulating for drinking water, unable to communicate his quest and his thirst for an impatient insensitive Other world.
I vaguely understand the connection of communication between a child who wants water and understands the language to how I connect to the internet as a child not having it.
Yet these remain the indulgence of a privileged few, and bring no attention whatsoever to the concrete fate of the millions of Mexico's children and citizens who must battle a different preoccupation: namely: the struggle to survive each new day and meet the demands of a real world.
The anecdote about the child, who probably has no idea about what the internet is, and his asking for water, which is speculative and dependent on the hotel worker's honesty, somehow connects to the marginalized population who is unable to use the internet.
Computers may be part of the reality of thousands of children, even hundreds of thousands, in California and Detroit and New York, but for the child on the streets of Lagos and Mexico City and the South Side of Chicago, computers are not a ubiquitous part of reality... This remainder of the population falls outside the statistic enabled to be part of the new world of cyberspace and digital reality.
This is more clear to me. The anecdote is abstract to the point and unneeded. It's a shame that not only people are starving and homeless in the world, but they cannot check their Facebooks. This sounds a little facetious however I do know homeless people who do have My Space accounts and regularly check them.
The article is giving other accounts of disenfranchisement from other parts of the world like South Africa and The Iraq, "everywhere like such as..."
...everything else is inevitably consigned to erasure and absence. In connective South Africa the majority of the population fit most perfectly into that category of the inconsequential revealingly known in cyberspeak as PONA. They are, indeed, a people of no account.
It's fascinating to me how we are able to talk to people from Sierra Leone from Facebook, a country marred with poverty, and yet these people likely don't represent the PONA who are part of the majority, probably more disenfranchised, of the population.
...deprivation is an almost unshifting reality, and within the matrix of this reality the assertion that "computers are with us" ... is a fallacy. It does not reflect the world as we know it. In the end, cyberculture is... reliant on the relative mitigation, if not absence, of deprivation.
Excellent observation. I agree fully.
If the computer or digital interface is a condition for cyberspace and cyberculture, computer literacy is a condition for successful use of the computer. This new literacy, in turn relies on the condition of the old literacy, the ability to not only read and write but to do so functionally.
It's interesting to reaffirm my own discoveries that there is a hierarchy within literacy, that especially in America, there are "levels" of literacy and the level of literacy determines whether a person is able to use a digital interface or not. Some people mentally can't function with a digital interface. In a way, I'm thinking of Terri Shiavo's blog, and how that represents a user's inability for communication when mentally unable to.
Cyberspace ... is not the new, free global democracy that we presume and defend, but an aristocracy of location and disposition characterized, ironically, by acute insensitivity and territorial proclivities.
This is the best quote in the book so far. The technology cannot mimic the automobile because of its technology's access cannot be allowable to all.
My goal is to challenge all those who possess and understand this new technology to apply greater seriousness and humanism in exploring means to extend the numerous, practical possibilities of this technology to the greater majority of humanity.
It will come into use yet I believe that more pressing issues like global hunger and general education/literacy should be in the forefront.
Information technology has become the backbone of social and cultural interaction on a global scale, spurring social codes as well as political, economic and cultural imperatives...
Geography is a major factor in literacy and the ability to practice or participate in the technology.
...the Internet is still mostly... a literacy-dependent medium... It is this conventional literacy, or familiarity of text, that in turn enables the individual to acquire or develop the requisite skills for computer-meditated communication or "computeracy."
I feel like this point was mentioned before but better mentioned and repeated over and over again than for the readers to forget how important this concept is.
A great number of people in the most industrialized nations thus are unlikely to simply connect as are many in the less developed regions of the world... Needless to say, those sections of the citizenry who are less represented in the workplace or at school do not fare too well with access to the digital network... Within the vast territories of the Net, populations on the outside obviously do not possess the privilege of agency because they can neither speak on their own behalf nor exercise control over the dynamics and dialectics of the network.
This is a great point. Day laborers, farmers and blue collared workers do not have their own blogs nor are they a represented population on the internet. Whether they are literate or illiterate, it also transcends to wealth and ability to use the computer. It's an interesting point of departure for further study.
Is it appropriate or realistic to preoccupy ourselves with extending connectivity to the deprived masses instead of first improving their social and material condition?
There should be no governmental regulation of the internet in order to extend connectivity. The focus should be the more important issues of the deprived masses which includes Maslow's hierarchy of needs like food, water and shelter.
The globalization of computing technologies has brought about a transformation in which the individual accesses the terminal in solitude but our social and political relations are increasingly ones of mutual dependence.
Information art or aesthetic is an interesting concept and according to the article that information is dependent on a variety of technical and social factors from its infrastructure by the internet through censorship avoidance.
To be engaged is not the same as to be connected. Engagement is an active and ongoing confrontation with others, whereas connection, as Steven Shapiro has suggested, is to the network and away from sociality.
It sounds obvious when read and reread but the contrast between connectivity and engagement on a digital interface needs to be clearly defined.
Connectivity, the transport of disembodied information, outstrips the more robust partiality of the book, but demands a material infrastructure which only connects a minority of the world's people... Hence being connected is a form of sociability in which access to the speed of information ... affectively strengthens the digital "haves" while affectively weakening the digital "have nots."
Possibly yet the "have nots" is nonexistent and therefore unable to be weakened.
Modernism is, above all, a mode of calling attention to the conditions and limitations of a medium in order to produce from these something positively different out of the nature of the medium itself.
I don't feel like my own work promotes digital art itself and am rather skeptical of art that does. Technology has as many flaws as positive attributes. The promotion of modernism can also be left to the muralists.
Harwood's site acts as a mirror to the official Web site for the Tate Gallery in London and in fact was commissioned by Tate Online... playing with proximity through the technique of mirroring that is itself part of Web design and the display of sites in online environments.
Several internet art pieces are mentioned in the article. Many of which are difficult to understand without a URL or at least a photographic example of the attempted explanation. For one, as a reader who is on the bus and not connected to the internet as this is being written, I don't understand how a mirrored website can act as art unless this is conceptual. Nonetheless, the idea sounds trite and other ideas sound flat as just a written explanation. I suppose it's tough to write about the internet in order to truly understand the beauty that encompasses it.
Connectivity... cannot just be thought of as an experience produced by interactive artwork...
Post colonial art is accessed by a small number of people but it often is diversified by people around the world. I remember when I looked at hits and visits on my own personal website and saw visits from every continent in the world sans Antarctica.
This means these new aesthetic experiences are not simply produced or consumed in isolation but result directly from collective, social exchange.
Bloggers around the world who post their own artwork and discuss their artwork in the public domain reflect connectivity.
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