Cyberspace is a cyber-subject: Socio-philosophical approach
ARS'11 Third International Workshop on Social Network Analysis June 23-25, 2011 in University of Salerno, Italy
Cyberspace is a cyber-subject: Socio-philosophical approach
Ilana Rosen, Haifa University Israel
ilanaros@nana10.co.il
From the beginning of the 20th century changes occurred in science, technology, society, economics, politics, culture, education, and modes of thought. These changes were expressed especially in what earned the name the “digital revolution." Information and Communication Technology (ITC) has shaped the century. There was a transition from the mechanistic, linear thought of Newtonian science, to electronic network thinking. If in the past it was customary to characterize societies according to their types of political government (democratic, totalitarian), or according to economic systems (communist, capitalist), in recent years we have begun to speak of the global society, characterized by the increased use of information and communication. Bureaucratic, hierarchical social organization has been replaced by social networking, composed of infinite junctions and bonds of interaction. National politics have given way to global politics. Industrial economy has been replaced by post-industrial economy. Modern culture has become post-modern culture. This is what earned the name "postmodern condition" (Lyotard, 1979). Computer technologies have developed significantly. Technological innovation triggers massive social and cultural transformation. We are currently living in a moment of extraordinary complexity, when systems and structures that have long organized life are changing. We are moving toward a new society", and standing on the threshold of a new era which makes it important to recognize that we need new concepts to describe the new reality.
Digital technology is connected to the socio-political and economic tendency of “capitalistic globalization.”Globalization refers to processes freed from time and geographical territory. The world has become one entity, without social or national borders, or states. Information obviates the demand for new technology, for instance, linkage and dependence between institutions, organizations, individuals and companies. This is a system embracing all areas of life: economy, politics, art, education, technology and communication, enabling new social and personal situations. It is the era of post-modern media and the digital network, characterized by communication and information that generate“cyberspace.”
Cyberspace is a universe created and supported by a collection of technologies and communication networks’ computers. It is the “matrix,” the global network, linking millions of people, and growing daily; a wide electronic super-system, holding multi-dimensional activities. Cyberspace compelling renewed examination of traditional concepts and ideas, and in general, renewed examination of subject condition. Cyberspace has become integrated into textures of daily living and into the social world. Cyberspace creates a real change in subject condition.
Cyberspace Is a Real Technological Experience That Justifies A New Theoretical Approach And Examination Of Subject Condition. Cyberspace is not just a storage space, it is a real space, a part of social and cultural context, and it is truly a real technological experience that justifies a new examination of subjectcondition. Cyberspace is a transformative technology, changing society and the subject in a number of ways. Humans are moving toward a new way of life. Cyberspace becomes an articulation of a networked space that is enacted in material form, conceptual structure, and lived practice in everyday life.
Throughout cyberspace relations are stretched over both time and space. The cyberspace is a worldwide (www) system of computer networks (Net) in which users at any one computer can get information from any other computer. This has a significant impact on life also outside the Net. The focal point of the discussion is the matter of our place in the world, at the center of the enormous power of computerized technology, which compresses time-space. According to this discussion, cyberspace is a system that is imposes changes in man’s relations with technology, and rises above the subject and the boundaries that were familiar to us. It seems that the theoretical relationships that controlled Western culture in the 20th century spoke in terms and suppositions suited to the pre-cybernetic period, which means these were suitable for the “traditional” subject who existed in“limited” space and “slow” time, but not suitable for the "hyper-subject" that arises in cyberspace. The 21stcentury technology, and especially cyberspace, necessitates that the human brain, habituated to the slow world, change and observe the fast world that contains everything, and become part of it. A new subject is being shaped. In this futuristic situation when everyone will be able to join cyberspace, a new trend will be created, a gathering from the real world ending in the inward collapse of cyberspace. A new space is forming, a space which will contain all human interactions, one connective system for both physical and mental levels. If cyberspace is the creation of a unique, total super-system, what does that space allow to the subject?
The Subject in Modernity is conscious, autonomous, and universal. The subject knows himself and the world through reason, or rationality. But at the end of 19th century philosophers such as Nietzsche, began to wonder whether the subject’s rationality is really ethical.During the 20th century modernist criticism regarding the rational subject, also developed from the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer and Adorno (1944) argued that the logic that hides behind Enlightenment rationality is the logic of domination and oppression. The Frankfurt School has a great influence on cultural discourse and on social criticism. On their philosophical thinking lean postmodernists and critical theorists.
Postmodernity is the critique of grand narratives, including the rational subject narrative, the awareness that such narratives serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities that are inherent in any social organization or practice. A slow cultural transformation in Western societies came about. Postmodernity tries to show that a "unity", a single, integral existence or concept, is plural. The subject is plural as well. He is not a unity, hierarchically composed, solid, and self-controlled; rather he is multiplicity of forces or elements. Everything is constituted by relations to other things, hence nothing is simple, or totally present, and no analysis of anything can be complete or final. Postmodernist philosophers like Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard, seemed to announce the end of rational inquiry, the illusory nature of unified self, the illegitimacy of Western civilization, and the oppressive nature of all modern institutions. This is the end of the subject (Foucault,1966).
There are two main attitudes of the subject in cyberspace: optimistic or pessimistic. Cyber-optimists (Barlow,Heim, Ess, Negroponte, Kellner), assume the subject transforms into a multiple, more flexible subject, with inventive skills and capabilities. It gives oppositional individuals and groups the possibility of participating in global culture and politics, through gaining access to global communication and media networks. This revolution will change the way we live, think, and interact with one another and with technology. Cyberspace is changing our psychological lives and our evolving ideas about minds, bodies, and machines (Haraway, Turkle, and Plant).
As opposed, cyber-pessimists refer to the subject as being unconsciousness of the ideological interest which manipulates him. Instead of emancipating the subject, actually cyber create a new form of exploitation (Lyotard, Virilio). This leads to a space that is more likely to be chaotic rather than an intersubjective rational space. The dystopians assumed the future would find humanity engulfed by the Internet. Some cyber-pessimists also emphasize the inequality evident in the "digital divide." A global divide is evident between industrialized and developing societies (Castells, Norris).
From the philosophical discourse concerning cyberspace, It seems more proper to examine the subject from criticism toward cyber-optimists and cyber-pessimists. The article examines the image of the subject from a new point of view, as a complex unified system, comprising all the traditional subjects and objects that populate cyberspace. The philosophical idea is that in cyberspace a process is under way, forming a "cyber-subject," a total system, inclusive, centralized, that may reach the status of an autonomous entity. If that should happen, the subject will change his essence and its characteristics. Is cyberspace becoming a subject?
This question emerges from some philosophical ideas; first, the idea of a complex system, created and built from individuals and parts (Kim, 1996). Secondly, the idea that man attempts to free himself from the physical environment – to overcome dependence on raw nature. This requires the colonization of space and time, through agriculture, architecture, civil engineering, systems of communication - from language, to a universal linked world. (Mitcham, Slouka, Mitchell). Another idea is that cyberspace is a network of a collective system (Rheingold, Le'vy). And finally, there is the idea that one system emerges from connections between: subject-object, artificial-natural, time-space, and virtual-real. The world becomes "hyperreality" (Baudrillard, 1976).
Like the traditional subject, cyberspace is a Cyber-subject, a knowledge source and an experience center.Cyberspace is a global center connecting millions of individuals. Cyberspace is an "inter-subjective"communication system, which has the potential to become a center. "Inter-subjective" principal (Habermas, 1984), refers to the individual reason, which is a social product of communication and mutuality. In cyberspace the surfer is not an autonomously acting agent, but rather a single in a community. Only the total cyber-subject can get autonomy. A new center of knowledge and power emerges, with infinite, total, immanent networking. Cyberspace has steadily become a central feature of our daily lives. For many individuals and groups, the existence of cyberspace has become a reality. Cyber- culture transforms leisure hours, community networks, and personal lifestyles. We are controlled by, and depend on a new space which has turned into an essential space.
The cyber-subject like the subject, is also a rational system, which gives networking knowledge. A super-technology in the image of a cyber-subject grows, a unity which imitates the rational subject. In the 17th century, Hobbes predicted the "Leviathan," the artificial subject, a total system, which operates mechanically, with a computing system a hundred years before computer technology and cyberspace. In cyberspace the traditional reasonable subject no longer exists, but the cyber-subject as a communication system merges all connectors. The communicative action has a rational interest to grow. Cyberspace would automatically reorganize itself reflecting the mobile relation of its users. The cyber-subject, like every other system, is an information system which maintains its homeostasis, its continuity and internal order. This is a situation where the traditional subject is without autonomy, but is a part of the system, acting inside it, and influenced by its interrelations.
The cyber-subject is alsoa conscious subject. We are living in a real-virtual culture, in which the consciousness of the modern subject (who will think about himself as "we," as one unity) connected to the consciousness of the postmodern subject (who will define himself through the difference between him and the other), being based on virtual communication, in a real world. This virtuality is our reality. This is what represents the cyber-subject.
Cyber-subject is a universalentity. cyberspace is a worldwide universal network system, and describe the social, cultural and psychological phenomenon created by it. Cyber-optimists or cyber-pessimists talk about cyberspace as a universal system. Optimists conclude that cyberspace allows free universal information and pessimists view it as a universal distraction which becomes a "grand-universal" Capital which turns the subject into an object. The universal enlightenment subject gets a new meaning in a postmodern world. Cyberspace as a hypertext also suggests universalizing and thus a globalizing medium. By making links from text to text or site to site, the user literally maps a cluster of material conceptual connections within this universal archive. Hypertext engenders a universal potential network cyber-subject. Cyberspace functions as a transformative technology specifically by its ability to function on global, universal level carried out by the individual user.
Cyberspace is also a reflexive autonomic system, which seeks inside failures, uses information and knowledge for its own sake; it creates laws, rules, norms, and meaning. Cyberspace is an autonomic cyber-subject of super-knowledge. It is becoming a cyber-autonomic-subject, which "takes away" the will and identity of the traditional subject. The cyber-subject that emerges is becoming an autonomic entity. Shared participation which unified cyberspace indicates an autonomic system. Even the skeptics concerning the digital culture (like Borgmann, 1984), cannot argue against the possibilities that cyberspace allows. This technology leads to an emancipated subject, and release from a hard life.
Concerning the cyber-subject, we should ask new questions with new concepts, about the meaning of emancipation. An example of an increasingly changing attitude regarding emancipation that cyberspace is creating, one can point to the status of hackers. There has been a change in how hackers are viewed, from being“heroes of the computer revolution” (1960s-70s) to criminals and terrorists in the information era, dangerous anti-social individualists. At this moment hackers are beginning to damage the homogeneity of an immanent system, the unity, the pleasure of surfing, the arrangement and organization taking shape in cyberspace. Hackers are turning honest men into criminals, flag-bearers of liberation into anarchists. In the total cyber-subject the “other” is liable to become marginal or even a troublesome problem. In the beginning, the on-line world was thought to be a world in which no one took charge or carried out inspections. It was perceived as a hovering world, mysterious even, with virtual communities like a world with fluid borders, anarchic. However, a more critical look at the last 10 years will show that the cyberspace in general, is at least in part under a certain amount of inspection: people and institutions are in charge of access into cyberspace (see Bill Gates who controls computers by means of his company’s programs and hardware). Key positions in cyberspace include: governments, telephone companies, personal computer companies, program companies, on-line services, Internet services, individuals and companies based on Internet, and of course the growing number of participants. It should be noted that in 2006 Internet surfers were chosen as the People of the Year by“Time” Magazine.
In sum, there will be changes in practices and institutions. Cyber-subject will be a super-power-space, for socialization and the learning process. Through real-time information, it becomes a political-educational center. The cyber-subject will teach how to cope with the natural-artificial hybrid.
This will be the hybrid age, in which we will see selection of the users’ efficiency. The only importance will be the user organization, regardless of identity, gender, appearance, health, and ethnicity. The traditional subject becomes a mutation, a programmed cyborg, and a cyber-subject organ. From a philosophical perspective cyberspace becomes a cyber-subject.
It will create a unity. All the users or the surfers will fill the new space with an interdependent collective unity. It will integrate a new identity.
Cyber will create conciseness, social norms, and affect life style and culture. The existence of the cyber-subject will be the important issue. There will be knowledge transformation linked to efficiency according to the cyber-subject.
There will not be any meaning to a province or to geographical cultural centers. The cyber-subject will unite norms, language, ideological ideas, and symbols in a cyber-culture. This will create a hyper-unity. Therefore cities, countries, and geographical-economical regions, will flourish only if they are connected to the global net. Cooperation will create one united network system, which connects a socio-political-economic traditional systems. There will be no escape from the cyber-subject logic.
ARS’11