Poster, Mark (2006) “The good, the bad and the virtual” from Poster, Mark, Information please: culture and politics in the age of digital machines pp. 139-160, 274-5, Durham, N.C.; London: Duke University Press.

What struck me from our two week short film festival was the way the cyberworld and the future were dominated by dystopian images.  The robotic/ digital futures were portrayed as colourless, dominated by shades of grey merging into black.  The machine/ robots were not to be trusted.  A threat of machines taking over, and threatening humans was pervasive.  At the beginning of the course I posted a short video on Wallwisher which used a series of clips of old technology (telephone switchboards, television etc.) to illustrate the impact of new technology. I posed the question: Is the impact of new tech just more of the same?  Sian had commented that I would enjoy Poster who would illustrate in how, in at least one area (ethics), it is not the same.  She was right. I found Poster very interesting. In particular, his discussion of ‘the good, the bad, and the virtual’ as not a polarization – an idea he borrows from Leone’s film – the Good, the Band and the Ugly – where introducing ‘the ugly’ upsets the polarization of good and bad – and where in fact, all the characters were ‘bad’. 

In a sense, Poster starts by saying, in a way, that it is ‘more of the same’; that every new medium has been greeted with a warning of undermining the ethical basis of society.  But the way each new medium impacts on society and ethical issues is different.  Poster takes a Nietzschean view that ethics is an historical construct (p. 145).  The following is what Poster identifies as unique to the internet as a medium and digital culture:

  • Up to the introduction of the WWW in 1993, it was dominated by the culture of computer scientists and the ethos of the university community
    • Ethic of sharing information
    • Designed as an open, harmonious community with no gates
    • Users were mostly civil and felt it was a utopian communication device
      • Some new forms of strife appeared: flaming, spamming but community felt newbies could be coached into netiquette
  • Post 1993 with the creation of Web Browsers the number of users increased dramatically
    • No longer possible to coach newbies
    • Broadcast media presented the internet to the society at large especially those with no experience of the internet
      • Important not to ignore intermedia rivalry and the threat of the new medium to the old in the way the internet was/is portrayed
      • Key ethical concerns:
        • Ease of access
        • Global availability of what is posted
      • Acts regarded as acceptable in certain contexts become moral issues owing to their media proximity p. 14
        • Publication in newspapers or television reporting make these acts known to non-Net users who make judgements
  • Issues on anonymity of identity
    • “…interface of computer and ease of communicating through a network renders identity in question in every case” p. 151
    • The virtual ethic may demand a different more demanding obligation:
      • “…act so that you will continue to maintain the identities you have constructed in relation with others”.
  • Overload and censorship
    • Paradox that everyone sees information as key to success (p. 154) yet everyone complains of information overload
      •  
        • Baudrillard – inverse relation between quantity of information available and quality of meaning in everyday life
    • Any crank can create a web-sit
      • May need new level of moral restraint, given ease of disturbing material can be make available world-wide p. 155
  • Internet researchers’ key concern: How can identity in cyberspace conform in “real life” pp. 155-6
    • Question of the nature of the good has become the nature of the ethical subject p. 156
    • Donath wants to impose standards of the ‘real world’ rather than explore ethic from the point of view of the new speech situation
    • Mediated identities are by no means stable, that “identity deception” is not an adequate conceptual vehicle to understand ethics in the mode of information p. 157

Poster’s solution is to take a Nietzschean perspective that explores the good and the bad in the culture of the virtual p. 158  He claims that digital media shuffles us around into new agglomerations that make no sense in relation to proximate practices and norms pp. 159-160.  Digital culture is still new, we are finding our way.  Popular conceptualizations are still very black and white, good vs bad.  Perhaps we should not see the media as the problem but how we use it.  We are still exploring ways of using it.  And there are different constituencies – government, commercial, activists, educationalists, criminals etc – struggling to shape the media to their needs.  Chaos to the souls of those online indeed.

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