Social developments from digital environments

10. Control over & Participation in Information is Power

Technology has long been used as a form of control. If users don't fully understand the new environment, technology, formalism, bureaucracy will prevail.

• Control
  • Who controls the products of a certain technology?
  • What social project is incorporated in that technology?
  • CMC does not "favor" democratic political development
    • although it probably does encourage "democratic" participation in the networked marketplaces for information, products, and services via increased access to participation
      
  • CMC does not function uniformly across environments.
  • CMC does not break down established organizational/social barriers. For example, status differences still work their ways.
  • CMC can allow more unknown observation.Asymmetry in message/sender/receiver: sending now involves far lower costs, so happens more often.
• Liquescence
  • The state in which power resides in cyberspace.
  • Authoritarian power thrives on absence.
  • Global economy lacks local outposts where one can find and critique the overly powerful establishment. Architectural monuments of power are hollow/empty: the elite operate in cyberspace.
• New Media might Challenge/Resistexisting Power Elite
  • Artistic creation can establish resistive public forums (esp. recombinant content).
  • Though networks are still centralized, the means of production is de-centralized.
  • Plagiarism might be back: the nature of "author" was probably more political than real anyway.
  • Technology can be a means of active production rather than passive consumption.
  • Digital hypertext might break linearity and destabilize the inevitability of textual authority (so users can reach their own conclusions).

The Electronic Disturbance (1994)The Critical Art Ensemble. Brooklyn: Autonomedia

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