Social Aspects of Informatics

By Robin Beaumont

Session 3 -

Being online: The Internet

Contents

2. Introduction *

3. Marshall McLuhan an early mystic *

4. Utopia or Dystopia *

5. Teleworking and Virtual Consultations *

6. VR/Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk and Cyborgs *

6.1 Cyborgs *

7. Reading, writing, understanding and post-modernism *

8. Summary *

9. References *

1 Knowledge and Skills Assumptions

This session discusses some social aspects of the Internet and in doing so makes several assumptions concerning your skills and knowledge:

That you have worked through, and understood, the Social Issues One handout and specifically you are familiar with Zuboffs panopticon concept.

• You have used the Internet.
• You understand what a Hyperlink and Search Engine are. (These were introduced in the first Web practical session.)
• You are aware of the history of the Internet and how it works. (If not read the notes on the History of the Internet in the IT section.)

This session does not teach you how to use the Internet.

2 Introduction

Although this session provides a large amount of material concerning the Internet from a social perspective it represents only a tip of the iceberg. Because of this the majority of references have been chosen for their suitability as references themselves.

This handout heavily relies upon Kling 1996 which contains a set of key articles along with excellent clear introductions by himself.

The concept of a networked community, its structure and social consequences etc. has been explored by many different types of writers. The session begins by looking at one of the oldest, Marshall McLuhan and then moves on to more recent commentators. The Internet is considered from a number of perspectives such as Videoconferencing, E-commerce, Virtual office (teleworking), E-mail, Virtual reality, Cyborg concept and the act of reading and writing.

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3 Marshall McLuhan an early mystic

One of the early and most enigmatic writers was Marshall McLuhan, (1911 -1980). He entered the University of Manitoba intending to become an engineer, but matriculated in 1934 with an M.A. in English literature. His two most well known books are The Gutenberg Galaxy" (1962) and "Understanding Media" (1964). More accessible is the Playboy interview found at http://www.law.pitt.edu/hibbitts/mcl.htm which is one of several internet sites dedicated to information about him.

The following, also taken from the Internet, gives a resume of his life and works:

"McLuhan's contribution to the field of communication study was widely acclaimed by popular standards while simultaneously being dismissed by those in academic circles. According to Rogers, "During his lifetime McLuhan did more than any other individual to interest the general public in communication study" (p. 489).

Gary Wolf, writing in Wired [17] magazine, painted a portrait of McLuhan as "a critic and an academic rebel", prone to incredible pronouncements and humorous quips.

McLuhan was a master of aphorisms. . . . The title of his best-selling book The Medium is the Massage is no exception. Maybe he was making a statement about the way that the media massage or pummel us, or perhaps he was making a pun on the new "mass-age." In any case the underlying notion is that the message is greatly impacted by the delivery system. Some would understand this position to be the ultimate in media determinism. If the content is obliterated by the channel, "what" we say is of little importance-only "how" we chose to deliver it. McLuhan's belief in technological determinism is obvious by his phrase, "we shape our tools and they in turn shape us" (quoted in Griffin, 1991, p. 294).

McLuhan believe that the print revolution begun by Gutenberg was the forerunner of the industrial revolution.One unforeseen consequence of print was the fragmentation of society. McLuhan argued that readers would now read in private, and so be alienated from others. "Printing, a ditto device, confirmed and extended the new visual stress. It created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and in isolation from others" (McLuhan, 1967, p. 50). Interestingly, McLuhan saw electronic media as a return to collective ways of perceiving the world. His "global village" theory posited the ability of electronic media to unify and retribalize the human race. What McLuhan did not live to see, but perhaps foresaw, was the merging of text and electronic mass media in this new media called the Internet.

McLuhan is also well known for his division of media into hot and cool categories. Hot media are low in audience participation due to their high resolution or definition. Cool media are high in audience participation due to their low definition (the receiver must fill in the missing information). One can make an argument that the Web results by combining two cool media into a new synthesized, multimediated experience. If print is hot and linear, and electronic broadcast media are cool and interactive, hypermedia on the Web is "freezing" and 3-D.

McLuhan's philosophy "was influenced by the work of the Catholic philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who believed that the use of electricity extends the central nervous system" (Wolf, 1996, p. 125). According to Wolf, "McLuhan's mysticism sometimes led him to hope, as had Teilhard, that electronic civilization would prove a spiritual leap forward and put humankind in closer contact with God" (p. 125). Wolf went on to write that McLuhan later reversed himself, calling the electronic universe, "an unholy impostor,...'a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ'" (p. 125)."

[from: http://www.regent.edu/acad/schcom/rojc/mdic/mcluhan.html also contains reference details]

The end of the above quote clearly demonstrates his Catholicism, being a devout Roman Catholic convert. One of his most talked about theories was that of the [electronic] global village, of which he talked about in the playboy interview (McLuhan 1969):

"The tribe, you see, is not conformist just because it's inclusive; after all, there is far more diversity and less conformity within a family group than there is within an urban conglomerate housing thousands of families. It's in the village where eccentricity lingers, in the big city where uniformity and impersonality are the milieu. The global-village conditions being forged by the electric technology stimulate more discontinuity and diversity and division than the old mechanical, standardized society; in fact, the global village makes maximum disagreement and creative dialog inevitable. Uniformity and tranquillity are not hallmarks of the global village; far more likely are conflict and discord as well as love and harmony--the customary life mode of any tribal people. . . . An electrically imploded tribal society discards the linear forward-motion of "progress." We can see in our own time how, as we begin to react in depth to the challenges of the global village, we all become reactionaries.

In our software world of instant electric communications movement, politics is shifting from the old patterns of political representation by electoral delegation to a new form of spontaneous and instantaneous communal involvement in all areas of decision making. In a tribal all-at-once culture, the idea of the "public" as a differentiated agglomerate of fragmented individuals, all dissimilar but all capable of acting in basically the same way, like interchangeable mechanical cogs in a production line, is supplanted by a mass society in which personal diversity is encouraged while at the same time everybody reacts and interacts simultaneously to every stimulus. The election as we know it today will be meaningless in such a society.

. . .Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness. In a Christian sense, this is merely a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man. . . .Mysticism is just tomorrow's science dreamed today."

McLuhan was certainly a inspired speaker and writer, his style exhibits many post-modernist attributes, although he is considered by critiques to firmly belong to the technological determinism school (see Landow 1992 and Andrews 1995).

McLuhan felt that the world was heading towards a 'tribalistic' culture, in the form of his Global village. Can you see this or do you think is was just a product of the 60's?

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4 Utopia or Dystopia

While Mchulan's Global village is both a heaven and hell as he changed his mind over time Zuboffs panopticon vision is clearly dystopic. In contrast other, more numerous, commentators present a Utopian ideal.

Kling 1996 discusses, for more than forty pages (p40 - 86), examples of 'dreams of technological utopianism' citing Weiland (1993), Stewart (1993), and Kelly (1994) as examples of such people. In turn he compares their presentation of utopia as comparable with that of earlier writers such as Alvin Toffler (1989) and George Gilder. Toffler's best selling "The Third Wave" describes the second wave as the shift from agricultural to industrial societies using "succinct, breathless prose to suggest major social changes" (Kling 1996 p48). Kling feels that such a narrative style with its "breathless enthusiasm can be contagious .[and]. stymies critical thought" Kling also criticises these writers for being selective in their examples and skilful in side-stepping tough questions. Examples from the various writers are given below.

"While the techno-types are working to perfect a brand-new field of applied science, sociologists worry about the human element: What about the loss of human contact? What about the employer's enhanced capability to monitor a person's work? Such concerns may well slow the acceptance of desktop videoconferencing. But like the fax and the PC before it, we will embrace this technology in the near future and ask a familiar question: How did we do business without it?

A picture, even a live-action video, may never substitute for a site inspection. But imagine using these capabilities to conduct a meeting from your desk. Wouldn't you think if the alternative were an arduous and costly trip by air?" [Weiland 1993, quoted in Kling 1996 p44]

"Someday soon, cyberspace - the vast, intangible territory where computers meet and exchange information - will be populated with electronic communities and businesses. In your home, a protean box will hook you into a wealth of goods and services. It will receive and send mail, let you make a phone or video call or send a fax or watch a movie or buy shoes or diagnose a rash or pay bills or get cash (a new digital kind) or write [to] your mother. That will be just the living-room manifestation of commerce and society, the greatest invention since the invention of the automobile.

During the next few years, electronic markets will grow and begin operating over cheap, accessible public networks……Whole industries will be destroyed and new ones born; productivity will leap and competitive advantage shift in the direction of small business." [Stewart 1993 , quoted in Kling 1996 p44]

The two above examples present only partial utopias in that they enthuse about a particular technology, Videoconferencing for Weiland and E-commerce for Stewart. In contrast Kelly's vision is all engulfing. His utopia is a "Neo-Biological Civilisation" based upon a human "bee hive" structure- the titles of two of his books. It could be said that Kevin Kelly is to the Internet what Bill Gates is to the PC. In August 1999 Bill Gates was the richest man on earth owning Microsoft e.g. MS Dos, NT and Windows operating systems.

Kelly edits the Wired magazine, a trend setting monthly which modestly bills itself as 'the authentic voice of the digital generation'. He is also a founding member of the California-based Global Business Network (GBN). GBN's clients include the US president, the Pentagon's joint chiefs of staff, AT&T etc. (Brown 1997 p31).

"… pervasively networked computers will be the main shaper of humans in the future. It's not just individual books we are leaving behind . . . global opinion polling in real-time 24 hours a day, seven days a week, ubiquitous telephones, asynchronous e-mail [i.e. chat lines], 500 TV channels, video-on-demand: all these add up to the matrix for a glorious network culture, a remarkable hivelike being:

The tiny bees in my hive are more or less unaware of their colony. By definition their collective hive mind must transcend their small bee minds. As we wire ourselves into a hivish network, many things will emerge that we, as mere neurones in the network, don't expect, don't understand, can't control, or don't even perceive." [Kelly 1994, quoted in Brown 1997 p235]

Reading the above one is filled simultaneously with both excitement and dread. You get the impression that Kelly himself is only presenting half the story, an incomplete analysis/scenario for a specific customer. Brown 1997 takes this analysis further.

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Kelly's bee hive vision has been criticised by a number of people.

Do you think it is valid? How do you think it compares to McLuhan's Global village concept? Which do you think is the most appropriate vision for 2050 and why?

It would be unfair to leave the realm of the technological utopians without mentioning Bill Gates who is firmly in the Kelly mould:

"Your wallet PC will be able to keep audio, time, location, and eventually even video records of everything that happens to you. You will be able to record every word you say and every word said to you, as well as body temperature, blood pressure . . . and a variety of other data about you and your surroundings. It will be able to track your interactions with the [information] highway - all the commands you issue, the messages you send and the people you call or call you. The diary will be the ultimate . . . . autobiography". (Gates, Myhrvold & Rinearson quoted in Brown 1997 p219)

For a interesting, but possibly overly critical biography of Microsoft and Bill Gates see Brown 1997.

While the above examples have touched on the organisational aspects of the 'Information revolution' it has not considered them directly Scott Morton (1991), partly reproduced in Kling (1996 p148 - 160) provides a typical example of how 'IT can transform your organisation' scenario.

Those that see the future as being less than a utopia include Brown (1997), Zuboff (1988), and probably Kling (1996). Zuboffs panopticon concept as discussed in social issues 1 is clearly a dystopia. Browns (1997) view is interesting in that he analyses the development of the Internet through the eyes of a Native American Indian, although much of his work is derivative, (he's a journalist), his synthesis and interpretation of the information results in a worrying new vision.

Brown (1997 p17, p146)describes what some call a 'Cultural overall' developing:

". . . a widening imbalance of wealth and opportunity, fragmentation of civil society often presented as a split between unwired . . .communities and increasing powerful globalists. . .These beneficiaries are reaching for powers that are comparable to those previously enjoyed by the landed aristocrats, the industrial robber barons, and the professional mercenaries who have been always willing to serve both, for a price. Instead of entering a new world we will find ourselves in a new dark age - one that is fractured by rival camps that live in a rumbling and ominous atmosphere of mutual incomprehension, visceral suspicion, and smouldering low-level unrest." (p18 - 19)

It is impossible to say if such visions of social bifurcation are valid or not. However Tassel (1994) describes a large scale Public Electronic Network (PEN) set up in Santa Monica in California. Between 1989 and 1994 more than 5000 of the 85,000 had signed onto the system including an estimated 100 homeless people. One dialogue between housed and homeless citizens resulted in the creation of several programs to act the homeless (p547).

With the rapid uptake of CCTV and 'Webcams'I will let Zuboff have the last word:

"Information systems that translate, record, and display human behaviour can provide the computer age version of universal transparency with a degree of illumination that would have exceeded Bentham's [the prison architect who designed the panopticon] most outlandish fantasies. Such systems can become information panopticons that, freed from the constraints of space and time, do not depend upon the physical arrangements of buildings or the laborious record keeping of industrial administration. They do not require the mutual presence of objects of observation. They do not even require the presence of an observer. Information systems can automatically and continuously record almost anything that designers want to capture, regardless of the specific intentions brought to the design process or the motives that guide data interpretation and utilisation. The counterpart of the central tower is a video screen."

Can you see the 'cultural overall' concept being of any relevance the NHS.

5 Teleworking and Virtual Consultations

This section does not cover Telemedicine in detail - see the section on health information systems. Before discussing teleworking it is necessary to be aware of the structure of a typical organisation.

The structure of a typical organisation is seen to be changing into what is termed a 'flexible firm'. For details and references see McLoughlin & Clark 1995. The diagram below shows the main features. Core workers are those whose skills are most essential to the firm. They enjoy primary labour status. Peripheral workers conduct less critical activities and are hired on employment contracts. External workers are those whose activities are 'distanced' as they are no longer directly employed by the firm. For a critique of this model see Pollert (1987).

One of the most important areas where the capabilities of the Internet has changed a significant percentage of peoples lives is Teleworking. This is where employees work from home or on the move using a virtual office. The possibilities of the electronic office ('virtual office') are succinctly summed up in the title of a 1992 article by Langdon Winner - "Electronic office: Playpen or Prison". Toffler (1989) described the future home as being a 'electronic cottage' and perceived that most people would eventually work from it. Kraut (1987) is a good reference article.

The Clinton administration has produced a report 'Promoting telecommuting (IITF 1994). These include major improvements in air quality from reduced travel; increased organisational productivity when people can be more alert during working hours; faster commercial transit times because of fewer cars; and improvements in quality of worklife. (Kling p288).

Forester (1989) came to the conclusion that full time home working was a romantic ideal. He found workers complaining of social isolation, unavailability for meetings, difficulty in supervision and were less visible to their peers for informal assessment for promotion. These findings were backed up by Olson's 1989 study that showed reduced job satisfaction, reduced organisational commitment and higher role conflict. Kling (1996) drawing of his own and others findings (p289) thinks that

"It seems that the desire to maintain control underlies many mangers' fears of having their employees work full time at home. It is much easier for managers to be sure that their subordinates are putting in a fair days work in an office from nine to five (some times called 'face work') than to develop and monitor subtle contracts about the amount of work ('deliverables') to be produced each week or month."

In a more positive frame Kraut (1978) distilled the following observed benefits from his own, and others research. However it must be noted that even he had reservations, voiced in the above article, about the large scale uptake of Teleworking:

Benefits to Employers:

• Availability - Larger pool of scarce resources and increased productivity. Cheaper more docile labour, typically paying piece-rate wages to temporary workers who receive no fringe benefits
• Productivity - This is questionable. [See source reference]
• Overhead - Reduction in overhead costs.

Benefits to Employees:

• Commuting time - reduced
• Incidental costs - Clothes, restaurant.
• Social - Child care, possibilities for handicapped, elderly or otherwise housebound to work.

Within the Health Sector the idea of the 'virtual consultation' is rapidly gaining hold. In the UK the development of NHS Direct in 1998 meant that people in most of the UK could phone up a health care professional 24 hrs a day. The Internet offers similar capabilities with expert web sites for most diseases concluding self diagnosis, e-mail posting area, discussion group listings and advice leaflets etc.

If you were a clinician working from home for one of the 'virtual consultation' organisations mentioned above what do you think would be the advantages and disadvantages to you? Are there any ways of minimising the disadvantages?

One of the essential ingredients of the electronic office is e-mail and this has been studied from a number of perspectives. Finholt & Sproull (1990) found that e-mail can give groups more ability to develop their own culture. Sproull & Kiesler (1991) found that e-mail reduced the barriers to communication between different levels of hierarchy in an organisation democratising it. It enabled people who were peripheral in the organisations to become more visible. Looking at distribution lists they discovered that they helped people make connections and heighten the sense of social solidarity.

Kiesler, Siegal & Mcguire (1984) conducted controlled problem-solving experiments that compared computer-based communication with face-to-face discussion. They found that the groups that used the computer communication took longer to reach consensus, participated more equally, showed more willingness to arrive at conclusions that differed from there initial proposals, and displayed more 'uninhibited verbal behaviour' (colloquially known as 'flaming')

The possible problem of 'Flaming' when working with groups was find also by Kezsbom 1992 and Zuboff (1988). Zuboff reports the experiences of a large drug company where managers claimed that their electronic communications were being treated as policy statements even when they wanted to make an informal observation or ad hoc decisions. This year, 1999, the problem was resurfaced dramatically with various witnesses producing e-mail in court cases, notably the one concerning Microsoft.

Markus 1994 Carried out an in-depth analysis of an organisation where upper managers required their staff to use e-mail, where it was also the major method of communication at the time of her study. She found that staff used e-mail to speed communication and bring people together, but they also reported significant negative effects, such as feeling that the organisation was a less personal place to work. Electronic mail was used to avoid face-to-face confrontation or unpleasant situations; and often in-office visitors were ignored while employees tended to the demands of e-mail. (Kling 1994 p431).

Herring (no date - online) investigated gender issues in the use of e-mail in a fascinating way. See Kling (1996 p429) for details. She found that it tended to reinforce inequalities already present rather than 'democratise' the organisation as several other researchers believed and found in their research.

Within the health sector e-mail has been used in hospitals in the form of requests for various services, from a Phlebotomist to a porter and it is considered an essential part of any Hospital Information System (HIS). Further details are given in the relevant handout.

Within the community, a small group of GP's belong to a discussion group of one type or another, one of the most popular in the UK is GP-UK (GP-UK@mailbase.ac.uk). Some small scale, unpublished research has been carried out on this list (rob.wilson@ncl.ac.uk).

Within your working environment how do you think e-mail might affect you and your patients.

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6 VR/Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk and Cyborgs

The above title is adapted from a book edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (1995). Possibly before discussing these concepts it is prudent to temper them with an opposing view:

"The cybernetic future being promoted by many contemporary policymakers and pundits is a . . .misleading college. It contains bits of truth which have been subtly decontextualised to yield a plausible yet insubstantial dream. . . .its downsides have been consistently unanticipated, misunderstood or simply ignored." [Brown 1997 p44]

We will now turn to the propagators of these concepts. As with all concepts as they evolve they become more clearly defined. Cyberspace is now divided up into three types (Featherstone & Burrows 1995 p7):

• Barlovian cyberspace is the simplest form, it is when you are using the Internet or even talking to someone on the phone.
• The second type of cyberspace is considered to be Virtual Reality (VR). The term virtual reality (VR) was first coined by Jaron Lanier head of VPL Research Inc. in California. It is a system which provides a realistic sense of being immersed in an environment. VR is a computer generated visual, audible and tactile multi-media experience. Using stereo headphones, head-mounted stereo television goggles ('eyephones') able to simulate three-dimensions, wired gauntlets (datagloves') and computerised clothing ('datasuits'), VR aims to surround the human body with an artificial sensorium of sight, sound and touch. Using such devices it is now possible to even have 'Virtual sex'.
• The third and most complex type of cyberpace, which at present does not exist, is Gibsonian cyberspace. This is named after the writer William Gibson who wrote the cult book Neuromancer (Gibson 1984). In 1999 the film called 'The Matrix' used many of the ideas from the book. Gibsonian cyberspace is discussed in more detail below.

Fictional Gibsonian cyberspace is a global computer network of information which Gibson calls 'The Matrix' which operators can access ('jack-in') through headsets ('trodes') via a computer terminal ('cyberspace deck'). Once in the matrix operators can 'fly' to any part of the vast three dimensional system of data coded into various colourful iconic architectural forms laid out beneath them like a vast metropolis. . . The players can interact with each other by adopting a cyberbody. . A range of other 'intelligent' entities (other cyberbodies) can also 'exist' in Gibsonian cyberspace which do not have human referent 'outside' the system. Some are previously downloaded personality constructs of humans, while others are autonomous post-human artificial intelligence's which live in cyperspace. [Featherstone & Burrows 1995 p6 drawing also from other authors referenced by them]

Certain writers are worried that people will become addicted to these enticing virtual environments and have compared them to addictions (Brown 1997).

Cyberpunk refers to the body of fiction, and academic work, built around the work of William Gibson and other writers, who have constructed worlds of cyberspaces (Featherstone & Burrows 1995 p3). The academic material uses the fictional ideas as frameworks for analysis of the present.

6.1 Cyborgs

This term was first used in the 60s' (Clynes and Kline, 1960; Halacy 1965;Haraway 1991; Gray 1995), when it was coined to describe a special union of human organism and machine system. It was become a key ingredient in many popular science fiction books and films and has been taken up by the feminists in a number of ways (Haraway 1991). Wilson 1995 provides a lucid description of the various degrees of cyborgism and argues that even wearing glasses could be considered to be a very basic form. His argument is complex; discussing the level of dependency of the prosthesis, the psychological effect, including yearning and disgust, it has upon the individual, the interface between the prosthesis and 'person' and cultural ramifications.

One aspect of the Cyborg concept that is particularly pertinent to that of the Internet is the idea of a group consciousness. While most commentators comment upon the 'shared experience' of those using the Internet fewer consider the results of the level or type of dependency that people might develop or be pushed into developing:

"Intel's Andy Grove . . . 'the economics of our industry only work if we have large numbers of users demanding our services'. . . . As Bill Gates cheerfully admits, the economic success of a cybernetic economy depends crucially upon 'total' participation' . . . persuasiveness is part of the design and those who choose to disconnect will be automatically marginalised." (Brown 1997 p143)

Consider the above in relationship to the NHS, particularly with regard to developing web based learning material i.e. 'virtual classrooms'.

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7 Reading, writing, understanding and post-modernism

This section presents the relevant 'findings' in a qualitative form in contrast to those in most other places in this course. Several of the findings have been validated in the more traditional quantitative literature (Landow 1992 p75-76; Nielsen 1989) It is suggested that if you are interested in this area you carry out a literature search focusing on quantitative psychology and information / computing science journals.

Sven Birkerts 1994 book The Gutenberg Elegies presents a unique eulogy for the traditional book form. It is a deliberate narrative not a scientific work, no index or references. Along the way he describes various memories or reading and writing and how it affected him including reading Robert Musil - The man without qualities (p67) which clearly influenced his style. He attempts to demonstrate, in his style and form as well as content, the uniqueness of reading a traditional text. At one point he describes a interesting interaction with a group of English students he was teaching:

"In the fall of 1992 a taught a course called 'The American Short Story' to undergraduates at a local college. A assembled a set of readings that I thought would appeal to the tastes of the average undergraduate. . . . I had expected that my students would enjoy 'The legend of Sleepy Hollow' be amused by its caricatures and ghost-story element. Nothing of the kind. Without exception they found the story over-long, verbose, a chore. I wrote down their reactions off to the fact that it was the first assignment and that most students would not have hit their reading stride yet. When we got to Hawthorne and Poe I had the illusion that things were going a bit better.

But then came Henry Jame's 'Brooksmith' and I was completely derailed. I began the class, as I always do, by soliciting casual responses of the 'I liked it' and 'I hated it' sort. My students could barely muster the energy for the thumbs down or up. It was as though some pneumatic pump had sucked out the last dregs of their spirits. 'Bad day, huh?' I ventured. Persistant questioning revealed that it was the reading that had undone them. But why? What was the problem? I had to get to the bottom of their stupefaction before this relatively - I thought - available tale.

I asked: Was the difficulty with the language, the style of writing? Nods all around. Well, let's be more specific. Was it vocabulary, sentence length, syntax? 'Yeah, sort of,' said one student, 'but it was more just the whole thing.' Hmmmmm. Well then, I said, we should consider this. . . . The whole thing. What whole thing? My tone must have reflected my agitation, my impatience with their imprecision. But then, after endless going around, it stood revealed: These students were entirely defeated by James's prose - the medium of it - as well as by the assumptions that underlie it. It was not the vocabulary, for they could make out most of the words; and not altogether the syntax, although here they admitted to discomfort, occasional abandoned sentences. What they really could not abide was what the vocabulary, the syntax, the ironic indirection, and so forth, were communicating. They didn't get it, and their not getting it angered them, and they expressed their anger by drawing around themselves a cowl of ill-tempered apathy. Students whom I knew to be quick and resourceful in other situations suddenly retreated into glum illiteracy. 'I dunno' said the spokesman, 'the whole thing just bugged me - I couldn't get into it.'

. . .It is not a simple case of students versus Henry James. . . . In Henry James are distilled many of the elements I would discuss. He is inward and suble, a master of ironies and indirections; his work manifests a care for the range of moral distinctions. And one cannot 'get' into him without paying heed to the least twist and turn of the language. . . .

. . .What had emerged was this: that they were not, with a few exceptions, readers - never had been; that they had always occupied themselves with music, TV, and videos; that they had difficulty slowing down enough to concentrate on prose of any density; that they had problems with what they thought of as archaic diction, with allusions, with vocabulary that seemed 'pretentious'; that they were especially uncomfortable with indirect or anterior passages, indeed with any deviations from straight plot; and that they were put off by ironic tone because it flaunted superiority and made them feel that they were missing something. The list is partial."

[Birkerts 1994 p17 - 18]

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I have quoted at length from Birkerts because I feel it is necessary to show his style. He deliberately avoids lists, tables and diagrams to emphasise the point he is trying to make. A one point he presents the gains and losses of electronic postmodernity as a narrative (p27) reproduced below in table form. Although this handout does not contain anything explicitly about post-modernism many of the ideas discussed in it could be considered to be characteristics of post-modernism. It is important that you have a basic awareness of the concept. Fox (1993) provides a unusually lucid, and short (p6-21) account.

The lure of HTML over traditional text with its additional features such as; hyperlinks, embedded graphics, sound, movies and user interactivity, along with the technological requirement to keep the documents ('pages' / files) small to reduce downloading time, demands a new style of writing. These electronic documents are business like, with bullet points and executive summaries. There is little room for long narrative discourses, as something more interesting is only a click away when boredom strikes.

HTML allows the reader to become the author in some respects (Brown 1987). For the reader can by selecting various hyperlinks in a order they control reconfigure the text to read in a way unimagined by the original author.

The Internet allows many people to contribute to a single document. There are numerous examples and techniques of doing this, from the BBC discussion lists for Eastenders etc. to poems. This particular type of group writing has been called 'Cyborg writing' (Winkelmann 1995).

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8 Summary

This session has covered a massive topic area beginning with Marshall McLuhan's mystical prognostications and then moving on to more recent commentators. The Internet was considered from a number of perspectives such as Videoconferencing, E-commerce, Virtual office (teleworking), E-mail, Virtual reality and the Cyborg concept. The concepts of Tribalism, The Global village, The bee hive community and Overlay culture were introduced. The unique book by Birkerts was used as a exemplar of what we might be loosing by giving up the traditional book in the electronic age.

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9 References

Andrew Jim 1995 Marshall McLuhan reconsidered. Available online at: http://www.vispo.com/writings/essays/mcluhana.htm

Brown David 1997 Cybertrends; Chaos, power and accountability in the information age Penguin books

Brown P J 1987 Turning ideas into products. In Hypertext '87 papers p.33-40 Chapel Hill NC

Clynes M E, Kline N S 1960 Cyborgs and space. Astronautics September 26 - 7, 74 - 6.

Feathersone, Mike, Burrows Roger, 1995 Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk: Cultures of technological embodiment. Sage Publications London

Forester T 1989 The myth of the electronic cottage in Tom Forester (ed.) Computers in the human context: Information technology, productivity and people. MIT press. Cambridge

Gates B, Myhrvold N, Rinearson P 1995 The way ahead. Viking / Penguin

Gray C et al (eds.) 1995 The Cyborg Handbook. Routledge

Halacy D S 1965 Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman New York. Harper & Row

Haraway D 1991 A Cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Centrury pp.149-81 in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The reinvention of nature. (1983?) New York Routledge

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