Psybernet Resources for Hosts
This is an older page of mine that continues to be useful. Email me additions, please.
Postmodern Virtualities
Postmodern Virtualities
Mark Poster
(This essay appears as Chapter 2 in my book The Second Media Age (Blackwell 1995)
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“In the twentieth century electronic media are supporting an equally profound transformation of cultural identity. Telephone, radio, film, television, the computer and now their integration as “multimedia” reconfigure words, sounds and images so as to cultivate new configurations of individuality. If modern society may be said to foster an individual who is rational, autonomous, centered, and stable (the “reasonable man” of the law, the educated citizen of representative democracy, the calculating “economic man” of capitalism, the grade defined student of public education), then perhaps a postmodern society is emerging which nurtures forms of identity different from, even opposite to those of modernity. And electronic communications technologies significantly enhance these postmodern possibilities. Discussions of these technologies, as w e shall see, tend often to miss precisely this crucial level of analysis, treating them as enhancements for already formed individuals to deploy to their advantage or disadvantage.”
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I offer you professional counselling by email, for a fee. This is genuine human contact between you and me which is confidential and secure. You may use my email counselling service and remain anonymous.
My friend Barry has recently aquired a new .com url! Looking good Barry!
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“…In my early professionals years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”
— Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person
A Rogers Page, with links to books.
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Salon.com Technology | Robots “R” us – Review
“Robo Sapiens: Evolution of a New Species” takes this notion and runs with it. Journalist Faith D’Aluisio and photographer Peter Menzel have assembled an accessible guide to the field of robotics that’s part photo essay and part primer, with a healthy dose of fatalistic futurism. They start out with a bang — the shocking cover image of an eerily fetuslike robot head is possibly the most disturbing photo ever to appear on a coffee-table book — and manage to turn interviews with more than 100 of the geekiest humans around the world into a curious peek at the future that will satisfy both the layperson and the engineer alike.
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Writing Structured CodeBy Al DiMarzio
What has writing HTML to do with the psyche in cyberspace? Much the same things as pencils have to do with writing on paper. I think people who create have a respect and love for their tools. This link is to some help with that by someone who seems to love what they do.
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edit check
Tim Jordan, Cyberpower
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Moulthrop and Kaplan argue against halio’s typographic bent
This page begins with a brief synopsis preceding an excerpt from “Seeing through the Interface: Computers and the Future of Composition,” by Nancy Kaplan and Stuart Moulthrop. The synopsis contains links to themes within the excerpt.
I seem to be surfing a wave here that is going backwards into what might now be seen as classics, though i did not know of this stuff at the time!
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I want to open a metaphor for you. A word. Door. With language I can create an opening; on the other side describe, perhaps, a classroom: the space of the room lit with flickering greens or whatever other colors flow from electric screens, the ambiance the humming fans of computers, the cackling of keys. In a MUD I can do that: create a room, or an object, structure it to my liking with my words. I can do that here as well, use my words to create a scene. The disparities between a word world described here and one erected in a social MUD may not be that great. While a MUD is more directly a text-based reality, the reality of this room, this gathering, can depend on the coming together of our language, talk either constructed here through mutual agreement, or mediating our cognitive selves.
This paper has nice words for this very Psybernettic notion.