Part 3 Technology, Culture and Society

The traditions and discourses mentioned above put forward conceptual frames and sets of themes and topics that are important for our understanding of the contemporary discourse on the internet. However, these frames, themes and topics are still too general to account for the specific characteristics of the utopian discourse on the internet. For example, they do not explain the prevalence of the theme that the internet empowers the individual in his search for success, identity, self-expression and authenticity. Similarly, they do not account for the absence of visions that envision the internet as supportting national unity and solidarity.

In what follows I elucidate the discourse on the internet from a recent socio-historical perspective. In particular, and in addition to accounting for the prevalence of visions focusing on the individual and not on national unity and solidarity, I analyze the key features of this discourse: “enlivening family life” in the Internet Age, the dominance of the trope of virtual community, the expressions of the dream of global understanding, world peace and harmony manifested more forcefully than ever before, the dominance of the trope of entrepreneurialism played out in the global market, the ascendancy of the idea of a global economic order of friction-free capitalism and the strange coalition of spokesmen – libertarians, Republicans, residual counter-culturalists and others working in concert to promote the internet.

In my discussion I do not suggest a strong causal link between all such factors as the collapse of the Soviet Union or the weakening of the nation state and the discourse on the internet, as it is hard to prove such a connection. Instead, I argue that we have to examine the ways the discourse embodies contemporary ideals, ideas and perceptions. In other words, I suggest that we need to abandon debates over causal concepts and turn to phenomenological concepts to explain the ways such diverse factors as 1980s entrepreneurialism, globalization, and technical advances that made it possible to conduct a many-to-many discussion have shaped and co-determined the discourse on the internet.

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1. The Internet as Empowering the Individual

A large proportion of advertisements for internet devices and services presented the internet highway as the proper location for the individual self to seek (and find) authenticity, personal success, liberty, freedom, autonomy, instinctual spontaneity and adventures in the realms of both leisure and work, blurred as never before; many internet visions of a better way of being and living involved empowering the individual by disembodied communication. Finally, internet gurus perceived the new medium as fostering personal empowerment, self-reliance, personal liberation and freedom.

Part of the explanation for the recurrence of this theme lies in the immersive and interactive qualities of cyberspace, the new “semantic space” made possible by the internet.²⁰ Whereas the TV or cinema are also immersive media in that the audience often feels “in” the scene on the screen, cyberspace strengthens this feeling by allowing users not only to passively watch the content but to interact with it by choosing where to go next. Thus, users are free to surf, browse and navigate on their own, “hitching a free ride on [the] information superhighway”, as one of the advertisements for America Online suggested. These immersive and interactive qualities of cyberspace made many American advocates of the internet consider cyberspace a safe haven, open to the individual to explore. This free exploration in turn was regarded as empowering the user and strengthening his individuality.

Another part of the explanation for the recurring appearance of the theme lies in the fact that on the internet each user can easily publish any type of content, unlike publishing in traditional media such as newspapers, radio and TV. Publication in these older media is monitored and regulated by editors and producers. The ability to publish easily on the internet was considered a means of enabling and empowering the expressive individual. In his much circulated book, The Virtual Community, Howard Rheingold confessed how “[l]ike others who fell into the WELL, I soon discovered that I was audience, performer, and scriptwriter, along with my companions in an ongoing improvisation. A full-scale subculture was growing on the other side of my telephone jack, and they invited me to help create something new” (Rheingold, 2000, xv-xvi).

The final distinguishing quality of the internet that explains the recurrent theme of the empowered individual is the internet’s alleged ability to support disembodied communication. This disembodied communication was perceived as free from many worldly constraints such as gender, race or disability, and hence could empower the individual as an individual. The Washington Post cited deaf person Jamie Clark about his surfing experience in cyberspace as saying “There is nothing to blockade me. I feel free, it feels great” (Sullivan, 1993, D1 in: Cogan, 2002, 229).

In my discussion so far, I have stressed that advocates of the internet perceived the distinguishing qualities of the medium as empowering the individual. In other words, I implicitly suggested that the inherent qualities of the medium do not in themselves explain much. The connection that many proponents of the internet made between these qualities and empowering the individual means that an ethos that privileges the individual has prominence in the culture at large. This ethos is the romantic ethos of postmodernity.

While the individualist ethos in American society is relatively steady, as Alexis de Tocqueville showed, following Daniel Bell, I suggest that in the past, “rugged individualism” was channeled toward the pragmatism of economic affairs and material achievements. In postmodernity, this individualistic ethos became central in the culture and was channeled toward self-realization, self-exploration and self-gratification. Thus, the contemporary romantic ethos sanctifies the untrammeled self, experimental individualism, individual authenticity, rebellion and hedonism (Bell, 1976).

Historically, the romantic ethos of postmodernity has its origins in the Romantic Movement in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. As Colin Campbell argues, the reaction of the Romantics against the Newtonian world view was expressed in a philosophy of ‘dynamic organicism’ with the metaphor of growth substituted for that of the machine, and the values of change, diversity, individuality and imagination, for those of uniformitarianism, universalism and rationalism. Historical Romanticism tended towards the new, towards individualism, revolt, escape, and fantasy (Campbell, 1987, 181). Later, the ethos of the Romantic Movement was adopted by Modernist artists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their revolt was directed toward the ‘project of modernity,’ that is, modernity as a social and political project including science, reason, progress (as exemplified in Positivism), and industrialism (Calinescu, 1987, 41-42).

Overall, in the past, as this brief historical overview shows, the torch of romantic ethos was carried by minority elites such as poets, avant-garde artists and bohemians. Gradually, as Daniel Bell argues, when the legitimation of social behavior passed from religion to modernist culture, and more forcefully, after World War II, first in the counterculture and later in culture at large, this romantic ethos gained prominence on a mass scale, and was promoted by various agents of popular culture, including the cinema, pop music, and advertisements (Bell, 1976). The discourse on the internet represents a new version of this romantic ethos that Richard Coyne aptly describes as “technoromanticism” (Coyne, 1999).

In particular, Coyne discusses one feature of the romantic narrative, that of unity and multiplicity. He argues that it pervades information technology (=IT) discourse including its four variants that cluster around the four great artifices of the digital age: virtual communities, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and artificial life.

The unity theme in the IT discourse presents in various forms. For example, in narratives of virtual communities, people who have never met face-to-face and are located in different places around the world, are drawn together to participate in the one global tribe through posts, emails and chats, in ways that obscure the divisiveness of issues of appearance and status. Another example is the language of virtual reality that involves the unitary conception of immersion and engagement (Coyne, 1999, 2-3).

The multiplicity theme, particularly as understood pejoratively as fragmentation or disintegration presents also in narratives of virtual communities who are posited as being the response to the fragmentation of current social forms (Coyne, 1999, 4).

What paradoxically defines the contemporary version of romanticism as expressed in the IT discourse is that it seeks the redemption of the individual alongside or through technology. Whereas Modernist culture and its associated romantic ethos revolted against science and technology, technoromanticism embraces technology, in particular the internet and computers as the means to self-empowerment, self-realization, self-exploration, liberation and freedom.

The strong romantic and individualistic ethos of contemporary society can be seen as compatible with the new perception of family life in the Internet Age.

2. Enlivening Family Life

During the 1990s advocates of the internet put forward a different notion of “enlivening family life” as compared to the meaning suggested by advocates of TV during the 1950s. Whereas in the 1990s promoters of the internet expected the new medium to sustain and enliven family life by allowing geographically separated family members to keep in touch via emails, in the 1950s promoters of TV expected it to bring the family members back to the “family circle” as a close-knit audience around the set. The difference can be explained by the dissimilar social circumstances of the two eras, and the different features of the two media. While during the 1950s one of the central preoccupations of the burgeoning middle class was domesticity and the reconstruction of family life after the disruptions of the previous two decades (and in this respect TV was perceived as the panacea for the broken family), no such circumstances existed in the 1990s. In fact, as recent statistics show, the traditional family is not necessarily the dominant/preferred way of life for many Americans.²¹

In addition, as regards the special features of the two media, browsing the internet and conducting other internet activities like managing an internet account or reading online news is done on an individual basis. In this sense, it is hard to imagine the personal computer and the internet in their stage of development during the 1990s as bringing family members back to the family circle as did the TV in the 1950s.²² On the other hand, the internet is an efficient medium to exchange messages between geographically distant family members and thus its advocates expected it to enliven and strengthen family connections, assuming that more communication fosters friendship, intimacy and familiarity.

Intimacy and friendship were indeed among the core elements that contributed to the existence of virtual communities.

In the previous part I referred to the dominance of the trope of virtual community in the discourse on the internet during the 1990s. Put forward by Howard Rheingold it originally meant a virtual venue, enabling emotional support, friendship, a sense of belonging and cooperation. Later, when absorbed into mainstream culture, it took on the new meaning of any online group that shares interests and goals.

The dominance of the trope of “virtual community” can first be explained by the fact that the internet and specifically, the bulletin board systems and later electronic forums, technically enabled many-to-many discussions. Regular participants in these dynamic discussions perceived them as giving rise to a “community”, in the strong sense of a virtual venue, enabling emotional support, friendship, a sense of belonging and cooperation. In contrast, such a medium as the telephone allowed only one-to-one conversation. As a consequence, its advocates saw it as enabling sociability within the traditional community and on a personal basis; the TV allowed neighbors and friends to gather ‘round to watch together, and hence was thought to sustain the traditional community.

The prevalence of a “virtual community” also resonates with the re-emergence of communitarianism. During the late 1980s and 1990s, social critics such as Robert Bellah, Robert Putnam and Amitai Etzioni (Bellah, 1985; Putnam, 2000 ; Etzioni, 1997) called for more community, more civil society and more social cohesion. As David Brooks argues, at that time, writers by and large “attempt to reestablish the rituals and institutional structures that were all weakened in the great rush of the educated-class emancipation. All critics are interested in moving in the same direction, back to the bonds of local communities and small scale authority and away from systems that allow individuals choice to trump all other values.” (Brooks, 2000, 238-239). But these social critics were not alone. The need for “more community” was widely felt. As Brooks further argues, across American society during the 1990s there were many efforts to restore social cohesion and to reassert authority (Brooks, 2000, 261).

In contrast to these efforts, it would be difficult to cite other successful, large-scale attempts to restore or enhance the cohesion of the nation.

4. The Absence of Visions of the Internet as Supporting National Unity and Solidarity

One of the explanations for the absence of visions of the internet supporting national unity and solidarity is that due to intensive electronic communication, made possible from everywhere on the globe in the form of discussions in virtual communities, emails, chat rooms, and mailing lists, proponents of the internet consider geographical boundaries of the nation state and physical location to be of minor or no importance. As John Perry Barlow wrote “I live at Barlow@eff.org. That is where I live. That is my home. If you want to find me, that’s the only place you’re liable to be able to do it, unless you happen to be looking at me at that moment – physically” (Barlow, 1998).

The absence of visions concerning national solidarity and unity is consistent with the broader trend that has emphasized the growing importance of separate ethnic identities and multiculturalism since the 1980s. David Goldberg argues that multiculturalism and commitments to cultural diversity emerged out of the conflictual history of resistance, accommodation, integration, and transformation of the 1960s and are to be understood in relation to the twentieth-century dominance of monoculturalism; i.e., an ethnoracial Eurovision that cast the United States as a hegemonic intellectual ideology and institutional practice. This ethnoracial Eurovision perceives European cultural production as the best that has been said and thought in the world (Goldberg, 1994, 3-4). Broadly defined, “multiculturalism is critical of and resistant to the necessarily reductive imperatives of monocultural assimilation” and embraces the variety of cultures inter- and intranationally (Goldberg, 1994, 7). This trend further undermined the sense of national solidarity.

This lack of utopian notions of national solidarity and unity is also enmeshed with the broader process of globalization, the decline of the nation state, and the dismantling of national borders. In the course of the “accelerated globalization”²³ of the last 50 years, the boundaries of the nation state have become more permeable than ever before to the economic activity of transnational corporations, an immigrant workforce and global culture. According to Jürgen Habermas, globalization weakens the forces of national integration in that it blurs the uniqueness of each national culture by nurturing a cross-national culture and by empowering the individual to easily move across borders in her professional activities (Habermas, 2000).

In this cultural climate that favors ethnic identity and cross-national or global culture and where communication knows no geographical borders, the nation state appears anachronistic. This would account for the absence of visions of the internet supporting national unity and solidarity.

In contrast to this absence of internet visions supporting national unity and solidarity there were many voices expressing a dream of global understanding, world peace and global harmony.

While not dismissing earlier expressions of the dreams of global understanding and world peace, I suggest that the current manifestations are stronger than ever before because technical features of the internet are perceived as making “global communication” a true reality. In 1858, the trans-Atlantic cable, for example, allowed potentially for global communication. However, it operated for only a few short weeks and accessing it was beyond the economic means of many, making “global communication” concretely impossible. The internet on the other hand is relatively easy and cheap to use and hence its promoters suggested, more strongly than before, that it would foster global harmony and peace.

In a world of intensive global communication, proponents of the internet also expected entrepreneurialism to be played out on a global scale.

6. Entrepreneurialism Played Out in the Global Market

As never before, during the 1990s advocates of the internet felt the new technology would create unparalleled opportunities for the right, often small, entrepreneur and for the right start-up company to operate (and succeed) in the global market.

One plausible explanation why this trope emerged can be linked to the merger of the 1980s enterprising ethos with what promoters of the internet saw as an electronically connected global market made possible by the new technology. The new enterprising ethos of the 1990s, as David Brooks describes it, created a rigorous “system of restraint”. Its devotees “transformed work into a spiritual and intellectual vocation, so they approach their labor with the fervor of artists and missionaries” (Brooks, 2000, 136). Adherents of this ethos perceived the new global market opened up by the internet as a natural arena for their economic activity.

Not unrelated to this trope of entrepreneurialism on the global market is the ideal of friction-free capitalism.

Vincent Mosco suggests that the prevalence of this idea among advocates of the internet cohered with the general feeling of the “triumph of capitalism” that many in the West felt with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and China’s move to embrace a capitalistic regime. One of the manifestations of this enthusiasm was the extremely popular article and book by Francis Fukuyama (1989 and 1992 respectively), The End of History. In the article and book, Fukuyama endorsed the global free market, technological developments and the triumph of empirical science. Also, and more importantly, he claimed that contemporary liberal democracy as we know it in the West marks “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the final form of human government and, as such, constituted the end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992, 2 in Mosco, 2005, 57). Fukuyama explained this by the fact that liberal democracy and its capitalist order are freed from the fundamental contradictions that led to the collapse of other forms of governance.

The end of history was marked for many of the advocates of the internet not only by the triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy but the very arrival of the internet itself. Its promise of general betterment in all areas of life was strongly related to the belief in the end of social and political conflicts on both the local and global scale.

8. Coalition of Spokesmen

A mixed group of cultural entrepreneurs – authors of popular guides to the Internet Age, advertisers, and less anonymously, residual counterculturalists like John Perry Barlow and Howard Rheingold, Republicans such as George Gilder and libertarians like Esther Dyson or Louis Rossetto – worked in concert to promote the internet. I suggest that the formation of this strange coalition of spokespeople can be explained by the existence of a shared strong American ethos that centers on technology (in particular computing and the internet) as an agent of personal empowerment, liberation and social change. Such a strong ethos masked the relatively minor political differences among its advocates.. Specifically, Fred Turner argues that the group of residual counterculturalists belonging to what he terms “the Whole Earth network” “developed a utopian vision that was in many ways quite congenial to the insurgent Republicans of the 1990s.” Their turn away from “agonistic politics and toward technology, consciousness, and entrepreneurship as the principles of a new society” was compatible with the ideology of Republicans like Newt Gingrich and George Gilder. They all shared affection for new technologies and businesses and rejected traditional form of governance (Turner, 2006, 8).

In broader terms, the ideological compatibility between such people as Barlow, Rheingold, Dyson and Gilder; namely, the common ethos that they all shared, must be set against the backdrop of the hybrid culture of Silicon Valley, which mixes antiestablishment rebelliousness with Republican laissez-faire. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron define this hybrid culture as the “Californian Ideology”. It is “a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age”, combining “technological determinism and libertarian individualism”. The authors argue that “this new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the high-tech industries of Silicon Valley.” As such it “combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies.” Further, according to the authors, following the victory of the Republican Party in the 1994 congressional elections, the right-wing version of the Californian Ideology that favored laissez-faire capitalism, deregulation, and the “free market” was on the rise (Barbrook & Cameron, 2001, 364-370).

Still more broadly, the combination of 1960s radicalism with 1980s entrepreneurialism and new businesses during the 1990s became the trademark of the American business world as a whole. As David Brooks argues, paradoxically “the one realm of American life where the language of the 1960s radicalism remains strong is the business world” (Brooks, 2000, 110-112). Thus, the ethos of the 1990s combined the countercultural sixties and the achieving eighties, preaching high-tech as an agent of personal liberation and social change.

To sum up, in this article I reviewed two contrasting positions as regards the relations (or lack thereof) between the utopian discourse on the internet and earlier discursive traditions about technology: the historical continuity position and the contextualist stance. I argued for the relevancy of both for fully comprehending the utopian discourse on the internet. Following this, I historicize the discourse by comparing it to earlier utopian discourses about technology and contextualize it by showing how it was co-determined and co-shaped by diverse contemporary factors.