Saturday, January 23, 2010
Democracy?
I guess what bothered me most about "Technology and Literacy in the Twenty–First Century" is the equation I kept seeing between democracy and corporate capitalism. Just recently, the last nail in the coffin of democracy in the United States was driven home when corporations were given the same rights as individuals –– the right to “freedom of speech.” Anyone who’s been “paying attention” knows that this means unbridled ownership of the airwaves, and that now, corporations will be able to pump as much money as they please from their “war chests” into advertisements to see that their candidates are elected. Do we really want to extend this type of “privilege, influence, and power” into cyberspace? I question who owns the internet now. Everywhere I go, no matter how little I surf, I run into someone trying to sell me something. The corporate world is entrenched in cyberspace, and it appears, if I can trust their track–record, they will be clamping down on it with an iron fist in the future. After all, now that they’ve got the networks of the American empire completely in their pockets, what’s left?
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2 comments:
How can we avoid extending privilege, power, and the like into cyberspace? I don't think we can ever actually avoid extending our cultural norms (as screwed up as they may be) into any of the technology we develop. Maybe once our little problem of access is resolved we can actually begin to subvert some of the forces/institutions that allow such unfair privileges to some and not others.
Selfe talks about the importance of paying attention and I wonder if her book and our study of it will make us question the validity of sites more and decide to stay away from those with that contain one piece of information surrounded by commercials. I wonder if there is a group working on promoting websites that are less commercial.
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