Mosco – Myth and Cyberspace
Net Technologies do
not appear in their mythic period.
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But when they become banal, part of the everyday.
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Evaluate myths on what the reveal and what they conceal.
A Myth is:
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A captivating fiction,
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A unfillable promise.
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An untrue or popular take.
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A fictitious person or object.
Technological Sublime
– Overwhelming feeling that a technology can solve social problems.
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Burke – The sublime.
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Arendt – Social spheres and the promise of progress.
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Produces feelings we can only see one way.
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Achieves transcendence through astonishment, awe and terror.
Information
Superhighway as a Myth:
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A lot of hype.
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Promising services people don’t need.
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Builds on myth surrounding earlier technologies.
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Situates itself in larger narratives.
Internet Myth:
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That it will lead to a new sense of community, education and
democratic communication.
Myths:
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Help people de3al with contradictions in social life that can
never be resolved.
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How do we retain our individuality while fully participating in
a collective society.
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The wish to control our circumstances while needing to give up
control for a democratic society.
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Wish to retain day to day routine while breaking out of the
banality of live.
Myths do not resolve
issues:
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But the provide scalability that we can talk about them.
To understand a myth
is to figure out why it exists.
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Why is it important.
Myth inflects human
values with ideology.
Cyberspace makes myth.
Myth is a way of
knowing, and or presenting knowledge.
Myth is enacted in
cyberspace, but cyberspace contributes to the myth making.
Myths are fed by the
sense we are leaving on age for another.
Learing about myth
means learning to tell big stories.
Inoculation:
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Admission of a little evil in a myth to protect it from greater
attack.
The denial and transcendence
of history:
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Becomes powerful with inoculation.
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Encourages people to ignore history.
A current myth is
history isn’t relative.
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We can now choose friends and associates rather than being at
the mercy of where we were born.
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Communication is becoming cheaper w/availability to all.
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Information was scarce, now it is available to everyone.
According to myth –
the information age transcends politics because it makes power avialbe to
everyone.
Myths sustain
themselves when embraced by power.
Bricoleur: Someone who
takes bits and pieces of narratives and fashions tory telling for their agenda.
Myths persist in the
face of powerful evidence that they do not embody a underlying reality.
Computer Metaphors:
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the digital library – instant access to information.
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The information highway.
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Electronic commerce
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Virtual community.
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Digital ecology
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The narrative stream.
These metaphors are
useful, but they do not transcend to myth.
Mosco, V. (2004). Myth and
Cyberspace. In The Digital Sublime:
Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. 17-53.
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