Bumble: Poster

Technology, technology, technology… all it does is feed into our ever fearful minds in our post-modern world. As we have learned in class, our country is obsessed with fear, everything can hurt us and kill us. Maybe I am giving into this hegemonic ideology of fear, but the internet and expanding world of technology scares me! Mark Poster’s, article Postmodern Virtualities, discusses the social and political implications of having a boom in the internet age. The article claims that the internet has, “gained enormously in popularity…” (Poster 535). Suddenly we are able to encode any possible thing in the world, and the encoded filed have never moved so quickly! It has always scared me how vast the Internet is.

One of the points that Poster makes is about the political implications of having such a vast array of information flooding cyber space.
Endless information from every organization, person, political group, scholarly journals pervades this public space. Just the concept of the internet is spooky in that there is this public space shared by all different cultures across time and space. Once upon a time when the internet was a space only for those who are talented in computers, the information was more readily regulated and it was easier to sift through the valuable and invaluable information. Now it is an open playing field. It can also be influential in the political arena, activist groups and terrorist groups are often posting their ideas, hoping that people will be influenced by them.


Along the lines of Zizek and the age of terrorism, the one thing that keeps pounding in my mind and the postmodern thinker is how the terrorists are using the internet and the super speedy connections to create conspiracy theories.

Well after looking into some research about this, if you look hard enough you can find all of the ways that the internet can be used for terrorism. One of the most interesting things that I found is that each picture in google images is encoded with a series of numbers. It is possible to change one of the letters or several letters in the images without dramatically changing the picture itself. Terrorists are able to communicate with each other right out in the open by slightly shifting these codes. As the technology gets faster and faster it becomes all the more easy to communicate out in cyber space.


As technology increases, does human identity decrease? Already our minds are not capable to do as much as the technological developments. We have delegated certain mental tasks to technology, for example we have delegated our memory to our cell phones. No one remembers cell phone numbers anymore, why should our minds (computers) be working if another faster computer can do it for us!? These communication and virtual realities will impact our world far more than we will ever know!