000ooo000ooo 3/4

“Is it likely to promote the proliferation of little narratives or does it invigorate a developing authoritarian technocracy?” (544)

I think this is an interesting question to pose regarding the future of the internet. So far we have seen it go both ways. In one respect, things like "napster" have allowed bands that would not otherwise have ever been heard to have their popularity proliferated across the country. On the other hand, if you looked up the top 10 or 15 websites on the internet, I bet a majority of them would be owned by major media conglomerates. In this respect, totalizing metanarratives are still dominating information output and people are still receiving their information from a few major outputs. Even if a lot of these sites have "message boards" the boards are usually just places to further talk about and invest your time in their ideas and products. If you go to any major newspaper's website they will probably have a place for people to comment on the articles. However, if you read the comments it becomes clear that most people just blow smoke about the article and don't bother to read what anybody else has said. Thus, it is not a series of individual experiences relating to each other and learning from each other about the article, it is people putting their thoughts on the article on the internet for absolutely no one to read or care about.
What I foresee is a struggle occurring between people and corporations for control over the internet. The problem is, people won't see this happening, corporations will. If individuals wanted to they could easily utilize sites like youtube to get their ideas heard from many people and people could demand more websites that allowed them to express themselves. However, corporations will try to control this and keep their totalizing metanarratives as the dominant ideology. This is happening already as corporations add their own videos to youtube and open up their own websites.