dmariel, Poster

When reading Mark Posters essay on Postmodern Virtualities, I came to the conclusion that technology is probably the number one thing in our society that has caused our culture to grow in this ‘anti-modern’ direction. When Poster claims that new communications systems produce new identities he describes the modern individual as rational and autonomous. On the other hand, he describes the postmodern individual as exactly the opposite. The first thing that came to my mind was the internet. The world wide web has definitely taken away the idea of human autonomy. We are never alone in the world with the internet. Everyone has become connected in this “Global Village”. Many believe that the global village has the possibility for world wide peace, yet others are more pessimistic believing that it can outline differences between cultures and undermine state sovereignty.
In my international media class last semester, I did a report on the internet undermining the territoriality of the nation-state. The web has the capability to undermine state and government sovereignty of its people. Pertaining to this topic, I discussed how in our world today, there is a huge increase in the amount of information circulating the globe and the speed at which ideas can spread.  Due to this, national boundaries have become more open and easily penetrated than ever before.  The internet poses a dictators dilemma, where it makes it almost impossible for governments to control information circulating in their country.  But the problem is that internet connectivity is necessary for economic power and growth.  The debate over internet control has focused on China, an authoritarian government with the second largest number of internet users in the world.  Although they have the second largest number of internet users in the world, the government has multiple strategies for restricting the circulation of information that may pose a threat to them. In relation to this, Poster states that “so desperate are national governments, confronted by the disorder of the internet, that schemes to monitor all messages are afoot...nation states are at a loss when faced with a global communication network”.
I believe that every new technology can go bad in time. I am not saying that the Internet is not a huge part of our culture, but people are beginning to learn how to use it to their advantages, at times these uses may also be the disadvantage of the law.