Technology Developments Essay, Research Paper
Scientific and technological developments have real and direct effects on every
person’s life. Some effects are desirable; others are not. Some of the desirable
effects may have undesirable side effects. In essence, there seems to be a
trade-off principle working in which gains are accompanied by losses.
Example:
As our society continues to increase its demands on energy consumption and
consumer goods, we are likely to attain a higher standard of living while
allowing further deterioration of the environment to occur.
Today, we are often told, we live not simply in an age of information, but in an
age of excessive information. The amount and availability of information seem to
be increasing at an exponential rate. We feel that our entire world is moving,
changing, mutating, at an accelerated pace. Our interactions with this world of
information seem plagued by an increasing sense that we cannot keep up, can’t
take it all in, that we are being overwhelmed by information, deluged by data:
the sense of an information overload.
One of the first attempts to represent this kind of information overload appears
in Ted Mooney’s 1981 novel, Easy Travel to Other Planets. There, Mooney
describes A Case of Information Sickness in the following terms:
If information was once considered the solid ground, the factual basis, on which
to make decisions and take actions, it no longer seems to be so. Indeed,
information no longer seems to be solid at all. Not only does it not provide a
grounding, a foundation, from which to see, know, or act, it comes to be seen as
obscuring our vision, our attempts at knowledge, our ability to control the
forces of the world. Information, it might be argued, has become precisely what
all that is solid melts into. Information flows; it spreads; it dissolves all
boundaries, all attempts to contain it. Thus, it is hardly surprising that we
increasingly feel ourselves enveloped by a rising tide of information, immersed
within it, feeling at once exhilarated and overwhelmed. Whether we figure it as
gaseous or liquid–an atmosphere or an ocean, smog or muck, a cloud of charged
plasma or an electromagnetic wave–we seem, almost invariably, to represent
information as fluid.
Colonizing the Internet
It is perhaps in reaction to this sense of being overwhelmed, lost in the vast
data of the Internet, that many Web-related corporations have relied on
metaphors of navigation and mapping as the figures par excellence of
interaction. Thus, interaction becomes precisely a matter of charting a course
through the abundant fluidity of the Net. It is no accident that browsing the
Web is figured as becoming a Navigator or Explorer–names that cannot help but
remind us of the European mariners of the fifteenth century and their voyages of
so-called discovery. Like their predecessors, today’s Web-explorers must also
navigate the unknown and at times tempestuous seas of the Internet. Like these
earlier explorers, too, they often seek to chart and to claim this new world, to
make themselves the masters of various sites within it, exploiting its resources
and enriching themselves in the process. In short, they seek not simply to
explore the exciting–perhaps even exotic–new world of cyberspace, but also to
br ing it under control, to tame its wild currents and flows–that is, to
colonize it.
Consider, for example, how efforts to improve the Web have been described: the
world of the Web, it is said, must be made more easily navigable, its
information–its secrets–must be made more accessible; to this end, various
sites must be established: beachheads, outposts, trade routes and portals, and
in some cases even cities; efforts must be made to contain the chaotic nature of
the Internet, to tame its wildness, to make its sometimes exotic appeal more
marketable, more decent, safer, more civilized, not to mention commercially
viable. In short, its energies must be harnessed, its movements channeled, its
resources exploited. The metaphors involved here are extremely similar to those
used by colonialism; they presume a need to survey and subdue, to catalogue and
contain, and, ultimately, to turn to profitable use, those areas that are seen
as wild, chaotic, and other. Commercializing the Internet, then, is precisely a
matter of trying to know and control, to colonize and master, that whi ch is
seen as culturally other.
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