Friday, December 24, 2010
HATİCE UTKAN
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We have effectively had the Internet since 1990 and the world has changed because of it.
On Saturday, a 20th anniversary of the Internet will be celebrated while many of the changes it brought will be remembered.
But the pervasiveness of the Internet also gives one cause for pause.
An article on “thesocietypages.org” written Dec. 6 by blog writer Nathan Jurgenson suggests that the flow of information is bringing “liquidity” to society and that the WikiLeaks incident is also a result of liquidity.
According to Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist, the conceptualized modern society is increasingly “liquid.” Information, objects, people and even places can more easily flow around time and space. Old “solid” structures are melting away in the face of faster and more nimble “fluids.”
The main idea of the blog writer is that as information becomes increasingly liquid, it leaks.
“WikiLeaks is a prime example of this. Note that the logo is literally a liquid world. While the leaking of classified documents is not new [i.e. the Pentagon Papers], the magnitude of what is being released is unprecedented. The leaked war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq proved to be shocking. The most current leaks surround U.S. diplomacy,” he said.
It is obvious that none of this would have happened without the great liquefiers: digitality and the Internet.
All this began with the information flow on the Internet. The hacker culture of the 1990s triggered the flow of “secret” information. The main belief behind the scenes was that information should be free.
This is what we are witnessing with the WikiLeaks incident.
Even if we do not see incidents like WikiLeaks everyday, it is a fact that everyone is sharing information through the Internet. Everyone one has a blog, and people write whatever they want to express themselves. That’s why some people call the Internet a form of information pollution. Despite this, it is no longer possible to live without the Internet.
That’s why the Internet’s birthday reminds one of bad things instead of good things; there are many swindlers trying to find their way and earn money on online, there is plenty of false information, there are the consequences of the new politics of liquidity and there is, of course, no privacy…
On Saturday, a 20th anniversary of the Internet will be celebrated while many of the changes it brought will be remembered.
But the pervasiveness of the Internet also gives one cause for pause.
An article on “thesocietypages.org” written Dec. 6 by blog writer Nathan Jurgenson suggests that the flow of information is bringing “liquidity” to society and that the WikiLeaks incident is also a result of liquidity.
According to Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist, the conceptualized modern society is increasingly “liquid.” Information, objects, people and even places can more easily flow around time and space. Old “solid” structures are melting away in the face of faster and more nimble “fluids.”
The main idea of the blog writer is that as information becomes increasingly liquid, it leaks.
“WikiLeaks is a prime example of this. Note that the logo is literally a liquid world. While the leaking of classified documents is not new [i.e. the Pentagon Papers], the magnitude of what is being released is unprecedented. The leaked war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq proved to be shocking. The most current leaks surround U.S. diplomacy,” he said.
It is obvious that none of this would have happened without the great liquefiers: digitality and the Internet.
All this began with the information flow on the Internet. The hacker culture of the 1990s triggered the flow of “secret” information. The main belief behind the scenes was that information should be free.
This is what we are witnessing with the WikiLeaks incident.
Even if we do not see incidents like WikiLeaks everyday, it is a fact that everyone is sharing information through the Internet. Everyone one has a blog, and people write whatever they want to express themselves. That’s why some people call the Internet a form of information pollution. Despite this, it is no longer possible to live without the Internet.
That’s why the Internet’s birthday reminds one of bad things instead of good things; there are many swindlers trying to find their way and earn money on online, there is plenty of false information, there are the consequences of the new politics of liquidity and there is, of course, no privacy…