Cyberspace : What Technology Can Not Do For Us

To begin with, globalization has furthered accessibility(SA1) to other groups and causes in many way. In Ariela Garvett essay “Tweets and Transitions: How the Arab Spring Reaffirms the Internet’s Democratizing Potential” Garvett argues that “as reflected in the recent political upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East, the internet is a potentially egalitarian and boundary-less structure...(174)

In Esther Dyson’s “Cyberspace: If You Don’t Love It, Leave It”, the existence of the internet is seen as potentially dangerous to today’s society. Dyson insists that the internet was once a sanctuary for tech savvy individuals such as gamers and professionals like engineers. The author focuses on the negative websites and communities that are often found offensive to the majority. She thinks the World Wide Web harbors a lot of power. This power can be accessed and conquered easily by most of the population. According to Dyson, responsibility is the key to changing the future (295). Her argument is convincing but slightly unrealistic. The internet seems to be growing into a whole other alternate universe. Society’s rapidly growing technology industry will only be harder to regulate. Most people will do what they want, when they want especially when it comes to the internet.

There are few places on this Earth, if any, where the possibilities are truly endless. However, if you detach yourself from the physical world and emerge into the “online” world, you find that this just might actually be accurate in this realm. The World Wide Web has had so much to offer to us since the early 1990s, but with this comes controversy. Unleashed onto a plane of seemingly immeasurable freedom of anonymity, was the world ready for such responsibility? Since those early days when new emerging technology changed our lives immensely, have we at all become a better place, or have we bitten off more than we can chew, and doomed our human relations forever? Exploring these concepts are three in-depth articles, including: “Growing Up Tethered” by Sherry Turkle, “The Loneliness of the Interconnected” by Charles Seife, and “Cybersexism” by Laurie Penny. Although it is thought that the Internet brings the world together, it actually does not help us politically, culturally, and economically like one would believe, as it makes us unable to be independent, isolates us from different points of view, and encourages real-world violence against women and other minority groups.

Imagine a society in which its citizens have forfeited all personal liberties for government protection and stability; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, explores a civilization in which this hypothetical has become reality. The inevitable trade-off of citizens’ freedoms for government protection traditionally follows periods of war and terror. The voluntary degradation of the citizens’ rights begins with small, benign steps to full, totalitarian control. Major methods for government control and censorship are political, religious, economic, and moral avenues. Huxley’s Brave New World provides a prophetic glimpse of government censorship and control through technology; the citizens of the World State mimic those of the real world by trading

In her call to action, The People’s Platform; Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, Astra Taylor addresses underlying social and economic forces of the internet and differential perspectives towards it. Taylor discusses the new internet in which content is king and, people are now the product, this is called Web 2.0. She discusses this topic from a couple viewpoints; those who would believe that the internet is truly the new people’s platform and that it is the golden age of sharing and collaboration, called the Techno-optimists. The counterparts of this interpretation of the internet are what she calls the Techno-Skeptics, who have a similar mindset in that of Nicholas Carr, an author about technology in the modern age, with the

At the moment, the whole world is being swept by globalization at a speed that is both immense and inescapable. The present scenario can be associated with that water glass which is considered as half-empty by the pessimist and is viewed as half-full by an optimist. The Internet has empowered cultural globalization tremendously. It has initiated an environment that is globally borderless. If the impact of internet on cultural globalization is judged, one would crystal-clearly observe that it has made nations realize their potentials and strength. Its usage has created new and additional wealth worldwide by eliminating cultural differences ("Creating Wealth in a" 2006, p. NA).

In the late 20th century, technology began advancing so quickly that entire world economies underwent extraordinary transformations in very little time. It used to be only a handful of powerful people and corporations interacting in global trade and commerce, but technology has made it so “countries like India are now able to compete for global knowledge,” giving leaders and companies the ability to work with more nations than ever before (Friedman 7). The internet has given men and women the power to connect, communicate and provide information to people across the planet in an instant. It has given people the opportunity to seek knowledge, educate themselves and single-handily play a role in the world economy. This is called

Globalization and the society we know today were created by the technological improvement we have seen since the beginning of the 18th century. Globalization and the new technology is a very relevant topic to discuss, because it is important to see the positive and negative aspects of it. We are today closer than ever before you can chat or talk with a person from a different continent, which makes closer. Technology is unfortunately too easy to abuse a concrete example of that is World War 2. Would we have had a better world without it, and was it the technology that killed the Afro-American people or was it the people who killed people. The essay “Time and Distance Overcome” was written by Eula Biss and published

With easily accessible hi-speed internet connections that grant communication between people thousands of miles away in milliseconds, it is hard to imagine that this essential commodity, the net, is a recently developed technology – that not too long ago, people were not able to easily communicate with loved ones across the globe. As a result, the internet is often credited as the spark that ignites the beginnings of globalization – a modern phenomenon arising from the integration of multiple cultures. However, in Vermeer’s Hat, published in 2007 and written by Timothy Brook, Brook offers a different opinion. He believes the rise of globalization began from an era, centuries before the online web and argues that the roots of humanity’s

The internet is a powerful tool for activists, but can also be utilized by the other side by promoting propaganda and mobilizing their own supporters. Networking sites have revolutionized the way people activists approach revolutions. Moreover, the internet has connected people from across the world and has caused people in the states (like myself) to become invested in a civil war occurring in a part of the world I never knew existed. The internet has empowered and enabled people by connecting like-minded people, providing access to information, broadcasting events, and creating real connections between people. Alone, the internet is not enough to bring down an oppressive, authoritarian state; but when coupled with the power and will of the people, it can create real

There will always be a new way to make money for the country and ways to protect it. Globalization can make the country wealthy, but everyone does not benefit from it. As Klein wrote her paper, she realizes that, “All these fences are connected: the real ones, made of steel and razor wire, are needed to enforce virtual ones, the ones that put resources and wealth out of the hands of so many.” (198). The phrase, “to enforce virtual ones”, means there are invisible barriers that block one from using all the benefits of globalization in respect with the real fences.

The world is not a large and strange place anymore. The world is a place that is interconnected and intertwined. The world has become from a place that each country and their peoples are separate and isolated to a place that each country and their peoples are part of a global network. Thanks to globalization this is occurring. Globalization is the ‘international integration” or ‘de-bordering’ – “a number of highly disparate observations whose regular common denominator is the determination of a profound transformation of the traditional nation-state” (Von Bogdandy 2). Globalization is connecting different people from different cultures and backgrounds together. More and more corporations are entering new foreign markets to sell their

Various countries, states, and governments still continue to exert increasing vigilance and control on the public, and citizens in various ways through the media, monitoring people’s opinions, and guiding and dictating how people live and interact. Even today, various things such as governments, large corporations and businesses play with people’s minds and also intrude into many aspects of their lives through electronic means. For example, look at the many advertisements today,

It may seem blasé, or more probably naive, in this post dot-com-bust world to still hold out that “information is power” and, moreover, that the Internet is fundamentally different than any previous information technology. Perhaps I am guilty of such sentimentalities, but allow me at least for the sake of argument to hold on to a small hope that the Internet really is something new. It would then be true that information and indeed the Internet—the phenomenon as opposed to the Internet as an enabling tool towards other rights—should be a human right in and of itself.

The world is more connected than ever, whether that’s through a stream of cross border capital flows or this new wave of digital disruption. In the past globalization was confined to trade between advanced economies or resource heavy countries. This gave consumers in the U.S. and Europe the access to items made by people in developing countries for a third of the cost. Over time trade barrier were