Interesting how prescient the final comment would come to be some 20 years later. A pretty decent summation of the modern critique of social media's 'like' mechanics and their lack of ability to create change:
"The Net as ideal treadmill for self-styled identities will create no revolutionary situations, nor bring the world to an end. Cybernetic emptiness need not be filled, nor will it ever be full (of desire, abhorrence or unrest). Until telematic energy finally disappears into the flatland of silence in the face of blinking commands."
Until/Unless digital opinion mechanics (likes, etc) are given the weight of real world consequences, they will continue to be empty gestures. The only way to move past this era of "like this post to help stop a dictator" is to implement Internet voting or something similar.
I'm not necessarily advocating for internet voting, just saying until some legitimate public outcome is driven by internet-enabled decision-making, all current social media/internet group-decisions will be empty of meaning.
The one line version is: the internet creates isolation (by removing our need to leave the home, even for work) and therefore loneliness. It's anti-computers (called home terminals in the article) because it disturbs the home as a refuge from work--a place for leisure (in front of a TV-- not the work-like home terminals).
Keep in mind, this is when most people were still not connected (or even had a computer), there were maybe 20,000 websites worldwide.
So this is a pro-status-quo position... arguing against the change that was beginning to occur from computers becoming widely available.
I think the point is that technology is pulling us apart, not bringing us closer, and that's actually not a bad thing? I'm honestly unsure if there's a more profound point being made, and it definitely comes off as the Postmodern Essay Generator trained on a different bag of words.
I think there are some interesting points in here but I am having a lot of trouble with the language. A lot of the time I cannot be certain what a given sentence is actually saying.
I'm continually confused by how the word "psychic" is used, for instance. Unfortunately, writing of this sort makes me skeptical of the value of the article, as it signals an odd mental model I can't properly connect to.
I.e.:
> Telework is not an institution, but a constitution, a mental frame in which the new work effort can move. Psychic, to begin with: what used to be called immobility is now the point of departure for delivering labour performance.
Eh? Is this just a weird way of saying "work at distance"? So telework is telework?
> An axiom of self-realisation has been slapped onto telework in passing: you're only someone if you're in business. No activity, no identity. Pepped up, in shape and evaluated for performance, the individualised mass must be brought into a state of readiness for digital piecework.
This might be a criticism of a everyone-must-have-a-job-to-have-identity mentality, but I cannot be sure, and I'm not sure how it makes sense, since that mentality is definitely present right now in the US, but telework is not all that common still. But I might be misinterpreting that sentence.
> A feeling of urgency must be created, the feeling that unless we all do something about it, everything will end posthaste in decadence, crime and entropy. There is delight that the masses will once again have something to do and can once again be kept on a leash. At home we are experiencing a science-fiction invasion: the spaceship is ensconcing itself in the living room and the feeling of being on a virtual trip through space imposes itself.
I would say this is just plain nonsense. I don't think this sense of urgency is needed by anyone or ever was and I do not believe the article provides evidence for it. A lot of things are said, but nothing is proven.
I think isolation is caused by reduction of the value of religion and no corresponding social replacement for structures such as churches (see first/second/third place concepts). This in turn makes alternative means, which are currently digital, more popular. But not just them, I think Meetups perform a similar function. But, hey, saying things is easy, proving them is another matter.
What I generally find missing in articles like this is some... balance, I guess? It always smells of age-old criticisms of technology combined with criticisms of people who do not socialize as much as some in society believe is proper, and since that sect has always existed throughout history, it's hard to separate its inherent bias against what I would call "nerds" from good points.
The articles sound like they were written by people to whom the internet is of absolutely no use, so they do not really understand it, and can only see its shallow applications, and shallow applications (of which I consider Facebook a type) generally do not look great. So the entire field gets vilified and used as a scapegoat for society's problems, in this case as an evil force that weakens labor rights. Strangely enough, fields generally get worse as more people join them, not because the fields themselves are bad, but because all the worlds problems now get encoded in them as well.
McLuhan has a similar problem with being overly fatalistic but he's a lot more readable.
It would be more interesting to read a criticism of the internet by someone who uses it in more advanced ways.
"The Net as ideal treadmill for self-styled identities will create no revolutionary situations, nor bring the world to an end. Cybernetic emptiness need not be filled, nor will it ever be full (of desire, abhorrence or unrest). Until telematic energy finally disappears into the flatland of silence in the face of blinking commands."