What are the main arguments in the two readings for this week? Which one do you prefer and why?
The main idea in Charles’s article “Cosmopolitan Ideal or Cybercentrism?” is democracy and cosmopolitanism; both terms have significant relationship in the communications field nowadays. Democracy can be defined various due to the values of different nations. The emergence of the internet created a brand new way for communication, which created no borders and all people around the world can together as a whole, they can sharing the same visions and values, and create cosmopolitanism together. The mini version of this cosmopolitanism would be the western society we are living right now, we are now having the freedom of speech, we can get to choose the leader of the country, to have relationship with worldwide people and etc. we did everything not only for our culture, ourselves, but as the whole country. This new form of communication will definitely improve our daily life from both economically and politically. But still, for some countries in the world, their governments are still trying to keep their citizens away from the internet information and the western media. The more recent example would be the conflict between the search engine Google and the Chinese government.
The second article “The Enclosure of Cyberspace” written by Ronald V. Betting talks about internet from more social perspective, more related to our daily life. The author is turning information as a commodity goods which all dealing with advertising and selling. We should all agree that money is becoming powerful in out life, internet not only provides an opportunity to sharing and creating information to the world but also creating mass of business opportunity around the world to let many of people make money.
For me, I totally agree with both articles but for the second one, it seems more convince me, since we obviously cannot avoid the power of money now a day, I always do trading on the internet, and I study information (knowledge) from the internet to fulfill my needs, and hope that I can use these knowledge again in my future career to generate money. Even schools are going to use internet as a way to presenting themselves, while more students applying for the school, more funding their will get. Therefore, what Ronald V is saying is more convince me.
Good job Ellen! The articles actually engage in a sort of debate. Charles Ess is criticizing the idea of cyber-cosmopolitanism. It is sometimes assumed that transnational political spaces are necessarily democratic. What Bettig's work points out is that the infrastructure underlaying the internet is not democratic - that it is structured by relations of power - and as such, we should not assume that transnational public spheres will necessarily be democratic or open.
ReplyDeleteKatherine