Cities 07

I completly agree with you. If anything, I think that the internet has made its own cities in way and in turn has brought back some social capital into today's society by making involvement no matter how small possible to those who never may have before the internet. (sorry for long sentence).

The internet HAS eliminated cities. It provides annonymity. When you log on you dissapear from your normal self and join the one giant "city" known as the web. We are all citizens there and our "normal" real life locations no longer matter anyways.

Dorian

This site has been around for a bit, hardly used, but I found it interesting when it was an MIT project 3-4 years ago and still find the concept interesting. It has been supplanted by other sites less geography specific like myspace, facebook and friendster. Check it out:

http://www.i-neighbors.org/

Dave Hauser

Wow, I've never seen that site. I guess it's a good jumping off point for shy neighbors. A lot of that My Space type stuff really bugs me. How can you rate your friends? That's just silly. Anyway...
While I think that type of interaction works some of the time, I don't believe it will ever replace face to face interactions. I know people who spend a lot of their time on the internet, but they have plenty of outside interactions too.
I personally, really need face to face interactions and I believe most people do, to varying degrees. It is really interesting how the internet has changed our social world though. Things like internet gaming and dating have become super popular and as I and a friend were recently discussing, it's all a bit more contrived. People have time to edit their thoughts in a way that spoken conversations don't allow for. I know folks who've dated people they met on the internet, and some form great bonds but others have terrible experiences. I suppose that's the same for any other kind of dating but the internet makes dishonesty so much easier. Sometimes that's a helpful thing, like for gaming, people have time to come up with elaborate characters.
There's the potential to share a lot of info. really quickly and also the potential to fool a lot of people who think that the internet is a source of knowledge that doesn't need to be checked. Sometimes the enhanced ability to deceive is awesome like when the Yes Men did it, but sometimes it's terrible like when scam artists and other predators do it, then there's the times when it's somewhere in-between like when people sell things that don't work on E-Bay.
It's also a new tool for social change(protests can be planned and news can spread quickly), discussion etc... like what we have here. I'd say the internet just a new type of "neighborhood" or "city" but never a replacement,.

Rather than asking whether we are or are not ourselves when using the internet, we should ask how the internet has forced us to redefine our selves in important ways. Like it or not we can never transcend our selves -- whether on the internet or within physical space. It is certainly true that we have opportunities to present our selves in different ways over the internet than in, for instance, a purely physical setting, but history, and the attendant technological, social, economic, and cultural circumstances that constantly change along with it, are always creating new and making obsolete ways of creating one’s self.

That being said, this question of what happens to the physical self when so much time and energy is spent creating a self reducible to ones and zeros is one of the preeminent questions our technologically saturated society will have to face in the twenty first century. Our physical self after all, is necessary for our internet self, as became apparent to one S. Korean man who died from heart failure caused by exhaustion from playing Starcraft for a week straight (powerful stuff!).

One way we can address this problem is by creating technology that works to embody our personas which have rapidly become disembodied by pervasiveness technological advances. A cool concept that I think is heading in the right direction is a program called Dodgeball. Apparently you can put it on your phone and track your friends in physical space (O lighten up Foucault!). Technology that works to bring communities together in the flesh, now that is a potentially revolutionary concept, especially compared to the way Webber thinks about the technological effects on people in space.

I just watched "Moulin Rouge" (one of my favorites) again the other day and thought about our Bohemian talks. So, if you have not seen this movie, but you are impressed with the Bohemian way of life, I think you should watch this movie if you haven't already!

Kari J.

I think we're noticing a shift in culture. We're at a very interesting time with the internet.

Look at how many people are meeting each other online. People who would have NEVER
met each other.... business relationships/partnerships, friendships and romace.

Dave M.
Author, Insider Internet Dating
internet dating