Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation, by Ronald J. Deibert

7. Hypermedia and the Modern to Postmodern World Order Transformation: Changes to Social Epistemology

In this chapter, I turn to an examination of the changes to social epistemology that are likely to occur as a result of the change in the mode of communication to hypermedia. Social epistemology refers to the web-of-beliefs into which a people are acculturated, and through which they perceive the world around them. It encompasses an interwoven set of symbolic forms, cognitive biases and social constructs that provide the general metaphysical presuppositions and boundaries that frame thinking and practice for a people in time. It is important to reiterate that according to the theoretical perspective advanced here, changes in the mode of communication do not generate new symbolic forms, social constructs, or cognitive biases de novo, but rather that elements of social epistemology present in society will tend to flourish or wither as a result of a fitness between those elements and the new media environment. This does not mean that each individual person will suddenly shift social epistemological perspectives or abandon long-held philosophical preconceptions as a result of their exposure to a new technology of communication; rather, it means that in a particular communications environment a particular social epistemology will have a better chance of finding a "niche" and thus surviving and flourishing. The process is thus largely intergenerational, rather than intrapsychic.

Also important to reiterate is that the mechanism of selection, as I have envisaged it in this study, is a chance "fitness" between social epistemology and a communications environment. As a consequence, we should expect elements of social epistemology that may once have been marginalized to resonate strongly in the future as a result of this chance fitness--even those that by current standards may seem distasteful, faddish, or downright heretical. In step with this expectation, then, in this chapter I will develop the argument that the symbolic forms, cognitive biases, and social constructs loosely associated with the current of thought known as "postmodernism" will flourish in the new communications environment as a result of a "fitness" between this environment and postmodern social epistemology. In doing so, I realize that I am treading on controversial grounds, for few labels can invoke such polarities of feelings as those that arise from the rather vague appellation "postmodernism." It is important, then, that at the outset of the argument I make clear that I will not be addressing the relative merits of postmodern epistemologies over other competing "modern" epistemologies, nor for the most part will I be engaging in a substantive dissection of the many, often competing theorists who may or may not fall under the umbrella label "postmodern." I am not arguing for or against postmodernist epistemologies, but merely analyzing postmodern social epistemology as a current of thought--a "species" of social epistemology--and asking whether or not the emerging communications environment has a functional bias in favor of the central characteristics of this current of thought qua species--a process that is largely the product of a chance "fitness."

I am not the first to attempt to link the rise of postmodernist thought to broader sociological/material factors. Both David Harvey and Frederic Jameson, for example, see the postmodern movement as a product of a change in the mode of production, or as Jameson calls it, "the cultural logic of late capitalism." ₁   Nor am I even the first to draw attention to its connection to communication technologies. For example, Kenneth Gergen offers a rather strong, technological determinist argument linking postmoderism unavoidably to new communication technologies. ₂   And some postmodernists, like Baudrillard and Lyotard for example, see a close affinity between changing communication technologies and broader social and cultural transformations. ₃   Where this analysis differs, however, is that it does not attempt to reduce the entire movement to a single overarching variable--to the mode of production, in Harvey and Jameson's case, or even to the mode of communication, in Gergen's. Contrary to these analyses, it affirms that the rise of postmodern social epistemology reflect a multiplicity of factors. The argument to be made here is rather that postmodern social epistemology will flourish to the extent that it "fits" the properties of the new mode of communication--that it will find a more receptive audience among those acculturated into the hypermedia environment.

The ultimate purpose of this examination, of course, is to fathom the emerging social epistemology as it relates to world order transformation. Following the analytical division set out in chapter 4, I will assess the relative "fitness" of postmodern social epistemology in the hypermedia environment along three dimensions, each of which has an important bearing on the architecture of world order: individual identities, spatial biases, and imagined communities. It is anticipated that through this examination a more comprehensive "blueprint" can be discerned of the emerging architecture of postmodern world order that complements the distributional changes outlined in the previous chapter. I will outline how I see this "blueprint" taking shape in the conclusion to this chapter, and will return to it in the final, concluding chapter of the study.

The Rise of Postmodernist Thought

Anyone even remotely acquainted with the broad social movement known as "postmodernism" will be aware of the extent to which it defies easy definition. Well-known are the many disputes about the exact nature of the difference between the "modern" and the "postmodern," between "postmodernism" and "poststructuralism," and between both of these and other subsidiary variants, like "deconstruction" or "genealogy." ₄   What does seem reasonably clear, however, is that Western societies have been undergoing a broad cultural transformation for the last 20 to 30 years, through which many long-held, fundamental philosophical assumptions have come under attack. Like many others, I feel the label "postmodern" best captures this societal transformation, and that it does indeed highlight a discernible current of thought latent in contemporary (mostly Western) societies. ₅   As my purposes are rather broad a great deal of the nuance within this current of thought is sacrificed. However, I am interested only in the broad symbolic forms, social constructs, and cognitive biases that define postmodern social epistemology as a species of thought or mentalité, and not in the intricacies that divide it internally.

The historical and sociological roots of postmodernism (or as Huyssen aptly put it, "the pre-history of the post-modern") reflects a multiplicity of factors reaching back into the late nineteenth century. ₆   Although space precludes a detailed history of the movement, its intellectual development can be seen along a series of touchstones reaching back to the nihilism of Nietzsche and the historicism of Hegel, to anti-modernist tracts of the early twentieth century, especially those of Heidegger and the existentialists, and the structural linguistics of Saussure. ₇   An early resemblance can also be found in early-twentieth-century modernist art and Dadaist poetry. ₈   But it was not until the 1960s that a strong disillusionment with modernity as a whole, and a sense of youth rebellion and frustration as evidenced by campus riots in Paris, Mexico City, Berkeley, and elsewhere, that a self-conscious social movement really began to cohere under the broad label "postmodernism." ₉   The intellectual "leaders" of the movement since that time have been a group of notorious French theorists, including Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Baudrillard. However, the ideas of these theorists reach well beyond the borders of France, and in North America particularly, the movement has spawned a large academic following.

As Hassen has suggested, the core traits of this mentalité are probably best approached as a series of nuances, or oppositions, that distinguish it from modernist style, and which reoccur or resonate similarly in different cultural spheres. ₁₀   In philosophy and the social sciences, for example, it is characterized by a skepticism of metaphysical foundations, or "master narratives," of the search for Absolute Truth, of linear, rational progress, and of universals of any kind. ₁₁   In its stead, it embraces disjuncture and discontinuity, fragmentation, indeterminacy, and at times an unabashed relativism that often reveals itself as a concern for "the other." In linguistics, it is characterized by a "crisis of representation" and a belief in the "indeterminancy" of the sign. ₁₂   In architecture, it reveals itself as a reaction against the functionalist modernism of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, and a promotion of ornamentation with a montage of historical and cultural forms. ₁₃   In art it is characterized similarly by a pastiche or collage of different styles that often gives the appearance of depthlessness. ₁₄   Much more will be said about these nuances when I turn to the formal examination below. For now it is enough to note that what has been loosely referred to as "postmodernism" does indeed represent a coherent cultural movement centered in Western societies. For heuristic purposes, then, it can be treated as a viable "species" of thought latent in society. The following subsection undertakes a more focused analysis of the relative "fitness" of this species in the hypermedia environment.

Individual Identities

At the heart of postmodern social epistemology is a forceful reaction against modernist views of the "self" and individual subjectivity--the very same attributes that had their origins in transformations described earlier in chapter 4. Modern conceptions of individual identity against which postmodernists react have been anchored on a stable self, unchanging in basic identity, a fixed center possessing certain universal attributes that all members of the human species share. This modern sense of the autonomous individual is perhaps best reflected in Descartes' "cogito" or Kant's mental categories of understanding. ₁₅   Postmodernists reject this view of individual identity, offering in its place a notion of a "decentered" self--a historically constituted identity that is continuously being reconstructed. ₁₆   The postmodern self is an assemblage of its environment, a multiple self that changes in response to different social situations. One consequence of this view of the self, according to postmodernists, is that the autonomous individual can no longer provide the philosophical or practical foundations from which to design or achieve human freedom, as Marxists and liberals would have it. ₁₇   As Jameson puts it, for postmodernists "the alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject." ₁₈   Likewise, Hall comments on how the postmodern self "is experienced as more fragmented and incomplete, composed of multiple 'selves' or identities in relation to the different social worlds we inhabit, something with a history, 'produced,' in process." ₁₉  

For example, Richard Rorty claims that individual selves are "random assemblanges of contingent and idiosyncratic needs" that are "centerless." ₂₀   A self is then nothing more than "a network of beliefs, desires, and emotions with nothing behind it--no substrate behind the attributes." ₂₁   Similarly, for Lyotard each of us lives at the "intersection" of many heterogeneous language games and into which the "social subject itself seems to dissolve." ₂₂   Going further, he writes that "no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before." ₂₃   For postmodernists, the sovereign rational subject gives way to a belief in "the role of the preconceptual and nonconceptual in the conceptual, the presence of the irrational--the economy of desire, the will to power--at the very core of the rational." ₂₄   What remains is a "subject who is multi-dimensional and without center or hierarchical integration." ₂₅   In short, the postmodern sense of individual identity is characterized by a historically contingent, multiple or "decentered" self.

There are a number of ways the postmodern view of the self "fits" the hypermedia environment--ways that suggest it might resonate strongly as that environment deepens and expands. First, notions of "authorship" and the "sovereign voice" seem to clash in many ways with the digital universe of hypermedia. This is evidenced, for example, by the way copyright and intellectual property rights are currently under threat, and are seen by many as being problematic within the new communications environment. ₂₆   According to communications lawyer Anne W. Branscomb:

The ease with which electronic impulses can be manipulated, modified and erased is hostile to a deliberate legal system that arose in an era of tangible things and relies on documentary evidence to validate transactions, incriminate miscreants and affirm contractual relations. What have been traditionally known as letters, journals, photographs, conversations, videotapes, audiotapes and books merge into a single stream of undifferentiated electronic impulses. 27

Within the hypermedia environment, digitization and networked computing provide users with the ability to extract bits of data in different forms and from disparate sources, and then paste them together into an assembled whole. As a consequence, principles of compensation and royalty are being undermined, especially within a distributed network of multiple participants, such as the World-Wide Web, where it is "more complicated to determine who is entitled to claim recompense for value added." ₂₈  

Notions of intellectual property rights that have underpinned authorship since the advent of printing in Europe are thus facing complex challenges as hypermedia disrupts traditional legal presuppositions and boundaries. Under most existing copyright legislation around the world only original expression is copyrighted and not facts or ideas. With hypermedia, "Computers can scan pages of data, and, presumably, as long as they do not copy the exact organization or presentation or the software programs used to sort the information, they may not be infringing the copyright of the 'compilation,' the legal hook on which data bases now hang their protective hats." ₂₉   One practical expression of this "authorless" environment is the prevalence of "samples" in popular music, whereby riffs or lines of standard jazz or rock songs are digitally pasted together to provide a recognizable background--a practice that has itself generated considerable legal controversy. ₃₀   The same holds true for computer-based scanning of images and photographs in computer art, animation, or documentaries. ₃₁   On the World Wide Web, sound and movie clips are shared, modified, and distributed, ending up as the idiosyncratic ornaments of personal home pages. ₃₂   John Perry Barlow's comments provide an interesting glimpse of the way hypermedia are contributing to the dissolution of authorship in this respect:

all the goods of the Information Age--all of the expressions once contained in books or films strips or newsletters--will exist either as pure thought or something very much like thought: voltage conditions darting around the Net at the speed of light, in conditions that one might behold in effect, as glowing pixels or transmitted sounds, but never touch or claim to "own" in the old sense of the word. 33

Some, like Barlow, see an inevitable end to modern intellectual property rights. For them, the social and political regulations that have underpinned the commercial protection of ideas since the invention of printing are simply incompatible with a world of networked computers and digital technologies. Others, primarily global entertainment and publishing corporations like Sony, Disney, and Time-Warner, are scrambling to devise new global copyright regulations to prevent "cyberspace piracy." Underscoring the importance of the issues involved, 800 delegates from 160 states gathered in December 1996 at the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, Switzerland to try to reach agreement on Internet copyright laws--a meeting that if nothing else revealed the enormous complexities involved in the task. ₃₄   However these issues are resolved, what is most significant for the purposes of my analysis is the way discussions of the "death" of intellectual property rights mirror postmodernist views of the "death" of the author. In an essay entitled "What is an Author?," Foucault, for example, asks where does an author's work truly begin, and where does it end? ₃₅   Which ideas are an "author's" own and which are borrowed from others, ad infinitum. These postmodern views of the disappearance of the "author" in endless reproductions of other "author's" ideas offer a striking resemblance to the perceived threats posed to intellectual property rights in the hypermedia environment. Both see the idea of fixing a work of expression with a terminal stamp of authorship as something arcane and futile.

A further illustration of the way the hypermedia environment dissolves long-held legal preconceptions of individual autonomy is its challenge to traditional distinctions between the "public" and the "private" spheres. In chapter 4, I provided a description of the way the practice of reading in a print culture contributed to notions of privacy exclusive to modernity through the mass reproduction of smaller, portable books. Today, theorists ranging across disciplines have commented on how the private sphere is being invaded in the transparent hypermedia environment. ₃₆   Although illustrations range from the popularity of more personally invasive "trash" talk television shows to the widespread prevalence of surveillance cameras, perhaps the clearest example of the privacy invasion is the collection of data on consumers through credit card and other electronic transactions. Commercial data-gathering firms, like Equifax Marketing Decision Systems, use the collected data to create a computerized market profile that is purchased by corporations who then "target" individuals with specific advertising. ₃₇   Equifax provides computer-generated demographic maps that sort individuals "as members of segments defined in terms of price sensitivity, coupon use, brand loyalty, television use, and other characteristics of interest to consumer product marketers." ₃₈   As more of peoples' daily lives and transactions are folded into the interconnected, digital webs of the hypermedia environment, the distinction between those aspects of their lives that remain within a "personal" sphere, and those that are widely distributed in the "public," becomes increasingly blurred. In an article aptly titled, "We know you are reading this," The Economist offered the following scenario of an "average" American to illustrate the point:

On a typical day, for example, our hero's driving route may be tracked by an intelligent traffic system. At work, his employer can legally listen in to his business conversations on the telephone, and tap into his computer, e-mail or voice-mail. At the shopping center, the ubiquitous closed-circuit camera may soon be smart enough to seek him out personally. His clothes shop is allowed to put peepholes in the fitting-rooms; some have hidden microphones, too. The grocery stores information about him if he is a member of its "buyers' club." If he uses his credit card, not only does the card company keep tabs on when, where and what he buys, it may sell that knowledge to eager merchants--hence the junk mail piled on his doorstep. 39

Although some theorists have expressed concerns that this form of information surveillance is leading to a new Panopticon, ₄₀   the surveillance that is occurring is more dispersed and decentered as personal information is collected and shared by a wide variety of firms to be purchased and accessed by virtually anyone else.

For the purposes of this analysis, what is most interesting is the way this transparent environment opens up and disperses personal information along decentered computer networks, much the same as postmodernists conceive of the self as a networked assemblage without a fixed center. Indeed, what may have once seemed an intuitively implausible postmodern notion, may not seem so when one's "electronic identity" is spread across and shared between global data bases. Where do we locate the human self, asks Mark Poster, when fragments of personal data are constantly circulating within computer systems, beyond our immediate control or awareness? ₄₁   Along with other elements of the transparent hypermedia environment, the circulation of personal information through computer networks dissolves traditional distinctions between the "private" and the "public" spheres. It was with this dissolution in mind that Baudrillard commented on how the "most intimate operation of your life becomes the potential grazing ground of the media." ₄₂  

Another way postmodern notions of individual identity "fit" the hypermedia environment can be found in the practices of those participating in computer networks. Identities on the "net"--such as age, gender, and occupation--are malleable because of the concealment that computer networks afford the user. According to Rheingold, the population of online gender switchers numbers in the hundreds of thousands. ₄₃   These "identity deceptions" have often been the source of hostilities once the identities of those IRL (in-real life) are unmasked. ₄₄   But the practice persists, no doubt as a result of a more experimental attitude toward individual identity that is encouraged by the Internet. A good example is the many MUDs (Multi-User Dimensions) that populate the Internet which allow real-time communications among multiple users in an illusionary "virtual world." To join, MUD participants take on a constructed identity and navigate their way through the imaginary geographies of the MUD environment, all the while interacting with other MUD identities. ₄₅  

One directory on the World-Wide Web offers links to more than 676 different MUDs, with titles such as "altered reality," "anarchy," "ancient dreams," "beyond reality," "dreamscape," and many more. ₄₆   Along similar lines are the interactive virtual cities, such as Minglebrook or Dcity, where dwellers can build their own digital homesteads, or perhaps just pass through as virtual tourists. By encouraging participants to take on constructed characters in different virtual environments, hypermedia favor the idea of a multiple self, one that varies with its social relationships, and is bounded only by the imagination of the individual in different settings.

There are other ways in which the postmodern self may resonate in the hypermedia environment. Kenneth Gergen, for example, suggests that exposure of the average individual to the technologies of social saturation of hypermedia "are central to the contemporary erasure of the individual self." ₄₇   According to Gergen, hypermedia technologies immerse the individual in a dense network of constantly shifting relationships that leads to a populating of the self, or what he calls a condition of "multiphrenia." In Gergen's words:

Yet we are now bombarded with ever-increasing intensity by the images and actions of others; our range of social participation is expanding exponentially. As we absorb the views, values, and visions of others, and live out the multiple plots in which we are enmeshed, we enter a postmodern consciousness. It is a world in which we no longer experience a secure sense of self, and in which doubt is increasingly placed on the very assumption of a bounded identity with palpable attributes. 48

While Gergen insights about the bombardment of images may be thought-provoking, his argument is needlessly deterministic. Being immersed in the hypermedia environment does not by necessity induce a sudden individual gestalt-shift to a "postmodern consciousness," as the many participants in ultra-conservative, religious right, neo-Nazi, or Islamic discussion groups on the Internet might attest. What might be said, however, is that the intensifying bombardment of images, alternative identities, and cultures unleashed by hypermedia opens up a critical space, or at least creates a conducive environment, in which the idea of a postmodern "multiphrenic" self might seem more plausible and thus find a more receptive audience among an increasingly large segment of those acculturated into its environment. When this facet of the hypermedia environment is combined with the dissolution of authorship and copyright, and the breakdown of the private/public distinction, the functional bias of the hypermedia environment toward postmodern notions of fragmented identities, and away from modern conceptions of the autonomous sovereign individual, appears even stronger.

Spatial Biases

In chapter 4, I outlined how the visual uniformity, mass reproducibility, and standardization of printing all helped to foster a rigid, linear demarcation of political space that complemented the spatial bias of early modern Europe. In this section I explore how some of the characteristics of the hypermedia environment may favor the spatial bias of postmodern social epistemology. As many observers have commented, the postmodern mentalité consists of a novel approach to space that sets it off rather markedly from modernist style. Two elements in particular stand out: The first, which is perhaps most apparent in postmodern art and architecture, is the use of pastiche and collage, both of which lend themselves to a nonlinear and overlapping spatial orientation featuring discontinuity and depthlessness. With pastiche, according to Bauman, postmodern art "has transformed history and ethnography of art into a pool of extemporal and exterritorial, permanently usable resources, which can be picked at will and at random." Collage, on the other hand, "denies the traditional principle of stylistic (and often compositional) unity, and practices instead the equivalence and non-contriety of artistic genres, styles, and techniques." ₄₉   The Portland Public Servies Building designed by Michael Graves offers a typical example. The building is an abstraction of different styles from different eras--modernist and Greco-Roman classicist mixed together with wedge-topped columns that evoke the Italian mannerist designs of the fifteenth century. ₅₀  

Contributing to this spatial bias of postmodern social epistemology is its outright rejection of realism and representationalism characteristic of modern philosophies of science and art--the idea of the subject standing over and apart from an independent world of objects that it can more or less accurately represent. Based on antirepresentationalist premises, postmodern social epistemology argues for the plurality of "worlds" and multiple "realities," each of which is contingent on social constructions, or "language-games" that constitute and orient the field of experience. ₅₁   What might be called the "world creationism" of postmodern social epistemology flows out of its dissolution of the theory/fact binary opposition; for postmodernists, no sense can be made of a linguistically naked "given" from which to assess alternative vocabularies. Theory--taken in its broadest sense--constitutes facts and not the other way around. From this theory-laden view of human existence, postmodern social epistemology derives the notion of intertextuality--that is, that there can be no reference outside of theory or the "text" apart from other theories and texts. ₅₂   Hence, external reference can only be a matter of intertextuality.

The combined effect of these two traits is a spatial bias that is less exacting and rigid, and more fluid, bypassing the idea of a firm reality that is fixed and immutable and open to a single accurate representation. Instead, the spatial bias of postmodern epistemology embraces discontinuity and juxtaposition, with mutable boundaries superimposed upon one another. This spatial bias is reflected in Foucault's suggestion that we "develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjuncture," and "to prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems." ₅₃   Foucault refers to this mind-set as "heterotopia," by which he means the coexistence in "an impossible space" of a "large number of fragmentary possible worlds." ₅₄   Using a quote from Wittgenstein, Lyotard offers perhaps the most compelling picture of postmodern spatial bias: "Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from different periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses." ₅₅  

The starting point for understanding the relative "fitness" of the postmodern spatial bias in the hypermedia environment is the multimedia convergence faciliated by digital technologies. On a technical level, the hypermedia environment was spawned largely as a result of digitization: the ability to translate all information--video, audio, graphics, and text--into a series of 1s and 0s. ₅₆   As Saxby points out, "digitization brings with it an entirely new environment. All media become immediately translatable into one another, capable of instant recall and transmission to any point within the network." ₅₇   As the hypermedia environment melds graphics, text, and audio in the same mode, communications becomes increasingly "mosaic" or pastiche-like--a characteristic most apparent in the surface appearance of a typical multimedia windows program, where on the screen at any one time might appear in separate windows a renaissance painting, a television feed from CNN, a text on which the author is currently engaged in composition, and a still image of an F-18 fighter plane. The surface similarity between a typical hypermedia interface and a typical postmodern work of art is striking in this respect, as depicted in Figures 5 and 6.

An even more compelling case for the functional bias of the hypermedia environment toward postmodern spatial biases can be found in the dominant mode of navigation in hypermedia: hypertext. As Heim points out, the word "hypertext" refers to an additional or unnoticed dimension. ₅₈   In computer navigation, hypertext is the ability to navigate through databases on a myriad of links between documents that provide that additional or unnoticed dimension. The most common example of hypertext navigation is the keyword search, which allows users to connect disparate documents on the basis of a single word or phrase that ties them together. In words that resound with nuances of postmodern social epistemology, Heim notes how the hypertextual link "indicates the implicit presence of other texts and the ability to reach them instantly. all texts are virtually co-resident." ₅₉   This ability to find "traces" of documents in widely disparate areas complements both the postmodern notion of "intertextuality" as well as a nonlinear cognitive orientation favoring jumps in intuition over the step-by-step logical chain--a cognitive trait that mirrors the pastiche and juxtaposition of the postmodern mentalité.

Hypertext, more than the dominant mode of navigating through computer searches, has become the paradigm of hypermedia participation as a whole. It is, for example, the architectural principle upon which the World-Wide Web itself is organized. Once one enters the "web" and begins surfing from link to link and page to page, one quickly realizes that there is no beginning, middle, end, or indeed any single logical sequence that navigation should follow. It is also found in so-called "personalized newspapers," in interactive television, or CD-ROM based multimedia programs where users click a mouse on a menu of options to enter into layers of audio, text, and video that supplement with more detail or provide tangential routes for various topics within the realm of the program. ₆₀   It is found in the practices of routine television viewing, where audiences--presented with an ever-increasing diversity of channels--engage in "channel surfing" rather than linear, sequential viewing of programs from beginning to end. ₆₁   The same phenomenon is evident in the form of television productions themselves, which increasingly appear as disconnected, nonlinear, pastiche-like montages--a trait most apparent in music videos. Gergen describes how "few of the videos offer a linear narrative; most will jolt the viewer with a rapid succession of images--often less than two seconds long--that have little obvious relation to each other." ₆₂   The pastiche-like orientation is not confined to the radical edge of television either. In television news, discontinuity is produced by hypermedia as "all the divergent spaces of the world are assembled nightly as a collage of images upon the television screen." ₆₃   According to Taylor, television is "the first cultural medium in the whole of history to present the artistic achievements of the past as a stitched-together collage of equi-important and simultaneously existing phenomena, largely divorced from geography and material history and transported to the living rooms and studios of the West in a more or less uninterrupted flow." ₆₄   As distributional systems expand to include competition between cable and telephone delivery, and as communications channels proliferate and diversify, the surface depthlessness and pastiche-like characteristics of hypermedia participation will only intensify.

Other facets of the postmodern spatial bias fit the hypermedia environment--particularly, the blurring of reality and irreality and the embrace of plural "worlds," or what I earlier referred to as "world creationism." One essential characteristic of the hypermedia environment is the way image-based, digital technologies allow the manipulation and creation of so-called "virtual" or "simulated" alternative worlds. Of course, the archetypal example in this respect is the overhyped "virtual reality" systems, in which the user dons a mask and gloves to enter into computer-generated virtual worlds. ₆₅   These systems attempt to convince participants that they are in another "world" by substituting normal sensory input (i.e., sight, touch, and sound) with information produced by a computer. Although such systems have been subject to much hyperbole, and although they are technically limited by their inability to mimic sensory stimulation completely, they are, in fact, only one minor element of the way "world creationism" pervades all aspects of the hypermedia environment.

Consider, for example, the way "world creationism" manifests itself in the escapist alternative and imagined worlds of consumer culture, including movies, videos, television, advertisements, and video games. ₆₆   An MIT Media Lab study reports that more than 70 percent of American homes with children between eight and twelve years of age own a video game system called Nintendo, in which children interact with highly involving, simulated worlds with ever-increasingly sophisticated graphics and audio. ₆₇   Nintendo's main competitor, the Sega Corporation, generated sales in excess of US$3.6 billion worldwide in 1993. ₆₈   Hyper-realistic games, like Doom or Quake, which feature graphic violence within three-dimensional, multilevel worlds, are distributed freely as "shareware" over the World-Wide Web and can be played on personal computers. ₆₉   What is perhaps most significant is that the video games explicitly cultivate the idea of plural "worlds" and the blurring of reality and irreality as part of their escapist attraction. Take, for example, the following liner-quote on an advertisement for a popular CD ROM video game called "Commanche CD":

The rotor blades are turning. The fuselage dips. Your chopper is reflected in the river beneath you. Watch out! It's real! Or is it? With Voxel Space from NovaLogic your sense of reality is given the ultimate challenge. With twelve detailed terrains, from arid desert gorges, to lush mountain valleys to frozen wastelands and wide river basins, Commanche is the promise of 3-D simulation action come to life. With Commanche CD you'll take on 100 complete missions. And when the Pentagon calls you, they'll never know you were trained on a personal computer. 70

Of course, video games like the Commanche CD are only one small element of a communications environment that is deeply saturated by simulations and digital alternative worlds. At a more practical level, advanced computer graphics and architectural software "allow designers and clients to 'walk' through buildings and redesign them long before construction." ₇₁   Military planners employ sophisticated simulations in war games. ₇₂   Neuroscientists and meteorologists regularly employ sophisticated computer simulations to study 3-D images of the brain or complex weather patterns. ₇₃  

Television commercials and advertisements are perhaps the most immediate and, at times, sophisticated employers of created worlds that blur the distinction between reality and irreality as commodities take on a wide range of "free-floating" cultural associations and illusions through the spectacular use of computer graphics. ₇₄   Another example is the computer-generated "special effects" that drive the escapist worlds of movies--now a billion-dollar worldwide industry through first-run theaters and the secondary home-video market. Giant "wrap-around" screens, like those of the IMAX theaters, attract their viewers by offering yet more fantastic simulations, like floating in space above "the Blue Planet," or fighting the "Fires of Kuwait"--"as if you were really there. And, of course, we should not forget the way in which world creationism is now deeply implicated in political campaigns and public-image making--a use of image-based artiface that to many signal the deterioration of public discourse, especially in the United States." ₇₅   Even the long-since "dead" can be created anew as virtual embodiments of the past now pasted seamlessly into the present. Timothy Luke elaborates:

Now smart movies can cast living-dead digital actors in new supporting roles speaking in sampled voices and moving within morphed bodies alongside real actors. Smart recording studios already stage cyberspatial music jams, allowing us to listen to Hank Williams Sr. and Hank Williams Jr. sing new kinds of digital ballads, hear Nat King Cole do duets with daughter Natalie Cole, and enjoy John Lennon rejoin the still living Beatles to sing on real-time records from cyberspace in hyperreal arrangements. 76

Given all of this continual bombardment of signs, simulations, images, and "virtual realities" it is easy to see why some, like Baudrillard for example, have concluded that the idea of a "reality" beyond the images--a signified beyond the sign--is irretrievably lost in the swirling maelstrom of the hypermedia environment. ₇₇   For Baudrillard, communication technologies have thrust us onto a stage where there is nothing but simulations. Society itself is fashioned into a mirrored, self-reflexive spectacle. In this environment, "false consciousness" or "distortions of reality" or "ideological fetters" no longer make sense, for there is nothing left against which to measure the accuracy of the simulation: "reality" itself is pure simulacra. Following Baudrillard, Vattimo notes that:

If we, in late modernity, have an idea of reality, it cannot be understood as the objective given lying beneath, or beyond, the images we receive of it from the media. How and where could we arrive at such a reality 'in itself'? For us, reality is rather the result of the intersection of a multiplicity of images, interpretations and reconstructions circulated by the media in competition with one another and without any 'central' coordination. 78

Do these analyses go too far in the direction of technological determinism? Who is the "we" to which Vattimo refers above? As I noted earlier with respect to Gergen, the mere exposure to hypermedia technologies does not by necessity force a sudden ontological shift upon those immersed in its environment. No doubt there are many computer scientists personally involved in the design of such sophisticated computer graphics who, if pressed, would hold firm to a scientific realist epistemology. What might be said, however, is that hypermedia create a conducive communications environment where such a spatial bias might find a more receptive audience. It is likely, in other words, that the spatial proclivities of postmodern social epistemology will seem more attractive, more "natural," to the current generation of children acculturated into the irrealism and world creationism of such escapist fare as video games, movies, and advertisements, where the distinction between the "real" and the "virtual" has not only been blurred, but also is promoted as a new and interesting weltenschaung. Hypermedia do not generate postmodern spatial biases, but they do certainly complement and encourage them so that over time, through an intergenerational "selection" process, their blurring of reality and embrace of plural "worlds" might seem as taken-for-granted as does the idea of a single fixed reality today.

Imagined Communities

The postmodern sense of imagined communities echoes many of the same themes and constructs that were raised with respect to individual identities and spatial biases. As Bauman notes: "Postmodernity is marked by a view of the human world as irreducibly and irrevocably pluralistic, split into a multitude of sovereign units and sites of authority, with no horizontal or vertical order, either in actuality or in potency." ₇₉   Driving this fragmentation and pluralization is a relativistic philosophical position on Truth. According to postmodern epistemologies, no sense can be made of Truth as correspondence to a theory- or language- independent reality because there is no "skyhook" out of our current vocabularies which will afford us, in Rorty's words, "a God's-eye standpoint--one which has somehow broken out of our language and our beliefs and tested them against something known without their aid"--a feat we can no more accomplish than "step outside of our skins." ₈₀   Flowing from this relativistic position, then, is a "multiperspectival" view of the world "composed of an indefinite number of meaning-generating agencies, all relatively self-sustained and autonomous, all subject to their own respective logics and armed with their own facilities of truth validation." ₈₁  

The postmodern imagined community is thus hyperpluralistic and fragmented--the very antithesis of the modern mass community. As shown in chapter 4, the modern imagined community was premised on the fusion of a single "national" identity and sovereign political authority. This singular identity, reinforced in the modern age by printed vernaculars and national mass television and radio, provided a sense of imagined community that corresponded to the division of political authority into territorially distinct, mutually exclusive sovereign states. Although people certainly belonged to many different overlapping communities, there was a pervasive sense that these identities were, or at least should, be ordered hierarchically, beginning most importantly with the nation. ₈₂   The postmodern sense of imagined community disperses this hierarchy to a multiplicity of overlapping "interpretive communities," ₈₃   and to local identities--a process captured by Lyotard's notion of the " 'atomization' of the social into flexible networks of language games." ₈₄   For Lyotard, and for postmodernists in general, the modern mass audience gives way to a postmodern "diversity of discursive species." ₈₅  

Perhaps no better illustration of the functional bias of the hypermedia environment toward postmodern social epistemology can be found than its promotion of multiple and overlapping transnational "niche" communities. Prior to hypermedia, systems of government-regulated national broadcasting provided the basis to set national agendas and ground public debates within territorially defined political spaces. ₈₆   According to some theorists, they even provided a tool by which central authorities could manufacture consent among the populace and thus shape and constrain the contours of public ideology in the interests of the state. ₈₇   The hypermedia environment increasingly dissolves these shared "public" or "national" information experiences characteristic of the "mass" media age, and replaces them with a bombardment of transnational, decentered, personalized "narrowcasting" and two-way communications in the form of computer networks, video-on-demand, direct satellite broadcasting, and the so-called "500 channel" cable systems.

In the hypermedia environment, individuals have an ever-widening choice among multiple and specialized programs provided by a growing list of private, competing distributional systems that were previously bound within separate regulatory jurisdictions. The recently unleashed competition between telephone and cable is a prime example in this respect. More importantly, perhaps, is the extent to which these competing distributional systems are increasingly transnational as states deregulate and allow an interpenetration of broadcasting systems, from global news organizations, to direct broadcasting satellites, to joint-sharing agreements among "national" broadcasting systems. ₈₈   As this interpenetration process is closely bound up with global market forces in favor of the "free flow" of information, even those states and regions that were once adamant about maintaining broadcasting monopolies have reversed their course. In Asia, for example, satellite owners now have a choice of more than forty channels of satellite television, including Star TV, HBO, CNN, ESPN, the Hong Kong-based TVBS, plus a variety of other programs transmitted through domestic satellites from Japan, Russia, Thailand, Australia, and China. ₈₉   Even more satellite systems to service the region are planned for launch in the next several years. ₉₀   In 1980, there were 40 television channels in all of what is now the European Union. By 1994, there were 150, with more than a third delivered by satellite. ₉₁   In Cairo, Samsung sells a package of a fixed dish, receiver, and television set for only $740 through which a choice of three commercial services provide choices like CNN, MTV, ESPN, as well as Arabic programming. ₉₂   With the emergence of the hypermedia environment, the single-point/mass-national broadcasting paradigm is giving way to multi-perspectival/transnational "narrowcasting."

Not only does the hypermedia environment contribute to "de-massification" through an increased diversity of choice among channels, it atomizes it altogether by the increasing "interactivity" of the communication process itself. Perhaps the best example is on-line "personalized" newspapers, which allow users to access sidebar stories or tangentially related news items and video clips at their own discretion. The result is a completely different news experience for each individual user. ₉₃   The same phenomenon is mirrored in multimedia music CD's currently available on the market that allow listeners to alter the composition to suit their mood--to make it possible, as one composer put it, "for you and me to have two different viewpoints on the same piece of music." ₉₄   Similarly, interactive television systems developed in specific test-market regions of North America allow viewers to select camera angles and choose replays while watching sporting events. ₉₅  

This personalized interactivity is taken yet a step further by studies currently being undertaken at the MIT Media Lab with financial support by industry giants like Knight-Ridder, Gannett, Hearst, and Times-Mirror. Here personalized software "agents" are being developed that will electronically scan global networked databases each morning to provide individuals with their own exclusive news package tailored to fit their own unique interests. ₉₆   Indeed, a free World-Wide Web service called CRAYON (Create Your Own Newspaper On the Net) provides subscribers with a large set of global news services from which they can build their own personalized jumping-off points. Through CRAYON, I have a selection of world news sources every morning that include Reuters, The Times (London), The Electronic Telegraph (London), The Jerusalem Post, This Week in Germany, The Irish Times, China News Digest, The Straits Times (Singapore), and The Hindu (India), among others. Although some of these technologies are still in their embryonic stage of development, they provide further evidence of the "de-massifying" direction in which the hypermedia environment is headed.

The second way the hypermedia environment challenges the national mass-broadcasting paradigm and encourages the rise of multiple and overlapping "niche" communities is by allowing two-way, unmediated, transnational communications among groups of individuals linked through computer networks. On the Internet, and on the many private computer networks, millions of people around the world now participate in these "virtual communities." ₉₇   At last count, there are more than 10,000 specialized USENET newsgroups on the Internet each of which involves largely unmediated communications among people from around the planet on such specialized topics as alt.politics.greens; alt.politics.libertarian; alt.politics.radical-left; alt.fan.dan.quayle; alt.sex.bondage; or alt.tv.simpsons. ₉₈   The prefix "alt" in the various newsgroups listed above refers to "alternative"--a category that permits anyone to start a newsgroup on any topic whatsoever. Here, "publication" is open to anyone merely by the posting of a message on a bulletin board or newsgroup. On the World-Wide Web, users can open up individual "web-sites" which contain any selected pieces of information--audio, video, or text--linked or edited together in any way, open to everyone else on the Internet. ₉₉   This democratization of publication represents a radical inversion of the national mass-broadcasting paradigm. As one New York Times article put it in ways that are suggestive of the de-massification of group identities, the Internet offers seemingly "infinite depths of narrowness." ₁₀₀  

There can be little doubt that the properties of the hypermedia environment outlined above are contributing to the rise of multiple and overlapping transnational "niche" communities observed by commentators across the theoretical spectrum--what Howard Rheingold has aptly described as an "ecosystem of subcultures." ₁₀₁   The values and goals of these movements are multiple and contradictory and reflect widely varying aspirations, from religious fundamentalist groups, to ethnic diasporas, to functionally defined interest groups, to terrorist organizations, to neo-Nazi movements. ₁₀₂   What is perhaps the most significant aspect of these communities, however, is the extent to which they are not bound by traditional notions of "territory" or "place" as prerequisites for membership. Geographical propinquity becomes less important as a basis for group identity as communities coalesce around shared interests in the "virtual" spaces of the hypermedia environment. As Appadurai explains, "sentiments whose greatest force is in their ability to ignite intimacy into a political sentiment and turn locality into a staging ground for identity, have become spread over vast and irregular spaces, as groups move, yet stay linked to one another through sophisticated media capabilities." ₁₀₃   The result is a much more decentered, multiperspectival universe of imagined communities--a "multi-centric" system, in Rosenau's words, comprised of "diverse subnational and supranational sovereignty-free actors." ₁₀₄   Nationalism, the visceral underpinning of modern world order, is giving way to nichelism--a polytheistic universe of multiple and overlapping fragmented communities above and below the sovereign nation-state.

Global Village or Planetary Villages?

It should be readily apparent how nichelism complements the fragmented, pluralistic view of imagined communities found in postmodern social epistemology. But what of the notion of a global identity so often identified with the planetary reach of hypermedia? What of McLuhan's "global village"? As a variety of observers have pointed out, superimposed upon all of these fragmented niche communities can be discerned an emerging "global" imagined community. ₁₀₅   Its identifying features are perhaps more ephemeral, evidenced not so much by a single cause as by a series of symbolic forms and discursive representations. Although human history is replete with ideas concerning the nature and spiritual significance of the world in the cosmos, it is only in the twentieth century that the idea of a single global society has been realistically broached, and the problem of its political and cultural organization examined. ₁₀₆   To be sure, this intensification of global consciousness is a product of a variety of concerns, foremost among them the recognition of environmental degradation and the spread of global consumer culture. However, there can be little doubt that the development of hypermedia has been one of the primary contributors to this embryonic sense of global identity, if even in a perceived negative way. In other words, reflections on the sheer scope of the hypermedia environment have contributed to a sense of global interconnectedness, beginning somewhat ironically with McLuhan's own aphorism: "the global village." Indeed, the perception of a tightly bound planetary community is hard to deny in a world that is constantly bombarded with images and reminders of the global reach of hypermedia. In this respect, the hypermedia environment reinforces both "the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole." ₁₀₇  

One immediate and widespread example is the proliferation of images of the earth. Today, it is hard to escape the "blue earth" image, whether it is in the form of a floating logo that signals the onset of CNN's Headline News, as a pamphlet header for an environmental awareness organization, as a cover-image for an International Relations theory textbook, or as a spinning ornament on the corner of a World-Wide Web home page. ₁₀₈   Without a doubt, it is by far the most saturated corporate logo in the history of commercial advertisement--one that seems to become ever more popular as the hypermedia environment deepens and expands. Its ubiquity alone is bound to have an impact on peoples' consciousness, as it already has to a considerable extent. As Cosgrove explains, images of the earth, like the Apollo photographs for example, "have been enormously significant in altering the shape of the contemporary geographical imagination." ₁₀₉   Through computer simulations and space-based sensing technologies, the planet has become for many a kind of virtual abstraction--less an enormous, mysterious biosphere than an object to be manipulated, controlled, and watched. ₁₁₀  

Does this global imagined community contradict the rise of postmodern "niche" communities? As many critical observers have pointed out, although the spread of global discourse and imagery signifies a sense of imagined community, it is a contested vision, one that is appropriated in different ways by different groups. ₁₁₁   For example, the one-world image features prominently as a symbol for transnational corporations and high-technology industries for whom it signifies "secular mastery of the world through secular control." ₁₁₂   For environmental movements, however, the same image represents "a quasi-spiritual interconnectedness and the vulnerability of terrestrial life." ₁₁₃   Indeed, the very paradoxical way in which the global image is appropriated by different communities reinforces the postmodern sense of heterotopia, or the coexistence of a large number of fragmentary worlds in an "impossible space." In other words, the global image itself embodies the very fragmentary and juxtapositional sense of pluralistic imagined communities that marks the postmodern sensibility. Despite the contested nature of the global image, however, the sense of boundedness and integration of the earth will likely prove significant in the long-term primarily as a challenge to modern claims of sovereign jurisdiction, but perhaps also as an imagined basis for an emerging planetary polis.

In this chapter, I have argued that the social constructs, cognitive biases, and symbolic forms of postmodern social epistemology will likely resonate in the future to a considerable extent more than they have to date as a result of a "fitness" between this social epistemology and the emerging hypermedia environment. Given the nature of the analysis, it is difficult to "prove" the argument beyond providing a kind of structured, "thick description" as outlined above. No doubt, other candidates for selection could be broached, though I doubt that any would be as comprehensive in "fitness" with the hypermedia environment as postmodern social epistemology seems to be. Some might object that since "postmodernism" is largely a Western phenomenon, it is unlikely to have implications for world order as a whole. While it is certainly true that the ideas outlined above have originated in the "West" and are so far largely confined to the West, they may well spread beyond their place of origin. After all, the idea of sovereignty also originated in the "West." ₁₁₄   Moreover, the fact that the "West" also happens generally to correspond to the richest and most powerful segment of elites in the world today should not be taken too lightly. If I am correct in suggesting that postmodern social epistemology will not be merely a "fad," but will only deepen and expand over time among those acculturated into the hypermedia environment, then it is likely that this social epistemology will have significant consequences, not just for individuals and societies, but also for the evolving architecture of world order as well.

What might these consequences be? Because changes in social epistemology are, by definition, an intergenerational process, any interpretation of their impact on world order transformation is bound to be speculative and somewhat tentative given the time frame involved. However, what is most interesting is the way many of the core features of postmodern social epistemology tend to complement and reinforce changes described in the previous chapter. For example, certainly the postmodern decentered self with multiple identities resonates with the demassification of imagined communities and the enmeshment of sovereign states in multiple layers of authority. And the latter seems especially to "fit" the postmodern sense of juxtaposition and superimposition, and nonlinear, pastiche-like orderings of space, as characterized by Foucault's notion of "heterotopia." The postmodern view of imagined or created worlds is also apropos in a world in which communities and corporations increasingly interact in the nonterritorial spaces of computer networks. And the recognition of "difference" and hyperplurality tends to complement a tightly bounded planet in which once-disparate cultures are thrust into close contact. From the perspective of social epistemology, these observations suggest that the emerging architecture of world order is moving away from territorially distinct, mutually exclusive, linear orderings of space toward nonlinear, multiperspectival, overlapping layers of political authority. Likewise, modern mass identities centered on the "nation" are being dispersed into multiple, nonterritorial "niche" communities and fragmented identities. The next, concluding chapter will attempt to sketch out some of the implications of these transformations.

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Note 1: Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity; Frederic Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92. Back.

Note 2: Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (New York: Basic Books, 1991). Back.

Note 3: Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, [Translated by Bernard & Caroline Schutze] (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987); Baudrillard, Simulations; and Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. Back.

Note 4: These definitional questions are taken up in Barry Smart, Postmodernity (New York: Routledge, 1993); Smart, Modern Conditions, Postmodern Controversies; Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sage Publications, 1991); Bryan Turner, ed., Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity (London: Sage Publications, 1990); and Pauline Rosenau, Post Modernism and the Social Sciences: insights, inroads, and intrusions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Back.

Note 5: As Smart put it, " there appears to be a shared sense that significant cultural Back.

Note 6: Huyssen, "Mapping the Postmodern," p. 24. Back.

Note 7: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, [Translated by Francis Golffing] (New York: Anchor Books, 1956); Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, [Translated by William Lovitt] (New York: Garland Publishers, 1977); Jonathan Culler, Saussure (Glasgow: Fontana, 1976). These connections are most explicitly made in the work of Richard Rorty. See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. See also Huyssen, "Mapping the Postmodern"; and Smart, Postmodernity, for similar touchstones on the path to the postmodern. Back.

Note 8: Brandon Taylor, Modernism, PostModernism, Realism: A Critical Perspective for Art (Winchester: Winchester School of Art Press, 1987). Back.

Note 9: Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 38. Back.

Note 10: I. Hassan, "The culture of postmodernism," Theory, Culture and Society 2, no. 3 (1985): 119-132. Back.

Note 11: Without a doubt, the most readable presentation is found in Richard Rorty's various works. Apart from others cited in this study, see especially Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Back.

Note 12: See Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). Back.

Note 13: See Charles Jencks, The Language of Postmodern Architecture (London: Sage Publications, 1984); and Jameson, "Postmodernism"; and Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 66-98. Back.

Note 14: See Taylor, Modernism, Postmodernism, Realism; Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 54-59; and Arthur Kroker and David Cook, The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and HyperAesthetics (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1987), pp. 20-27. Back.

Note 15: See Gellner, Reason and Culture for an overview of Cartesian and Kantian views on individual autonomy and selfhood. Back.

Note 16: As Burkitt notes, "concept of the self has begun to move away from the traditional image of the isolated individual, towards a concept of selfhood which emphasizes the social nature of the person." Ian Burkitt, "The Shifting Concept of the Self," History of the Human Sciences 7, no. 2 (1994): 7. Back.

Note 17: This is a point made by Harvey with regard to the postmodernist view of Marxism in The Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 53-54. Back.

Note 18: Jameson, "Postmodernism," p. 63. Back.

Note 19: Stuart Hall, "Brave New World," Socialist Review, pp. 58-59. Back.

Note 20: Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others, p. 155. Back.

Note 21: Rorty, Objectivism, Relativism and Truth, p. 199. Back.

Note 22: Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 40. Back.

Note 23: Ibid., p. 15. Back.

Note 24: Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy, "General Introduction," in Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy, eds., After Philosophy: End or Transformation? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 4. Back.

Note 25: E. E. Sampson, as quoted in Burkitt, "The Shifting Concept of the Self," p. 11. Back.

Note 26: See Deirdre Carmody, "Writers Fight For Electronic Rights," New York Times (November 7, 1994); See also, "The Property of the Mind," The Economist (July 27, 1996), available online at: http://www.economist.com/issue/27-07-96/wbsf1.html. Back.

Note 27: Anne W. Branscomb, "Common Law for the Electronic Frontier: Networked Computing Challenges the Laws That Govern Information and Ownership," Scientific American (September 1991), p. 154. Back.

Note 28: Ibid. Back.

Note 29: Ibid., p. 156. Back.

Note 30: See D. P. Tackaberry, "The Digital Sound Sampler: Weapon of the Technological Pirate or Pallet of the Modern Artist?" Entertainment Law Review 87, 1990); and Thomas G. Schumacher, " 'This Is Sampling Sport': Digital Sampling, Rap Music and the Law in Cultural Production," Media, Culture and Society 17 (1995): 253-273. Back.

Note 31: See B. R. Seecof, "Scanning into the Future of Copyrightable Images: Computerbased Image Processing Poses Present Threat," High Technology Law Journal 5 (1990): 371-400. Back.

Note 32: For example, my own computer turns on to the theme of the popular television show, the XFiles. The "default" key is programmed with the voice of Homer Simpson exclaiming "Doh!" And everytime I close a program, a voice lifted from the movie "Shaft" proclaims "Right On!" Back.

Note 33: John Perry Barlow, "The Economy of Ideas: A Framework for Rethinking Patents and Copyrights in the Digital Age," Wired (March 1994), p. 86. Back.

Note 34: See Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" in Josue V. Harari, (ed.), Textual Strategies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 35. See Gandy, The Panoptic Sort; Branscomb, "Common Law for the Electronic Frontier"; Bruce Phillips [Privacy Commissioner of Canada], "Privacy in the Information Age--An Oxymoron?" (Speech delivered to the University of Toronto XXXI Conference on Law and Contemporary Affairs, January 16, 1995); David Flaherty, Protecting Privacy in Surveillance Societies: The Federal Republic of Germany, Sweden, France, Canada and the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Richard Lipkin, "Making the Calls in a New Ear of Communication," Insight, (July 12, 1993): 6-13. Back.

Note 35: Foucault, "What is an Author?" Back.

Note 36: Equifax has 15,000 employees in 1,100 locations in the United States, Canada, and Europe. See Anne Wells Branscomb, Who Owns Information? From Privacy to Public Access (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 189, fn. 33. On page 19, Branscomb provides a good overview of the way debit card transactions in grocery stores are used to generate data on consumers. See also Gill, "The Global Panopticon?," pp. 16-17 for a similar discussion. Back.

Note 37: Gandy, The Panoptic Sort, p. 92. Back.

Note 38: "We know you're reading this," The Economist, (February 10, 1996): 27-28. Back.

Note 39: See especially, Ibid; See also Gill, "The Global Panopticon?." Back.

Note 40: Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 15-16. Back.

Note 41: Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, pp. 20-21. Back.

Note 42: Rheingold, The Virtual Community, p. 164. Back.

Note 43: See Peter H. Lewis, "Computer Jokes and Threats Ignite Debate on Anonymity," New York Times (December 31, 1994). For a provoking overview, see Julian Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace," The Village Voice (December 21, 1993): 36-42. Back.

Note 44: See Stephen Steinberg, "Travels on the Net," Technology Review (July 1994), p. 25; and Josh Quittner, "Johnny Manhattan Meets the FurryMuckers," Wired (March 1994), pp. 92-98. Back.

Note 45: "Cyberspace copyright treaties move toward adoption," CNN Interactive, (December 20, 1996). Back.

Note 46: The URL of the site is http://www.mudconnect.com/mud.html. Back.

Note 47: Gergen, The Saturated Self, p. 49. Back.

Note 48: Ibid., pp. 15-16. Back.

Note 49: Bauman, "Sociology and Postmodernity," p. 792. Back.

Note 50: See S. Kostof, A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Back.

Note 51: Once again, the most coherent overview of this position is provided by Richard Rorty in, among other works cited throughout this study, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; See also Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Natural Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). Back.

Note 52: For readable introductions, see Culler, On Deconstruction; and David Hoy, "Jacques Derrida," in Quentin Skinner, ed., The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 41-64. Back.

Note 53: As cited in Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 44. Back.

Note 54: As cited in Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 48. Back.

Note 55: As quoted in Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 40. Back.

Note 56: See "The Tangled webs they weave," Economist (October 16, 1993): 21-24. Back.

Note 57: Saxby, The Age of Information, p. 299. Back.

Note 58: Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 30. Back.

Note 59: Ibid., p. 35. Back.

Note 60: For description, see Philip ElmerDewit, "Take a Trip into the Future on the Electronic Superhighway," Time (April 12, 1993): 50; Nicholas P. Negroponte, "Products and Services for Computer Networks," Scientific American (September 1991) also provides a good overview of this "paradigm" of navigation. Back.

Note 61: See Elkins, Beyond Sovereignty, p. 54. Back.

Note 62: Gergen, The Saturated Self, p. 133 See also Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Sign and Space (London: Sage Publications, 1994), p. 16. Back.

Note 63: Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 302. Back.

Note 64: Taylor, Modernism, PostModernism, Realism, p. 103; see also Bauman, "Sociology and postmodernity," p. 796; and Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984). Back.

Note 65: For overviews of "virtual reality," see Benjamin Woolley, Virtual Worlds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993); Thomas B. Sheridan and David Zeltzer, "Virtual Reality Check," Technology Review (October 22, 1993), pp. 20-28; and the special issue on "Virtual Reality," of IEEE Spectrum (October 1993). Back.

Note 66: See especially, Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism; and Ewen, All Consuming Images. Back.

Note 67: This study is cited in Nathan Gardels and Leila Conners, "Republic of the Image," New Perspectives Quarterly 11 no. 3 (Summer 1994): 2. Back.

Note 68: John Battelle with Bob Johnstone, "Seizing the Next Level: Sega's Plan for World Domination," Wired (December 1993): 73. Back.

Note 69: In 1993--long before the explosion of the WorldWide Web--15 million people downloaded shareware versions of the game Doom. See "A World Gone Soft: A Survey of the Software Industry," The Economist(May 28, 1996), available online at: http://www.economist.com/surveys/software/index.html. Back.

Note 70: The advertisement appears on page 69 of Wired (March 1994). Back.

Note 71: Donald P. Greenberg, "Computers and Architecture," Scientific American (February 1991). Back.

Note 72: Der Derian, AntiDiplomacy, chapter 2; and James Der Derian, "Global Swarming, Virtual Security, and Bosnia," The Washington Quarterly 19, no. 3, Summer (1996): 45-56. Back.

Note 73: See Stephen Hall, Mapping the Next Millennium: How ComputerDriven Cartography is Revolutionizing the Face of Science (New York: Vintage Books, 1992); Timothy Ostler, "Revolution in Reality," Geographical Magazine (May 1994): 12-14. Back.

Note 74: See Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, p. 14. Back.

Note 75: For an early and still outstanding treatment of this issue in particular, see Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to PseudoEvents in America (1961); and Daniel J. Boorstin, "A History of the Image: From PseudoEvent to Virtual Reality," New Perspectives Quarterly 11, no. 3, Summer (1994): 16-21; Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death; and Kiku Adatto, Picture Perfect: The Art and Artiface of Public Image Making (New York: Basic Books, 1993). Back.

Note 76: Timothy Luke, "Simulated Sovereignty, Telematic Territoriality: The Political Economy of Cyberspace," (unpublished draft, 1996), p. 31. Back.

Note 77: Jean Baudrilard, Simulations. Translated by Paul Foxx, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). Scott Lash and John Urry make a similar argument in Economies of Sign and Space, p. 3. Back.

Note 78: Gianni Vatimmo, The Transparent Society, [Translated by David Webb] (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 7. Back.

Note 79: Bauman, "Sociology and Postmodernity," p. 799. Back.

Note 80: Richard Rorty, Objectivism, relativism and truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 6; and Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xix. Back.

Note 81: Bauman, "Sociology and postmodernity," p. 799. Back.

Note 82: See Elkins, Beyond Sovereignty, especially chapter 6 on "A Community of Communities." Back.

Note 83: "Interpretive communities" is taken from Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980). Back.

Note 84: Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 17. Back.

Note 85: Ibid., p. 26. Back.

Note 86: See Edward S. Herman, "The Externalities Effects of Commercial and Public Broadcasting," in Nordenstreng and Schiller, eds., Beyond National Sovereignty, pp. 84-115. Back.

Note 87: See Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988); The classic work in this genre is, of course, Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: The Free Press, 1965) [originally published in 1922]. Back.

Note 88: A good discussion of these arrangements in a North American context can be found in Steven Globerman and Aidan Vining, "Trade, Investment and the Culture Industries: Bilateral Issues in the PostNAFTA Era," (Unpublished draft, 1995). Back.

Note 89:  Lee and Wang, "Satellite TV in Asia," p. 135. As Lee and Wang note on page 142, "The debate on banning or restricting the reception of satellite television is clearly alive in nations which have tried to bar its entry into their territory, and the pressure to "liberalize" satellite television is showing no signs of lessening." Back.

Note 90:  Ibid., p. 135. Back.

Note 91:  "Feeling for the Future," p. 12. As the article goes on to explain, "The explosion of choice has blown gaping holes in Europe's public broadcasters. Italy's RAI, Spain's RTVE and Germany's ARD and ZDF are all facing financial ruin." See Jane Perlez, "Habits Die Hard in Central Europe," New York Times (May 13, 1996) for an article on deregulation of state television in Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic. Back.

Note 92:  John Tagliabue, "Tapping the Power of Satellite TV," New York Times (April 15, 1996). Back.

Note 93:  See Gary Stix, "Domesticating Cyberspace," Scientific American (August 1993). Back.

Note 94:  The composer is Todd Rundgren, whose No World Order was released on the compactdiskinteractive format. See Edward C. Baig, "Ready, Set Go OnLine," Business Week (Special 1994 Issue), p. 124. Back.

Note 95:  See ElmerDewit, "Take a Trip into the Future," p. 50. Back.

Note 96:  For discussion see Nicholas Negroponte, "Products and Services for Computer Networks," Scientific American (September 1991): 106-113. Back.

Note 97:  In Japanese, these "virtual communities" are called "tokumeisei no komyuniti" or communities of anonymity. See Kumiko Aoki, "Virtual Communities in Japan: Their Cultures and Infrastructures," AsiaPacific Exchange (Electronic) Journal 2, no. 1, March 1995). Back.

Note 98:  For discussion, see Robert Wright, "Hyper Democracy," Time (January 23, 1995): 46; and Stephen Steinberg, "Travels on the Net," Technology Review (July 1994): 22. Back.

Note 99:  For discussion of "websites" see Kurt Kleiner, "What a tangled Web they wove " New Scientist (July 30, 1994): 35-39. Academics are increasingly using such personal "websites" to "house" unpublished manuscripts and draftsinprogress for criticism and publicity. Back.

Note 100: See Steve Lohr, "The Great Mystery of Internet Profits," New York Times (June 17, 1996). Back.

Note 101: Rheingold, The Virtual Community, p. 3. Back.

Note 102: To give just a few examples, a dissident Catholic bishop in France, Jacques Gaillot, set up a WorldWide Web page as a kind of "virtual congegration" that received 250,000 visits in the first six weeks of 1996. See "Virtual Bishop Has Cyberspace Congregation," CNN OnLine (September 1, 1996). Using a different part of the hypermedia spectrum, the Christian evangelist preacher Billy Graham preached via satellite to one billion people in 185 countries on a single day. See Hamid Mowlana, "The Communications Paradox," The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (July/August 1995), p. 40. Back.

Note 103: Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy," Theory, Culture, and Society 7 (1990): 306. Back.

Note 104: Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics. Back.

Note 105: See especially, Mary Catherine Bateson, "Beyond Sovereignty: An Emerging Global Civilization," in R. B. J. Walker and Saul Mendlovitz, eds., Contending Sovereignties: Redefining Political Communities (Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 1990; and Daniel Deudney, "Global Environmental Rescue and the Emergence of World Domestic Politics," in Ronnie Lipschutz and Ken Conca, eds., The State and Social Power in Global Environmental Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Back.

Note 106: Roland Robertson, "Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as the Central Concept," Theory, Culture and Society 7 (1990): 21. Back.

Note 107: Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (Newbury Park, CA.: Sage Publications, 1992). Back.

Note 108: Consider just the one following anecdotal illustration: in the 1977 third edition of K. J. Holsti's International Politics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1977) textbook, there is no index entry for the word "global"; in the 5th edition (1988), however, not only is there an entry for "Global system, contemporary" but there are also 10 separate subheadings, including "rules of," "structure of," and "ideological issues in." Moreover, the 5th edition features a color image of the earth suspended in space. Back.

Note 109: Denis Cosgrove, "Contested Global Visions: OneWorld, Whole Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84, no. 2 (1994): 271. Back.

Note 110: See Wolfgang Sachs, ed., Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict (London: Zed Books, 1993). Back.

Note 111: For criticism of the idea of a global imagined community, see Anthony D. Smith, "Towards a Global Culture?" Theory, Culture and Society 7 (1991): 171-191. Back.

Note 112: Cosgrove, "Contested Global Visions," p. 287. Back.

Note 113: Ibid. Back.

Note 114: For discussion of this theme, see the articles collected in Bull and Watson, eds., The Expansion of International Society. Back.

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Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation