Hand’s commentary on the political dimensions of digital culture (the promise of ‘social inclusion and empowerment, interactive citizenship, and participary democracy’ (p.16) and the threat of individualism and rejection of the state) led me to link into commentaries on the recent Arab Spring movement.  The commentator I selected presented an alternative to the utopia/dystopia binary – cyberrealism – which seemed not to tell the whole story, perhaps presenting a more dystopic sense of ‘inevitability’ than the author intended.

The film review postings were a whistle stop tour of notions of digital cultures that Hand introduced, blended with ideas put forward in the Synchtube tutorial. I made connections to themes of digital culture in societal and economic spheres – sometimes bending the the themes to fit my readings of the pieces.

Finally, while watching a BBC documentary about the emergence of the railways in the industrial revolution and I was struck by the similarities in attitudes towards promise and threat of technology and in particular the view point of Carlyle. The struggle and tensions for the acceptance of technology into everyday culture seem to me to be timeless.

This piece appears to represent a dystopian view on the role of technology, and is potentially a metaphor for its links to capitalism. There are religious echoes throughout: the sub-title ‘Obey his command’; the mount sinai ascent; the dense clouds; thunder and lightening and the worship. The religion in this case appears perhaps to be that of ‘commodity’ at least in the first instance (the proliferation of adverts on the TV, the wastefulness). The deity who gifts this technology then, is perhaps not a metaphysical, spiritual being, but one which has an interest in commodification. Within this proposed metaphor it could represent any one of a number of large corporate entities with an eye on profit within the digital/media world; Facebook, twitter, Google for instance, all of whom share a ‘free’ product with citizens. The omnipresence of the deity becomes apparent when the searchlights begin to track down the citizens. All the while its gift is fracturing the old society, by segmenting it into groups (football fans; gym junkies; children). This could potentially be an example of Lyon’s (2001) ‘intensifying surveillance techniques which increasingly and routinely ‘sort’ populations’ (quoted in Hand p.30) which as Hand goes on to say is a practice ‘inextricably tied to the commodifying tendencies of late capitalism’ (Hand p.30). Finally, in this piece the technology has a tendency to dispatch (read – ‘kill’) citizens, especially those who are different (ice-cream eater), and perhaps this is representative of Hand’s ‘coming society of monadic citadels, a neo-feudal ghettoisation of excluded communities subsisting in a parody of ‘competitive capitalism’ and the global market of atomised interests’ p.33

THANKS fellow #ededc-ers for the ideas!!!

Morozov believes the Arab Spring, should be viewed via the lens of ‘cyber-realism’. In a nutshell, he thinks, Facebook, Twitter were kind of important but they weren’t the be all and end all – good old traditional human agency was at work. One of his arguments is that previous revolutionary movements (Bolshevik; Iranian; revolutions of 1989) are remembered for the human issues not the technological means (telegraph; tape-recorder; fax machine). He says:

‘Will history consign Twitter and Facebook to much the same fate 20 years down the road? In all likelihood, yes. The current fascination with technology-driven accounts of political change in the Middle East is likely to subside…’

He may have a point, but I don’t think that means that the role technology played was that of a mere tool. Arguably, the recent uprisings would not have happened as they did if the communications infrastructure, the social media, the mobile phones and all of the other ‘things’ involved didn’t exist. It could be argued that the affordances that these ‘things’ performed were equally as powerful in determining the shape of the uprisings as the activists and that *together* they formed a hugely vigorous, rolling mashup of sociomaterial networks that was forceful enough to topple regimes.

If that’s true, the question of whether the phenomenon is dystopian or utopian, perhaps depends on your perspective.