In response to the discussion of the questioning of nationalistic and political intentions (apropos of Bell’s argument in his chapter Community and Cyberculture), my own analysis was drawn to the concept of “deep time” as defined by Wai-Chee Dimock in her examination of “nonstandard time”. Dimock suggests a spatial continuum in which, through its contiguous nature, connects current and popular meanings and works to the antecedent, extending (essentially) to infinity. Dimock then applies this definition to the national canon, a key tenant of the nationalist sentiment. Arguably, a nation/state cannot claim nationalist pride without a body of work (be it literature, art, etc.) in which to support the nations claims to solidarity. However, the application of Dimock’s deep time severs the nationalist’s politicization of the aforementioned body precisely because deep time suggests a historical perspective in which the nation/state does not exist in a strictly geographical and theoretical conception. According to Dimock, deep time,
This produces a map that, thanks to its receding horizons, its backward extension into far-flung temporal and spatial coordinates, must depart significantly from a map predicated on the short life of the US. For the force of historical depth is such as to suggest a world
that predates the adjective American.
This theory applies perfectly to the body of the web and its uncanny demonstration of Dimock’s theory. The vast and expansive nature of information stored in cyberspace is astonishing in both scope and historical diversity. The body of the web is truly transnational in the strictest sense of the term.
The webpage criticalpast.com represents deep time with resounding pertinence, questioning not only the Platonic conception of space and time, but also the nationalist boarders imposed by the modernist’s conception of nationalism. The site is devoted to public access to an extensive film and photo archive dating back to the earliest films of Edison and Lumiere. The website is organized with the clear intent of allowing its users to browse particular historical epochs by decades. By selecting the “Browse” tab at the top of the page, the user is then brought to a graph presenting the amount of films contained within each year. The experience of selecting the year 1898 and finding archival video of refugees in Cuba during the Spanish American war on the same webpage as Edison’s “A Street Arab” cuts to the very core of deep time and nationalism; one can almost imagine a page of history folded upon itself in a vast library without boarders…
In 2004 an article titled “Cyber-Communities: Idle Talk or Inspirational Interaction” was published by Meira van der Spa in the journal Educational Technology, Research and Development. The article studied an online community in the Netherlands, analyzing the activities of the community in communication with the theory that online communities represent the model (supposedly) embodied by the “scientific community”. According to the article, the very nature of any community, “is a basis for the development of the scientific mind and that collaboration, discussion and self-correction are essential to the advancement of scientific truth”. Essentially, the study conducted a firsthand experiential survey of a non-scientific community (www.fok.nl) in attempts to understand the online community in relationship to a hard-science community. Ultimately, however, the study concludes that, “although there appears to be agreement that the community is a learning environment, there is insufficient evidence that this particular community inspires collaboration and discussion to a degree where scientific truth is sought”. While the quest for “scientific truth” (a term clearly problematic in nature) is specifically employed in the study, the terms of the study can easily be transposed to a far more broad and inclusive terms. The question is then begged:
Do online communities expand a zeitgeistian understanding of transnational truth-values? Online communities, after all, typically represent (relatively) diverse demographics with numerous historical and cultural perspectives. Hegelian Dialectics would suggest that a community of diverse opinions would synthesis a new thesis through the collision of thesis (1) and antithesis (1), whether or not said synthesis is scientific in nature is irrelevant in the discussion of non-scientific communities. However, what is significant is the implication that online communities represent a rapidly expanding global community creating entirely new ways of examining so called “truths”. The significance of this dialectic can be seen in nearly any online community, but I would suggest that the community at www.somethingawful.com represents a pastiche of the (ever obtuse and illusive) truth values.
A personal guilty web pleasure (no, not that kind of site) of mine has always been www.lifehacker.org, a website devoted to unconventional hacks not always consumed with cyber hacks. The hacks demonstrated on life hacker are often based in RL reality. Much like cyber hacks, life hacks are modifiers of common experiences and objects. An examination of the site would find that most of the hacks are related to increasing productivity and general utility in second life and real life. For instance, the site features both “The George Costanza Lifehack for Overcoming Fear and Anxiety” and “11 Free Mind Mapping Applications & Web Services”. The latter post leads readers to Freemind, an application that allows users to essentially store and log their minds into a virtual web, easily accessed and coded. While it would be oversimplified to suggest that Freemind is simply a tool solely analogous to a postmodern diary, the apps ability to search ones thoughts and analyze the mapped web of the human consciousness presents Freemind as a hard drive that the user can store and access his thoughts. This further raises the question often discussed by robotic and virtual theorists of the singularity, or the point in which computer mediated mechanisms obtain intelligence beyond that of their creator (us). Some would suggest that this singularity takes place when a computer has the ability to engender consciousness. The ability to implant even what Freemind suggests is a concept that rapidly approaches this theoretical point. This question of transferring human intelligence and consciousness to computers is often quoted in academic studies of digital media and its progression, but the discourse has only recently become a complete field complete with moralist and economic analyses. The Following article examines the moral aspects of the possibility of such an event in moralistic terms that would have Kant rolling over in his grave.
http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai.html
