The World with The Internet

This internet is “the primary socio-technical architecture that enables the mobility of data with a logic of informationalism.”    [Ned Rossiter, fibreculture]

Imagining a world without the Internet is nearly impossible. Despite the Internet’s global significance, less than 20 percent of the world’s 6 billion people currently have access to the educational, social and economic opportunities it can create.

[Isolated centres]

Globlisation in its literal definition is to develop or be developed so as to make possible international influence or operation.  This generally refers to business, industry and commerce through communication and the globalising of capital markets.  It speaks also of a unification of the peoples of the world, within a single society functioning together, and of the flattening of the globe.  Arguments for and against this notion have long been debated, but the point of interest here is in the image of ‘sweeping generality’.  Globalisation paints a picture of replication/duplication, of standardization, uniformity through commercialisation.  It renders the world in a scripted language akin to that of programming source code, where the meaning in the content is near undistinguishable between programmes of completely contrasting ends.

There exists then, an issue of identity.

“What identity feels like when you become aware you undoubtedly have one’, Erikson answered: it feels ‘as a subjective sense of an invigorating sameness and continuity.’” [Identity in the globalising world, Zygmunt Bauman, 2000]

Identity describes the characteristics determining an individual or a place. In the context of Nowa Huta and Sheffield these were once places whereby their very existence lay in parallel to the absolute strength of their identities as places.  ‘The Steel City’.  The very connection of people and place indicates that identity and is socially produced:

“‘Individualisation’ consists in transforming human ‘identity’ from a ‘given’ into a ‘task’, and charging the actors with the responsibility for performing that task and for the consequences of their performance; […] the shape of our sociality, and so of the society we share, depends in its turn on the way in which the task of ‘individualisation’ is framed up and responded to.”  [Identity in the globalising world, Zygmunt Bauman, 2000]

Bauman proclaims that instead of talking about identities, inherited or acquired, it would be more in keeping with the realities of the globalising world to speak of identification, a never-ending, always incomplete, unfinished and open-ended activity in which we all, by necessity or by choice, are engaged.

Nowa Huta and Sheffield are caught within the requiem of the post-industrial no-mans-land of post-identity.  In the absence of manufacturing in there exists a strong uprising of creative cultures in both these cities; suspended within this back-drop of post-industrial anonymity there lies an inescapable stratum of artistic stimulus…

Second Life, a city created by its people, is a place entirely absent of identity. Users assume avatars, alternative virtual manifestations of their actual selves, thus they assume the role which they envisage these imagined characters possess.

“Identities sought these days are such as ‘ can be adopted and discarded like a change of costume’”

The idea of the digital city came about from the technological convergence of computers, telecommunications and mass media, coupled with the social and cultural context of the ‘information society’ and ‘network society’. The very globality of the internet feeds a hunger for its immediate opposite – a smaller, simpler and more localized world where every person can make a difference.  Bringing people together in the electronic agora is never going to replace the sense of community that evolved from by-gone eras.  The loss of social capital – of people normally networking in person turn to the convenient but lifeless medium of computers instead.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vFe2a29hms]

“Public ambivalence towards globalization – increased appreciation of the local & romantic yearning for small town-sense of community of times past.”

As basic services and amentities are sucked in the metaphorical black-hole of the metaverse, communities are devolving, straying the border from the physical to the virtual.

According to Bauman, ‘the frantic search of identity’ is developed from the combination of a rapidly globalising world and the social pressures for individualisation.  Has this frantic forage for individualism also become devolved from the locality and seeking out a sense for community within the digital city?  

“Digital cities are built for analog, flesh and blood citizens.We are not, cannot, and never will be our avatars.” [The construction of the digital city, Helen Couclelis, 2002]