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Monsters in cyberspace cyberphobia and cultural panic in the information age

2006; Routledge; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13691180500519407

1468-4462

Barry Sandywell,

Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

Abstract This paper explores popular attitudes toward the Internet (and computer-mediated communication more generally) by mapping some of the more threatening, transgressive and 'monstrous' images associated with cyberspace. An account of risk consciousness is developed in three parts: (1) comparisons with earlier information technologies reveals similarities and differences with regard to public attitudes toward cyberspace and its risks; (2) the development of a model of contemporary teratological space derived from images of boundary-dissolving threats, intrusive alterities and existential ambivalences created by the erosion of binary distinctions and hierarchies; and (3) possible historical and sociological explanations of cyberpanic drawing on recent theorizations of globalization (capitalism/information society theory, risk society theory, reflexive modernization theory, and alterity theory). Keywords: cyberspacecyberphobiacybercrimecyberterrorismteratological spacemoral panicsdigital capitalismglobalizationrisk societyalterity theorycritical Net research Notes 1. Dorner (2000 Dorner, J. 2000. The Internet: A Writer's Guide, London: A & C Black. [Google Scholar], pp. 154–155); also Abbate (1999) Abbate, J. 1999. Inventing the Internet, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]; Loader (1998) Loader, B. D. 1998. The Cyberspace Divide, Edited by: Loader, B. D. London: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; Porter (1996) Porter, D. 1996. Internet Culture, Edited by: Porter, D. London and New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]; Shields (1996) Shields, R. 1996. Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, Edited by: Shields, R. London: Sage. [Google Scholar]. 2. Representative pronouncements of cyberevangelists can be found in the early editions of the futuristic magazine Wired (see Wired UK March 1995). Howard Rheingold's Virtual Reality (1992), Michael Benedikt's Cyberspace (1991), and Scott Bukatman's Terminal Identity (1993) may be read as classical statements of digital utopianism where cyberidentities acquire a fluidity and protean transformability that undermines the fixed roles and statuses of pre-digital society. 3. Such paranoid responses when fused with the fear of the totalitarian rule of 'experts/scientists/bureaucrats' and the 'loss of community' may well be viewed as one of the most widespread neuroses of the late twentieth century, reflected, for example, in Max Weber's dark foreboding about the irreversible spread of bureaucracy in modern society, the hegemony of instrumental rationality in the work of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, the dystopian future in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, E.M. Forster's 'The Machine Stops', George Orwell's 'Big Brother', Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society, Lewis Mumford's The Pentagon of Power, and the Frankenstein image of science and technoculture as the modern Golem. 4. On the functions of apocalyptic rhetoric and its links with fin-de-siècle anxieties see Jay (1993) Jay, M. 1993. "The apocalyptic imagination and the inability to mourn". In Forcefields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique, 84–98. London and New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar] and more recently Aitchison (2003) Aitchison, J. 2003. "From Armaggon to War: The vocabulary of terrorism". In New Media Language, Edited by: Aitchison, J. and Lewis, D. 193–203. London and New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]; for anti-capitalist movements see Hertz (2001) Hertz, N. 2001. The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy, London: William Heinemann. [Google Scholar]. 5. 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Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace, Melbourne: Spinifex Press. [Google Scholar]; Hopkins 1998 Hopkins, P. 1998. Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender and Technology, Edited by: Hopkins, P. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. [Google Scholar]), and explorations of new occupations and disciplines associated with cyberspace security and counterintelligence (Schneier 2000 Schneier, B. 2000. Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World, New York: Wiley. [Google Scholar]; Sprenger 2001 Sprenger, P. 2001. How to Make It On the Internet, London: Virgin Publishing. [Google Scholar]). Additional informationNotes on contributorsBarry SandywellBarry Sandywell PhD is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Sociology at York, UK. He is the author of Logological Investigations (Routledge, 1996), a three-volume work on the history of reflexivity, alterity and ethics in philosophy and the human sciences. He is also the co-editor, with Ian Heywood, of Interpreting Visual Culture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual (Routledge, 1999). His most recent publications are 'E-Topia as Cosmopolis or Citadel. On the Democratizing and De-democratizing Logics of the Internet, or, Towards a Critique of the New Technological Fetishism', in Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 19, nos 1–2, 2002 [co-written with Martin Hand], 'Metacritique of Information', in Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 20, no. 1, 2003, and 'The Myth of Everyday Life: Toward a Heterology of the Ordinary' and 'Beyond Metaphysics and Nihilism', in Rethinking Everyday Life: And Then Nothing Turns Itself Inside Out, eds Michael E. Gardiner and Gregory J. Seigworth, Cultural Studies, Routledge, London, vol. 18, nos 2/3, 2004.