Cyberspace QUOTES
Information and communication technologies are about to inflict widespread
social, cultural, economic, and political change upon the twenty-first century.
The advance promises to deliver greater efficiency, speed, power, control, and knowledge
and with this is the potential for personal development, the transformation of work, and the
production of value.
ICT's offer users to access information and communicate with whom they want, freed from the
material and social constraints of their bodies, identities, communities, and geographies - means
that these technologies are regarded as potentially liberating for those who are socially, materially,
or physically disadvantaged.
The technologically illiterate may be excluded from many forms of employment and also suffer from
wider social exclusion because they will be unable to participate in "normal" activities.
The Information Age, children - as symbols of the future, are at the heart of debates both about
pssibilities that ICTs afford should be realized and about the dangers of social exclusion for those who
are not technoliterate.
The fear is that computer-obsessed children will socially withdraw from the off-line world of family and friends
thereby missing out on the imaginative opportunities for play that the outdoors is perceived to offer,
and that they will become addicted to the screen, putting not only thier social but thier physical well-being at risk.
Children may be at risk for corruption from Internet material
Threat to childhood as an institution, because of their potential to threaten childhood "innocence" and blur the
differentiation commonly made between the states of childhood and adulthood.
"Real" vs "Virtual world unconnected, oftentimes oppositional to each other.
"the material body is not simply rendered invisible on-line: it becomes completely irrelevant.
"virtual realities are more intimate and richer because they are formed on the basis of genuine mutual
interest, rather than being based on the coincidence of off-line proximitiy.
the disappearing city where chronological typographies replace constructed geographical space,
where immaterial broadcast emissions decompose and eradicate a sense of place"
While we may "lose ourselves" in a good book or in a state of online interaction, its something that is of
the mind, not the body.
"artifactual" view, in which technology is severed from the normative context of social practice.
viewing technology as a "neutral tool" whose impact is entirely determined by the intentions of its users.
Actor Network Theory - the actors in these actor networks redefine each other in action in ways which mean
that there are no simple one-to-one relationships from technology to people but rather a constantly ongoing, inventive,
and constantly reciprocal process of social acquaintance and reacquaintance.
The disembodied and asynchronistic nature of on-line interactions also offers people the oppotunity to position
themselves in new ways.
When children take on other personas it is invariably to adopt what they regard as more desireable or powerful
identities than thier own. Usually older and based on models or sports heros
