ix Poster

From the vantage point of the year 2006, reading Mark Poster and his viewpoints on the potential future(s) of technology really emphasizes for me all the changes that have occurred in just the decade since he wrote this article. Changes that even in hindsight seem to have developed at an almost exponential rate.

One of the more interesting, current parallels that kept coming to mind while reading was the notion of MySpace.com. Poster’s references to simulated communities, particularly the example he provides of “the Well” seem to be distant evolutionary cousin to the megalithic community that is now myspace. Clicking on “Tom,” the virtual face and name of myspace.com one finds that this community is nearly 116 million strong, more than one-third the “real” population of the United States. A far cry from the mere 30 million Internet users in the world at the time Poster was writing. Exponential increase indeed.

In the section “Narratives in Cyberspace,” Poster quotes an observer who posits that for the first time, through “cyber-tales…the many are talking to the many…everyday…[in] more and more idiosyncratic, interactive and individualistic” ways. (M 543). What the observer bespeaks of is the no more pertinent a subject than the very act of what I am doing at this moment and time: blogging. (For you, though, it is blog reading). These cyber-tales, now blogs, can definitely be idiosyncratic—I’ve read some written by peoples pets, others in “Klingon” speak, etc. As for interactive, many blogs allow the opportunity for the community and “foreign visitors” to post comments. And for individualistic “expressions,” all one needs to do is scroll down this very blog site, which I’m sure can be seen as a microcosmic representation of blogger voices out in the world wide.