Ms Sana Asif
The child stands upright holding on to objects & may walk holding on the child can crawl around, the child has fully developed eyesight can self feed with fingers and spoon can wave goodbye and point out, can cry when left with strangers from carer-separation anxiety, smiles for the main career & understands more of what is going on around them, begins there first words
Is the Internet a weapon? This question may sound strange, maybe verging on conspiracy, but as the Age of the Internet or The Networked Society continues on its trajectory, we are indelibly lead to ask questions about and reinvent its “essence”. The streets are full of voices claiming that the Internet is like no other invention in the history of technology. These enthusiastic claims stem from a number of the Internet’s more esoteric qualities: it is media-independent, consisting of billions of links, sites, sights, sounds, endless avenues and twisting, morphing networks. Like a Polanyian organism, it reaches out in every direction, a rhizomatous mass of tentacles. It prophets proclaim: the Internet is a communications monolith. This image of the Internet leaves us with a sense of technological sublimity. How is one not overwhelmed by the spilled ink and words saturating us, pummelling us, with testimonies of its ultimate potentiality and possibilities. Are we not in the midst of the Great Techno-mind? Does this understanding of the Internet not embody many of the qualities of St. Anselm’s God? Yet, I claim that the Internet is a technological gestalt.[3] This other image is not the Democratic tencho-deity, but an ambivalent image of a military weapon. If the Internet is a techno-deity of infinite potential we must also admit that this ultimately derives from the potentiality of use, as well as potentials of ontology. That is to say, this Gestalt changes its appearance when we look at its differing potential uses. This point is banal enough, is it not? This paper asks these two questions: What is
Is the Internet a weapon? This question may sound strange, maybe verging on conspiracy, but as the Age of the Internet or The Networked Society continues on its trajectory, we are indelibly lead to ask questions about and reinvent its “essence”. The streets are full of voices claiming that the Internet is like no other invention in the history of technology. These enthusiastic claims stem from a number of the Internet’s more esoteric qualities: it is media-independent, consisting of billions of links, sites, sights, sounds, endless avenues and twisting, morphing networks. Like a Polanyian organism, it reaches out in every direction, a rhizomatous mass of tentacles. It prophets proclaim: the Internet is a communications monolith. This image of the Internet leaves us with a sense of technological sublimity. How is one not overwhelmed by the spilled ink and words saturating us, pummelling us, with testimonies of its ultimate potentiality and possibilities. Are we not in the midst of the Great Techno-mind? Does this understanding of the Internet not embody many of the qualities of St. Anselm’s God? Yet, I claim that the Internet is a technological gestalt.[3] This other image is not the Democratic tencho-deity, but an ambivalent image of a military weapon. If the Internet is a techno-deity of infinite potential we must also admit that this ultimately derives from the potentiality of use, as well as potentials of ontology. That is to say, this Gestalt changes its appearance when we look at its differing potential uses. This point is banal enough, is it not? This paper asks these two questions: What is