[Week2_2] Doing what they've always been doing

The main premise of Webster and Robin is that the information society is nothing new, and rather a extension of the industrial capitalism society. I completely agree with this view. Most of the early optimistic, even utopian views on the democratic and subversive potentials of the Internet were raised before everybody was online, when the cyberspace was more or less a ghetto of liberal intellectual geeks, so to say. They simply did what they had been doing in the age of analog libraries, only to a greater extent: developing a collaborative and open network of information (the reference list and footnotes of academic journal articles were the primitive forms of 'hypertext'). First, the non-geek users came in and thought in high hopes that this atmosphere was due to the technological /media features of the net. But then the merchants came in and did what they had been doing: painting ads all over the place, screaming to gain more money and so on. Governments came in and tried to eavesdrop everything and bring regulation (in worse cases, censorship) as they always did elsewhere. Hate speech, non-sensical trolls in the forums, winner-takes-all competitions and every other communicative patterns that were present in the real world appeared in the cyberspace. Amplified, because the cyberspace is a world of pure interaction, thus making 'communication' more salient. The so-called problems of the information society are nothing more than the problems of modern (I hate the misleading term 'post-modern') brakeless capitalism.