The Information Society and the Remaking of the World - Essay Example

The Shift from the World of Control
Earlier, repressive regimes and authoritarian productions housed have nearly complete control over who writes what and who reads what. Now, such a scenario is impossible with the heterogeneous content production by bloggers, Twitter and Facebook users, and millions of internet activists. Even big media houses are now quoting from blogs and uses tweets and Facebook updates as genuine news sources. For instance, in the controversy of Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers as Supreme Court Justice Candidate, Bruns points out that “CNN and other news organizations accepted bloggers’ voices as an obvious part of the U.S. mediasphere, a natural indicator of public opinion on the nominee” (2008, pp. 247-8). Earlier, the controlled world of knowledge and information was characterized by gate watching and gatekeeping which materialized through the works of middle man, reporters, editors, and censors (Bruns, 2003, p. 36). At present, on the other hand, new media technologies have caused a paradigm shift in the realm of content production by eliminating the hierarchical structures within and by an “unprecedented transformation during the past decades, from the audience as passive consumers of media to users as active content creators (Burns, 2010, p. 24). The co-production of content by the users is enhanced by the invention of internet tools such as blogging, filesharing, and feedback and comments (Reading, 2006, p.2).
The media sphere in the twenty-first century is no more entirely controlled by the big sharks. Still, the digital divide exit between the Global South and Global north is a matter of grave concern. Also, the irresponsible use of information technology such as addictive gaming and social networking must be resisted. In brief, the privileges of the network-information society must be deployed for the services of the underprivileged through people-friendly technologies and digital interventions.

The Dynamics of Identity Formation in the Network Society
Introduction
Identity formation has become one of the most contending topics in the contemporary network society. The digital and the identity are closely related in an increasingly globalized world. What role information technology plays in shaping contemporary identity? How the interdependence and interconnectivity assisted by the new Information and Communication Technologies are defining even the most parochial identities from across the world? The predominance of the digital in the economic, political, and cultural realms of human life is leading to a new situation in which fluid identities are constituted by the digital. In brief, identity has become networked.
The Great Digital Turn
Globalization, according to Schifferes, is blamed for many of the ills of the modern world, but it is also praised for bringing unprecedented prosperity (2007, p.1). The prosperity is often attributed to the economic realm only and the ills are often identified with the questions of identity in a globalized world. Manuel Castells has famously argued that the end of the Cold War and the subsequent spread of information technology across the world are marked up by the beginning of the invention of the “space of the flows” (2010, p.18). The identity in the network society is not formulated in either the realm of the material or the ideal. Rather, the identity in a network society as a fluid entity recreates itself through the constant encounter with the space of flows. The flows of information, people, capital, and goods are the defining feature of the present. The contradiction between the identity and the network society lies in the fact that identity is essentially local and closely related to the real while networks are by definition global and exist in the realm of digital. Therefore, identity formulation in a technologically sophisticated society would be intensely connected to the changing relations between space, time, and technology. As technology helps human beings to shrink time and overcome the constraints of space and time in digital space, it certainly results in reformulating the identity based on changed time and space. In brief, in the word of James Slevin, “[o]nce we are online, we seem to enter and become submerged in a different world” (2000, p.iv). In a different world of digital networks, no one can have a stable identity that is concretely tied to the foundations of the local. Read More