22 July, 2003:

Posted at 8h52. Permalink.

Entertaining early (1995) take on the internet/cyberspace and it's metaphor of space/territory/place: Baudrillard in Cyberspace: Internet, Virtuality, and Postmodernity. A few points jumped out at me. That the screen is unbridgeable with the body, so the internet collapses into a single physical point, however the internet creates its own world with connections between computers, a virtual terrain that has no frontiers: what exists is what is already mapped. There's lots more.

Also, I liked this: "'Information' has become a term to describe movies on demand, electronic malls, and expanding numbers of television channels; the media is 'accelerating in a void' of the banal. Increasing sophistication in technology produces more convincing simulations of information and more convincing strategies of deterrence. The fascination of the depthless screen--'the superficial abyss'--keeps us firmly rooted. With a wealth of information, we have no time to realize that we have nothing to learn". The superficial abyss.