This week we take a look at two very different articles with an underlying connection: mediating communications in a shared, finite space. The first article is based on an address given by Garrett Hardin in Logan, Utah, in 1968, on population control (how ironic it was given in Utah of all places!), and the second is a quantitative research analysis of politically motivated web users undertaken in 2003 by Thomas Johnson and Barbara Kaye. Below are three general questions.
Question 1 – Hardin argues that technology cannot solve moral dilemmas. What moral dilemmas, such as the net neutrality debate, has the Internet presented? How will increasing numbers of users and decreasing technical resources eventually create a web “tragedy of the commons”?
Question 2 – Johnson and Kaye discuss how the Internet is used in a very different way by those who are seeking political information than by others. In general, politically motivated users are going on-line for guidance and information, while most others are going on-line for entertainment purposes. As third-world and other less-web connected countries blaze new paths to the Internet, one might imagine entertainment providers and profit-driven businesses fueling growth in these new markets; such businesses might be more adept at convincing political powers in certain regimes to provide access to their citizens in order to bolster the economies of these nations. In what ways will the citizens of these nations become better politically informed, considering that their motivations for web use might be informed by a desire to be ‘merely entertained’ at the outset? How will this change (and how is this already changing) the political landscape of a nation like The People’s Republic of China? How can the governments of such nations apply Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” to their advantage (another question of resource control)?
Question 3 – Langdon Winner, in his essay Technology as Forms of Life, theorizes that we sleepwalk through our mediations with technology – that we think of technologies as tools alone and do little to examine their deeper and lasting implications because we are focused more on their menial applications. How is this technological somnambulism creating a tragedy of the commons on the Internet? Are the “politically motivated” defeating this somnambulism or furthering it, for example, when considering the recent victory of Barack Obama, which some believe was directly influenced by social media technologies?
References
Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science (New York, N.Y.), 162(3859), 1243-1248. doi:10.1126/science.162.3859.1243
Johnson, T. J., & Kaye, B. K. (2003). Around the world wide web in 80 ways: How motives for going online are linked to internet activities among politically interested internet users. Social Science Computer Review, 21(3), 304-325. doi:10.1177/0894439303253976
Kaplan, D. M. (2004). Readings in the philosophy of technology. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Retrieved from WorldCat
Technological somnambulism – wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved 2/17/2009, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_somnambulism
Winner, L. (2004). “Technology as forms of life”. In D. M. Kaplan (Ed.), Readings in the philosophy of technology (pp. 103-113). Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.
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Tags: Garrett Hardin, Langdon Winner, morality, politics, technology, Utah