Cyberculture: Society, Culture, and the Internet - How We Live

HOW WE LIVE

The Internet touches many parts of life in advanced industrial societies. Everything from shopping, paying bills, and playing the stock market to news gathering, family interaction, romantic courtships, and play all take place in cyberspace, whereas before the mid-1990s all these activities existed more commonly in the physical world. The Internet profoundly influences what and how children learn, the vocabulary employed in daily conversation, the way people coordinate their schedules and work habits, and perceptions of distance and time. With the ability to jump from China to Brazil to Los Angeles within a minute and with e-mail offering lightning-fast communication, the Web has taken the advancements of the telephone several steps further toward bridging physical distances between people, not to mention time. For that matter, the Internet is a 24-hour-a-day operation, and thus consumers are no longer confined by store hours to go shopping.

Some say the explosion of information technologies changes the dynamics between business, social, and ethical issues. According to this view, as individuals gain access to greater and greater quantities of information, the social and ethical ramifications of business practices will become widely known. This openness, the argument goes, will pressure business strategists to take controversial social issues into account to avoid jeopardizing their sales or, at the least, to avoid missing valuable business opportunities.

Internet and cyberculture enthusiasts come from all shades of political persuasion. Conservatives applaud the Internet's subversion of state functions such as taxation and regulatory interference with the free activity of commercial interests. Liberals applaud the Internet's capacities to network disenfranchised groups and coordinate efforts toward greater social equality. But if cyberculture has been hailed by politicos of all stripes, it is also criticized by as broad a spectrum. Social conservatives railed against the excessive openness of the Internet and its attendant capacity to spread materials and ideas they find indecent or morally or socially unacceptable, while left-leaning advocates warned against the excessive commercialization of the Internet and its tendency to transform social needs and relationships into personalized consumer needs, fracturing social solidarity. Thus, it is safe to say that arguments for and against Internet practices aren't drawn along clear political lines.