Other sections of the thesis

Other students have also put their theses on the web. Among them are:

Truth and Politics - Mass Media in Independent Ukraine 1991 - 2001

Private TV in Palestine

This thesis attempts to examine the existing "wired world" and imagine the further development of already evident technological and cultural trends in developed nations, along existing directions. It assumes a continuation of development in those countries (which may be joined at that level of development by others) in current directions.

It is not an attempt to predict the future. It is acknowledged that many events might prevent developments proceeding in this way, from a major environmental crisis to widespread social breakdown.

Furthermore this thesis does not directly address national, racial, gender or other disparities in access to the technological, social and educational resources that might prevent large numbers of humans from joining these trends. These disparities are important, but they are not its subject.

Introduction

This thesis is being written in October 2000, at a time when digital technology is, in the words of Houston (2000, paragraph 4), "in the infinite nanosecond after the Big Bang, an inflationary moment when all that matter spreads itself out. Now things start to coalesce." In the last decade of the twentieth century, computers, the Internet, mobile telephones and many other forms of digital technology progressed from being expensive toys for enthusiasts to essential tools for everyday work and social and cultural life. Yet it appears that over the next decade the possibilities for development of these technologies, and accompanying changes to education, work, social and community life, far exceed what has already occurred.Over the next couple of years broadband networks will be rolled out in most industrialised countries. These will allow the transmission of vastly greater quantities of data, far faster, while developments in computing promise far great ability to manipulate, manage and control that data and mobile communications will ensure all of those facilities are available everywhere, every time.

Discussion of the cultural changes that will inevitably accompany the period after the 'Big Bang' have, however, been sadly limited. Most serious academic work has yet to even begin to catch up with the developments of the past decade, and given the time-frame of academic publishing, potential workers in the field face the serious problem that their work is patently out-of-date even before it is published. What work has been done has been heavily focused on issues of identities in "cyberspace", an issue that I would suggest is profoundly overworked. More popular work has been distinguished by a sharp division into two camps - digiphobes and digiphiles, convinced either that society as we know it will be destroyed by the technological developments, or will be transformed into an endless utopia. Both conclusions are usually achieved without any real theoretical or material basis of analysis.

This work attempts to address this lack by tackling one element of the likely new world, the relationship between texts and the individuals who create and use them. Since texts will, this thesis argues, become an increasingly central, indeed all-pervasive, part of the "wired world", this is one of the central relationships within it. In an attempt to avoid the many perils of futurology , it imagines what is essentially today's world, although one in which existing technologies are more sophisticated and more widely utilised.

The relationship will be explored through three primary theoretical perspectives. The study draws the non-essentialised body into "cyberspace" through N. Katherine Hayles' concept of embodiment and uses Pierre Bourdieu's habitus to consider how the embodied agent will act in the new wired world. Elements of Regis Debray's mediology concerned with the essentially material, historical nature of all texts will be used to examine the way in which even the "flickering signifier" is profoundly grounded in historical and material circumstance.

The thesis also draws on the work of Steven Johnson, who provides a refreshingly critical perspective as a commentator on the existing Internet structure. He says that many existing concepts and ideas do a "terrible injustice" to the realities of the Web (Johnson; 1997, 107). He rejects, as do I, the term surfing for navigating the Web, and argues that the hyperlink, not the fancy graphics or streaming video that obsess most commentators, is the key factor of the Web.

I situate myself within this work, not as a subject outside it looking at the "object" of the wired world, within which I am, of course, writing this sentence. I will therefore not sway away from the use of the personal pronoun, nor from the use on occasion of accounts of personal experiences where these inform my imaginative framework. My personal encounters with the wired world have largely been pleasurable and productive ones, and that I acknowledge inevitably has some impact on my conclusions. Such an acknowledgement does not, I believe, make this work less "objective" or less valuable, but situates the reader to enable her to read it more clearly.

The fact that we live now in only a partially wired world is illustrated by the material nature of this work: a thesis whose basic organisational and physical form that has changed little in the past century. Instead of hyperlinks indicating non-linear connections, I am forced to rely on far less user-friendly references and cross-references. Several trees will die for its production. I am, however, composing this work on a moderately advanced personal computer running Windows and Microsoft Word, which enables me to work on all of the chapters at once, which corrects my basic typing errors, and enables me to access the partially wired world of the Internet at the click of a mouse. This is an intermediate-stage product produced in intermediate-stage habitus.

The choice to "imagine" a wired world has been carefully made. The Cartesian legacy teaches a profound contempt for imagination, seeing it as far inferior to the formal elements of cognition. I would follow Margolis (1987, xxxix), however, in saying that imagination exist "in the no-man's-land between the clearly demarcated territories of reason and sensation". This "extended Kantian view of imagination as a capacity for ordering mental representations ? makes it possible for us to conceptualize various structural aspects of our experience and to formulate propositional descriptions of them" (1987, xxix). Since this work, as will be outlined in Chapter 2, is seeking to escape from the errors induced by the Cartesian mind/body split, and the related subject/object or subjectivity/objectivity divisions, "imagination", rather than analysis or description, provides an appropriate methodology.