This article comes fromWeChat public account: Xiuyuan Foundation (ID: xiuyuanjijinhui), author: Hu Yong (Beijing University of Journalism and Communication), the original article published in the “cultural aspect”, the title figure comes from: the movie “the Matrix”
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With the vigorous development of the Internet industry in recent years, many friends who are in traditional industries or retired feel “not keeping up with the pace of the times”. Each segment/age group is getting tailored “headlines”. At the same time, it also lost the judgment and grasp of the importance. Professor Hu Yong pointed out that the Internet, as a blue ocean industry in recent years, has become a “big stick” in the hands of some people. It seems that “Internet thinking” can be linked to any industry. Once questioned, it is easy to attract “you don’t “Understand the Internet” accusation.
Professor Hu Yong believes that compared with the digital business business that can be seen everywhere in the market, there are few discussions on digital society issues. As the Internet is a virtual thing, users need to use metaphors to understand how the Internet works. Such metaphors will not only shape users’ understanding of the Internet, but will also be used, thereby affecting the future development of the Internet.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Internet was hailed as an “information superhighway” and was dominated by the government. The Internet was often regarded as a public good; earlier in the same era, the metaphor of “cyberspace” was proposed. Libertarians regarded the Internet as an independent kingdom not governed by any power, and was later described by the media and institutions as a “gray space” flooded by criminals and hackers. The two different metaphors imply that users have different expectations of the Internet.
The concept “big data” that has been frequently cited recently is often compared to a flood of data. It is considered a natural resource that can be exploited by humans. Users can mine and analyze big data; but big data is not a natural resource , But generated artificially; if big data is regarded as a resource, there will be behaviors such as managers disrespecting user privacy and deliberately inducing users.
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In the past two years, the Internet has become a “stick” in the hands of many people. Why do you say that? You can find a few books about Internet to read, or you can read Technology Blog, or read in various conferences on the Internet PPT. After reading it, you can make appointments with people in various industries and tell them what is Internet thinking.
If they doubt you a little bit, you can wave this big stick. This big stick is six words called “You don’t understand the Internet”. All of us are talking about the Internet, but when you say that others don’t understand the Internet, are you saying that you don’t understand Internet thinking, or that you don’t understand Internet thinking?
I chose a perspective to analyze Internet thought-“Internet as a metaphor”. In 2014, I posted a Weibo. This is a deep feeling I have over the past few years. What I said is, “There are countless people in China who care about digital business, but there are few people who care about basic issues in the digital society. Less”. After I posted this Weibo, there are some comments below. The first person’s comment proved what I mean. He said that so many people pay attention to big data, and many people are actually talking about big statistics and big flicks, but Few people pay attention to how computing power and storage power leverage the underlying structure? Another fan of mine wrote, “One step forward is pain, one step backward is happiness”. That is to say, you will feel very happy if you care about future changes, but it will be painful if you care about reality.
So I especially hope that if the bookstore continues to select TMT books, it can develop in the latter direction and be more concerned about the basic problems caused by the arrival of the digital society rather than just the problems of digital business. Internet companies have become rich in the past two years and have begun to do something to give back to society. For example, Tencent’s WE Conference, Baidu’s BIG Talk, but it may be more digital business, not the basic issues of the digital society.
The following will start my entire speech from the Internet as a metaphor. We use metaphors a lot in our daily lives, often without knowing it. Because we have to restore many things, abstract concepts and phenomena to a concrete thing, human cognitive structureIn order to have an understanding of this thing. Wilken, a professor at an Australian university, said that there is a metaphor for everything on the Internet that helps you understand it. Without this metaphor, you don’t know what the Internet is like? But behind all metaphors there are connotations related to position.
As time goes by, metaphors will be embedded in our culture, will shape users’ understanding of the Internet, and even affect the future development of the Internet. Metaphors will fight because of their differences. This is a field of struggle. Each metaphor will show certain aspects while concealing the other. And you must know who proposed this metaphor. For example, officials and Internet designers will propose different metaphors.
Therefore, those of us who observe or use the Internet must keep in mind that no matter which metaphor it is, we must always examine it to see if it reflects the reality of interconnection? Which metaphors should be kept and which should be discarded?
“The Parables We Live By”, everyone can pay attention to this book. This is a book written by Raikoff and Jensen. They deeply analyzed why our lives are full of metaphors and human beings are a figurative animal . Intercepting two people’s discourse on metaphors, they believe that most of the human conceptual system is constructed by metaphors. Although we seldom perceive this, the environment in which we experience the physical body The similes born and the similes inherited from culture restrict our way of thinking.
This means that there are two sources of metaphors. The first one is physical perception. We use all the sense organs to obtain metaphors. The second type is passed on to us from our previous generation, and it is a cultural heritage.
The other two people talked about universal metaphors across cultures. Is it possible for a metaphor to exist beyond various cultures and races? For example, there must be cultural barriers. For example, it is also a utopia. The imagination of Daxi is completely different from the imagination of Taohuayuan. On the one hand, we acknowledge that there are cultural differences, and on the other hand, there must be some metaphors that exist across cultures. These two phenomena coexist at the same time. Most of the metaphors about the Internet discussed today cross geographic and cultural boundaries. There are also more American ones.
Make a simple timeline. From 1990 to 2000, and then to 2020, combing through the metaphors of the Internet, we can see that different metaphors will be located in different coordinates during this time period. For example, in the early 1990s, a dominant metaphor called high informationSpeed highway. Until today, there may be a very important metaphor called “cloud”. How did we get to the cloud from the information highway? What happened in the middle? This is what we are going to discuss.
The earliest metaphor was cyberspace, which was proposed by a Canadian science fiction writer in 1984 when the Internet was not yet commercialized. We know that science fiction is actually the pioneer of the entire technology, and many things are first described by science fiction people. It can be seen that the term cyberspace has become a very common word. It was invented by Gibson in 1984. He said that cyberspace is a computer-generated space. The characters in the story can enter this space as long as they plug in the power plug. With unimaginable complexity, there are beams of lights flickering in the non-space of the mind, drifting away like city lights.
He called cyberspace a sympathetic illusion, a collective illusion. Thousands of people access the Internet. These illusions may lead to an extreme extension of the exclusion of daily life. In theory, you can completely wrap yourself in the media and no longer care about what is actually happening around you. This is a forecast for 1984. We have to be surprised to say that this is very accurate.
His novel is called “Neuromancer”, and cyberspace is the most durable and influential metaphor of all metaphors. One of the core things of this metaphor is that there is a space. This space has to step out of your real space. The space you enter after crossing a certain threshold is called cyberspace. In other words, it divides our living space into two different dimensions, real space and virtual space.
The first thing Gibson felt was that he was wandering on the street and saw teenagers playing arcade games in Vancouver. Although teenagers are on the street, their minds have completely entered the space of playing games.
The metaphor of cyberspace was quickly taken over by the first generation of ideals and rebellious people in the early days of the Internet, and a very famous thing appeared is John Perry Barlow, a rock band’s music Writer, the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. He said that the iron-blooded giants of the industrial world, you avoid our cyberspace, which belongs to us. This is what he wrote in 1996. It is the voice of a group of people who regard cyberspace as a utopia and hope to use technology to liberate mankind. He said this is our territory. Therefore, it is implied here that the future struggle for cyberspace sovereignty is a very primitive origin of conflict.
Cyberspace is the favorite of those libertarians and counterculturalistsAs a metaphor, they said that the independent kingdom we built is called Cyberspace. However, with the popularity of the Internet, the media quickly described the cyberspace as a terrible place, full of all kinds of pornstars, criminals, thieves, hackers who breach security, and terrible crimes everywhere. . The government quickly regarded cyberspace as a place where it must be regulated, managed, and controlled.
To cite two examples, when Obama introduced the US cybersecurity strategy in 2009, he announced that cyberspace is real, not an illusory existence. The former Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Karl Butt, said at a cyberspace conference in London in 2011, “We no longer have any dark spaces where shameful behavior can take place.” The implication is that they need to take these spaces All control, no independent space is allowed. Therefore, the term cyberspace, very strangely used by a libertarian, has become a term especially liked by the government.
A corresponding metaphor closely related to cyberspace is called Electronic Frontier, which is used by Americans. Americans like to say that we have the Wild West and that there are no rules in that place. When we go to that place, we reclaim the land, organize, establish rules, and protect the safety of that place. The most famous organization that uses this metaphor is called the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is dedicated to many causes of protecting Internet freedom. So metaphor is a place full of struggle, and there are very fierce struggles in it.
The World Wide Web appeared in 1989, and this translation is wonderful. The invention of the World Wide Web is due to Berners-Lee, who wrote a book “Weaving the World Wide Web.” In this book he talked about how the World Wide Web came into being. There is a preface in this book, written by the famous computer scientist De Tuzos. He said that thousands of computer scientists have been watching two things for 20 years. The first is hypertext, because there is no hypertext. There is no World Wide Web. The second is called computer networking. But only Berners-Lee thought of how to combine these two elements to create the World Wide Web.
The World Wide Web is a very important metaphor. It shows that physical computers all over the world are finally connected through the Internet. Therefore, there is another metaphor called matrix. Whether it is a net or a matrix, they all represent some intersections held together by a common structure. The matrix will give you a sense of order, but the network may be a trap.
From 1989 to 1991, the metaphor of the information superhighway appeared. It can be heard from the name, It shows the rapidity of our information flow, the convenience of transactions, and it has a very strong businessIndustry color. But at the same time, we all know that highways are generally government projects, so it will give you a feeling that the information highway is dominated by the central authority, so it is a public good. Because it is a public good, it must be regulated and managed. The term information superhighway was once very popular, and it is not used anymore, but it has not died, and it has partially revived in the debate on net neutrality.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore has made a great contribution to the global Internet. The Nobel Peace Prize. He was awarded for environmental protection and climate change activities, but his contribution to the Internet is also eligible for Nobel Peace. prize. Gore is the most powerful advocate of the information superhighway in the United States. He is his father who followed him, also called Al Gore.
Today, if you go to the United States and drive by yourself on a highway, that road is related to his father because his father proposed to build an interstate highway. So Gore proposed to build a virtual information highway.
The iconic thing about the information superhighway is the HPCA passed by the United States in 1991, the High Performance Computing Act. The Americans proposed to establish a national information infrastructure or NII. This trend has blown to China, and they feel that it is being established abroad. Information basic information, if we do not establish it, we will be expelled from the ball. This bill not only led to the establishment of NII, but also funded NREN, the American Research and Education Network.
The importance of this bill lies in the fact that Gore himself said in 1996, how did the Internet develop in the United States? He said that our government ignited the initial spark, and then we handed it over to creative individuals and companies, letting them perform recklessly, and finally with a phrase we Chinese often say, a single spark starts a prairie fire Up. Therefore, the United States experienced the most prosperous period in the United States during the Clinton and Gore administrations. Productivity was greatly improved and the economy developed very well.
The research and education network supported by Gore has produced an important thing. What many people don’t know is that you use a browser on the Internet today. The earliest browser is the Mosaic browser developed by Mark Andison. Netscape, founded by Andison, went public in 1995 and was the beginning of the wave of investment in the Internet.
This browser is a tangible product produced under the funding of the Goerty bill. Take a look at the development of the entire Internet back then. If the Internet had not developed these seven layers today, you would not have seen the prosperity of the Internet.
The bottom layer is a computer. Without a computer, there is no Internet. The computer is an editable version released by the German Zus in 1941Cheng’s computer, and then the release of the Mac in 1976.
The second layer is the network. The network was born out of George Wiley, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1956, in 1956, in order to prevent the United States from being subjected to a nuclear explosion, a radar detection network was established. The prototype of a computer network was formed. Then, in 1973, Ethernet was the inventor. It’s Metcalfe.
Then the Internet, Arpanet in 1969 to TCP/IP invented by Cerf and Kahn in 1975.
The fourth layer is the World Wide Web, from Bush, Nelson, Engelbart to Berners-Lee in 1990, and then the so-called Http.
The fifth layer is the browser, Mosaic in 1993. The sixth layer is the search engine. The first search engine was Archie in 1990 and Google appeared in 1998.
In the end, we came to the rich and colorful content that everyone saw today, which is based on the World Wide Web. Until the advent of the mobile Internet, the entire online world was composed of these seven layers.
Speaking of the information superhighway, there is a well-known book called “The Road to the Future” by Bill Gates, but in this book, Gates actually criticized the metaphor of the information superhighway. For example, highways are easy to think of the distance between two points, but the characteristic of computer network technology is to eliminate the distance; at the same time, driving on the road can only see the scenery along the line, while on the Internet See and do whatever you want. The more fundamental reason Gates opposes this thing is that the information superhighway will easily remind people of the role of the government. He believes that in most countries, it would be wrong for the government to lead the construction of computer network projects.
Gates believes that the Internet should be a big market. This market is the center of the world. We shop, trade, sell, bargain, make new friends, and discuss issues here. This is the core of the Internet. It is a market. . Because we have this market, Gates further proposed a concept in this book called frictionless capitalism. A lot of information can be obtained by spending a small amount of money here. This is a shopper’s paradise. It will make the producers of products more effective than ever to see what consumers really need, and it will also enable consumers to buy more effectively product. In this regard, Adam Smith should be happy.
The metaphor of the information superhighway has a huge impact on China. This advertisement may be the most famous advertisement in the history of China’s Internet. Perhaps if you write about the history of Chinese advertising, you can also enter the most famous ranks. At that time, Zhang Shuxin of Yinghaiwei Today’s Baishiqiao, a huge advertisement erected at zero kilometers from Zhongguancun called “How far is the Chinese from the highway”, and there is a line next to it called 1500 meters to the north. When you come to Weigong Village, come Arrived at Yinghaiwei Science and Technology Museum. My own online career also started in this place.
The information superhighway is no longer used by everyone, but it has been revived in one place, that is, in the discussion of net neutrality. I said before that many of us care about digital business issues, but do not care about the basic issues of the digital society. Net neutrality means One of the big problems. The core of network neutrality means that all network traffic should be treated indiscriminately, and toll stations should not be set up where network traffic passes.
The concept of net neutrality was put forward in 2003 by Wu Xiuming, a professor at Columbia University. In 2006, he used a set of concepts called fast lane and slow lane in order to explain why net neutrality is required. His analogy is that if you are driving in the United States, on a highway, a certain highway announces that I will only open this highway to cars produced by General Motors, and other people must take the slow lane beside it. This is called network non-neutrality. We oppose this approach.
Many Internet companies stand on the side of net neutrality, but telecommunications companies believe that those who consume more resources can give us more money, and we can give them a priority. This neutral debate has been hitting the U.S. Congress, and Obama issued his proposition on this, and he opposed the priority of fees. The principle of net neutrality is that all Internet traffic should be treated equally.
In 2006, a U.S. senator suggested that the Internet is not a big truck. Anyone can throw this thing on it. He said that if this thing causes Internet congestion, Who should be responsible for this thing? So he mentioned another analogy, he said that the Internet is a row of channels. Since those who advocate net neutrality feel that there is a conspiracy behind his position and may support telecommunications companies, this person has received a lot of ridicule. But the metaphor that the network is a row of pipes is actually more reliable than the network is the cloud. I will talk about this later.
Why is there a big difference between the metaphor of the information superhighway and the metaphor of the cyberspace, and there is a fight between them? Two professors Pushman and Burgess wrote an articleZhang said that if we regard the Internet as an information superhighway, we think it is one of our infrastructure that plays a role in daily life. And the term cyberspace tells you that the Internet has a great utopian meaning. We will give the Internet a meaning of water, electricity, coal, and gas that goes beyond daily life. It brings greater possibilities to our human potential. Therefore, different people choose different metaphors and have their own demands behind them.
Let’s talk about another metaphor that has a major impact. On May 26, 1995, Gates’ internal memo from Microsoft came out. Gates wrote this letter. The title of the letter is “Internet Wave.”
In 1995, Gates felt that Microsoft might be in trouble, because everyone started to connect to the Internet, and everyone was getting information on the Internet, and the Internet was an open standard. Gates is very worried that the Internet will subvert Microsoft. He wrote this famous memo, which led to the very famous metaphor of the Internet called “wave”. He predicted smartphones, online videos, and online advertisements.
The original statement he wrote in the memo at the time was that I had not opened any Word documents or executed Windows files after surfing the Internet for 10 hours. I opened many video files. There is a panic possibility. Perhaps one day these fans of the Internet may get together and create a tool that is very cheap, much cheaper than a PC, but can be accessed online and has enough computing power.
I believe that the Internet will become our most important promotion tool. Maybe someone should pay for the link to our homepage. The most interesting thing is that he said that the information found on the Internet is much more than the information found on the corporate network within Microsoft. Gates felt that there might be a tsunami coming.
Speaking of the metaphor of the wave, back to an older book “The Third Wave” (1980), Toffler The human society is divided into three waves. The “Revolution of Wealth” in 2006 is the version of “The Third Wave” in the Internet age. He said that producers and consumers will become one.
Following the three waves of argument, we come to another school. A thinker who constructs the theory of the information society. A famous figure is Daniel Bell, who wrote “The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society is also a very early book (1974). He explained that the post-industrial society has several characteristics. The first characteristic is that more and more people are moving from the so-called secondary industry to the tertiary industry, in more and more service-oriented industries , People become important capital, that is, human capital.
Bell said that the only way for economic growth today is to motivate people to freely develop their ideas. He also analyzed the decline in the status of blue-collar workers and the rising importance of professional workers, whether they are scientists, creatives or IT experts. Finally, he said, What we are witnessing today is the vigorous development of information science and behavioral science. For example, behavioral economics began to show its strength in this era.
Following this line to 1996, Cass wrote a book “The Rise of the Network Society”. This is the first book of Custer’s trilogy. Custer got cancer in the 1990s. He felt My life is running out, and I write a book desperately. I have written three books in a short period of time. I am called the current Weber. The miracle is that after I finished the book, I lived well and wrote many more books. He talked about the rise of the network society. The network constitutes our new social form and is the source of dominating and changing society. A network-based social structure is a highly dynamic and open system that is easier to innovate without affecting its balance. .
He called the essence of informatization an information space, which includes three levels: the level of technology, the level of location, and the level of people. As long as all nodes in the Internet world have common information codes, including common values and achievement goals, they can achieve connectivity and constitute the network society we see today. This line is all down Toffler.
Another seminal book “Virtual Community” appeared in 1993. Everyone we are familiar with today is doing social media activities, and the earliest concept is a virtual community. This writer was in a small community at the time and was there every day, trying to summarize from this community, what are the characteristics of the future online community? He used a series of metaphors to describe: This is a place of publication and expression, like a huge coffee shop with 1,000 rooms, like the online version of the lecture corner of London’s famous Hyde Park .
It is also a mobile flea market. It is a unedited collective letter to the editorial department. He uses many metaphors to say that we humans may live in a completely different world from the offline world.An online world. The virtual community has grown all the way to the social media we use today. The earliest prototype of Chinese online community may not be known to many people. In fact, it was Yinghaiwei Time and Space. At that time, it had credit points, which was equivalent to virtual currency. Love stories were also produced there. All the things in the online community have already taken shape. Up.
Coming to today, when talking about the social nature of the Internet, one of the opposition we often see is that many people are studying whether online interactions will affect offline interactions. If too many online interactions, it will Will not become isolated from everyone offline. In other words, when you get more and more home, do you lose contact with the world? This is something that is controversial, and we have a lot of literature to discuss this topic.
One point I specifically mentioned here is that we oppose digital dualism. We believe that today, there is no space where offline and online are completely opposed. What we have now is a mixture of atoms and bits, which together create our augmented reality. In other words, don’t try to distinguish between what is online and what is offline.
Especially when we come to the era of mobile internet, When you use all these apps at hand, you will blur the boundaries between online and offline. For example, we don’t even need to talk about your specific experience of using the app. Let’s just talk about a common example in reality. You are holding a mobile phone and watching it on the street. It is actually very dangerous. You may hit an object, or Get hit by a car, or see someone falling into a big ditch in the news.
Actually, this shows how we live today. On the one hand, we are in a certain place in a physical world, on the other hand, we actually live elsewhere. So in this sense, technological development has made it unnecessary for us to distinguish the so-called online and offline. We have to break this paradox of digital dualism. If you have seen The Matrix, the typical scenario is that the real world is called Zion, and you think the real huge world is Matrix. When we break this dualism, they are actually the same thing. So, all activities on social media are our real lives, they are not virtual lives.
From this point of view, we can discuss a lot of interesting issues. On the issue of social movement caused by social media, there is a point of view that social media does not cause action, and it causes lazy activism. You can click one Like or press a button to indicate actual action.
This is GladwayYou are trying to argue that in the virtual space, because your organization is so loose, it is impossible to achieve action. But if you look at it from the viewpoint of anti-digital dualism, your statement is wrong. Because the so-called digital space activism should be combined with offline activism in order to promote things. No one says that a purely online action will push things forward.
The tradition of digital dualism has a long history. One of the famous representatives is Sherry Turkle, her view is called The Second Self. In fact, our true selves and digital selves are the same thing.
There are usually two most common metaphors about Internet politics. The first is the square at the head of the village, and the second is the city hall, both of which are American metaphors. For the Americans, these things are small experimental sites for democracy, including the Puritans who landed from England. First, they formed an autonomous group to formulate the rules of their territory, and convened a local residents’ congress to decide everything. There is a saying in American politics that a city hall meeting should be held.
These two metaphors give you the feeling that it is either a village or a city. In fact, a city means a town in English, and both are very small places. There is also a big analogy in this respect that is the global village. How can a village become a global one? The concept of a global village gives you the feeling that Although the scope is very large, in fact, such a large scope can still maintain the intimacy of people, because they are villagers in a village. It can be seen that the analogy of the village can be expanded from a small scale to a large scale, which is to apply it to the global Internet user community.
The concept of the global village was proposed in McLuhan’s two books “Gutenberg Galaxy” and “Understanding the Media” in 1962 and 1964, and also demonstrated why we will be a global village in the future? For example, why doesn’t he say it is an earth city? He said that the global village makes sense, because McLuhan believes that we are from tribalization, to de-tribalization, to return to the tribe, to re-tribalization, we are very close, we are a village. In the tribe, the person who tells stories to his close members around the campfire is the one who spreads.
Look at the latest development: We have come to the era of comparing the Internet to a “stream”. If you use today’s social media, you will know what a stream is, what is a timeline, and it is a stream sorted in reverse order. On the one hand, this stream is updated in time. If you use a smart phone, you expect that new information should be generated every time you pull down. If no new information is generated, you think it is not a new media.
At the same time, it will produceOther things, such as the latest things, whether important or not, are always on top. This leads us to rethink what is important in this era. I call it “rethinking the importance.” We are now in a world without weight. We can no longer figure out which is important and which is not. It also leads to another problem. Americans mentioned this concept a few years ago, called the long-term present, the present becomes the eternal present.
In 2006, there was another Internet metaphor called “cloud” that is popular today. Amazon launched cloud services in 2006, and Cisco proposed Fog Computing for the same reason. We are now using the cloud to describe any electronic data that can be stored and processed remotely. Because there is big data with the cloud, the concept of the cloud will give you an illusion that your data, which may be an individual or an enterprise, seems to exist in a very beautiful place in the distance. You need to worry about it, any benefits can be enjoyed, and someone else will worry about you.
In the past, companies like IOE told customers that your data is stored in our big data center. We have rows of servers. You are safe here. But think about it, the difference between the cloud metaphor and the row of servers metaphor is very big. You seem to feel that you can trust your data to the cloud with confidence.
When we see big data, we usually compare big data to a flood of data. We often marvel at the amount of data. Data can be arranged from the earth to the moon when it is burned into a disc. It is a huge amount. It should be a resource that can be used by humans. We can mine and analyze big data. , Make good use of it, and then reach a new level. But there is a potential problem that big data is not a natural phenomenon, and all data is generated artificially. If you treat it as a purely natural phenomenon, one day you may get a lot of trouble.
Finally, let us go back to a particularly remote time. In 1785, someone foreseeably proposed a metaphor for the popularity of the Internet in the future, called Panorama Prison. The picture drawn by the famous British social reformer and philosopher Bentham is that everyone does not need external supervision when they live in prison, they will self-supervise. Because they can’t see where the person supervising them is. This panoramic prison was later cited by Foucault, and now it is lost to all people who worry about Internet privacy.Loss, loss of safety, people monitoring machines are all using this term. Often used with this word is “Big Brother is watching you”.
It’s a pity that the book “Snowden Archives” should be selected as one of the ten TMT books this year. This book is a very valuable book. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you read it carefully. . Because in the era of surveillance metaphors, a hero finally appeared. He told you that as long as surveillance machines want to do it, they can do it. In other words, without Snowden, we still don’t know how far our lives have been monitored.
I wrote an article, I think Snowden should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In this kind of rigorous machine or technical web weaving process, some alternative heroes can always be found to help us escape some seemingly inevitable bad luck. This book is the Snowden Archives, and I highly recommend this book.
In the final analysis, all these metaphors point to two categories, the first is utopia, the second is dystopia, Snowden represents dystopia, then Toffler, Negroponte, Kay Wen Kelly and others are all utopians. Utopians say that the Internet can evolve and can save our human beings. It represents progress, represents the world, and even symbolizes this traditional American dream of individual struggle, which is the American dream.
So when you describe the Internet in this context, the Internet is a great change for mankind. It will determine our work, games, and interactions with others, and it will create new businesses and creativity. Even if some countries and groups of people are temporarily dumped, after technological advancement, these people will certainly catch up and finally achieve global harmony.
But dystopians say that what the Internet brings to us is a negative utopia, not something revolutionary. Not only did it not bring us salvation and unity, but on the contrary, it isolates us from each other, and everyone is alienated. We may only talk through avatars and be monitored. This is a dystopian picture.
My favorite book about dystopia is Morozov’s. thank you all!
This article comes from public micro-channel number: Foundation and far (ID: xiuyuanjijinhui) , Author: Hu Yong (School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University), this article was originally published in “Cultural Aspects”