Which server contains you?

Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ibm_media


Look at the picture carefully. Trump has just made a new post on Twitter and got thousands of angry replies. The data about it is now being processed by one of the servers you see. As long as the machine is safe the evidence of political battles, poor Friday choices and cat videos will be available to any user of cyberspace at any time for better or for worse. Poster believes that “new media offer possibilities for the construction of planetary political subjects, netizens who will be multiple, dispersed, and virtual, nodes of a network of collective intelligence.” I would argue that this idea is still idealistic in its willingness to create collectivity through digital space even though he mentioned that he is not suggesting “a utopian realm of equality and freedom.” Undoubtedly, cyberspace creates expansive communities within it but just as it happens in “analog” life people’s views are framed through their sources of information. And the abundance of sources online is controlled by the political power like Trump administration and its continuous supply of digital content that tries to blurry “the boundary between news and entertainment” even further. Edwards does not try to attribute potential collective intelligence to online users as he doubts their existence in the first place. In what he calls “the selfie-determination of nations” it is hard to recognize not only real information but a real person. His infostructure is “a digitally mediated, imagined community in which individual citizens, bots, and trolls exist side by side.” It means the digital identity is created not only around those living in the real world. Some of Internet subjects without bodies might even have more persuasive digital traces of existence than real people who do not use a mobile device. Does it mean that it is a time when the analog or the real version has to stand “the test of equivalence” to the digital one? Well, as long as the servers are on, we will keep persuading machines that we are humans every time checking “I’m not a robot” box. Even if netizenship gets created, it will arise a new question of who will be governing the cyber state.

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