Response to Cyberspace Con Readings

This group of articles, written also before the dot com bust, sounds soberer and more grounded in perspectives than the pro group.

Langdon Winner is concerned that "if we limit our attention to powerful technical applications, their uses and market prospects, we tend to ignore ... the shaping of the conditions that affect people's sense of who they are and why they live together." Theodore Roszak points out that "this is not the first time people have projected their hope for happiness and their image of perfection upon the latest magic gadget to come along." Tracing the history of the information revolution, Kevin Robins and Frank Webster argue that the current information revolution is "no more -- and no less -- than the extension and intensification of processes set under way some seventy or so years ago." They believe that "the scale and complexity of the modern nation state has made communications and information resources (and technologies) central to the maintenance of political and administrative cohesion."

Technologies, from fire making to metal weapons to computers, are tools that bring changes to societies through the application of them by human beings. They are not magic pills that can cure a society's problems automatically. Put in different people's hands, they bring positive or negative change to the society. It's very important for us not to be carried away by their power in the technical sense, but to examine their role and impact in the context of human application and history.