Team Poster: Information Please

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Revision as of 22:28, 23 April 2008

Introduction

The purpose of this wiki is to provide background information so that readers can develop a deeper understanding of Mark Poster's book Information Please. We hope that this will be a useful reference guide for people to refer to before reading the book. Our link to Mark Poster should allow readers to gain insight into Poster's personal life and his views. In addition, we will investigate various aspects of the three sections of the book. This includes defining technology jargon,digging deep into crucial topics,and linking various related articles. BEST LINK EVA! [1]

The Book

Poster: His Views on Technology

Global Politics and New Media

In the first section, Poster discusses the relations between politics and digital media and the interactions of cultures in the context of human-machine relations.

It begins with the discussion of protesters in Afghanistan carrying a poster with Sesame Street's Bert sitting on Bin Laden's shoulder. Poster explores the many interpretations and explanations about the puppet's reason for being there. (Bert also appears by the side of many other public figures such as Adolf Hitler and a member of the KKK.) The Bangladesh protesters did not even recognize Bert on the posters as they carried him around. Poster raises the issue of the decoding of cultural objects in a globalized culture. Globalization (of which Internet is a component) imposes a heightened level of interaction between cultures that pushes them over the boundaries of the nation.

The internet is what enables people to cross the boundaries of different cultures and share different cultural objects and ideas. Following the idea of Jean-Luc Nancy, Poster focuses on how interactions between cultures do not leave them unchanged. There is no longer a clear line separating media forms and content.

The Culture of the Digital Self

In the second section, Poster focuses on the recent growth in identity theft that occurs due to the creation of an identity through global networked computing. He focuses on several case studies where he differentiates the identity of self from the identity that exists in a database. He realizes that in order for identity theft to occur, one's identity would have to be made tangible. Through digital media, the security of one's identity is threatened and things that were once safe are no longer so.

Digital Commodities in Everyday Life

In the third part of the book, Poster focuses on the influence of human-machine relations in the social and political realm. He talks about file sharing and how books change from being a structural and material object of which someone could have ownership to a digital media in which files can be shared no matter who has ownership. We also catch a glimpse of the attention that Poster pays when talking about copyright and the characteristics of digital cultural objects. Namely when Poster is dealing with the topic of copyright, he talks about the history of bookmaking, exclusively focusing on the need for a stable text and for the inviobility of the author's work were inscribed in the book from the beginning.

Key Terms

Poster devotes an entire chapter to the concept of Global Media. Communication has become easier and easier as technology has expanded. Medias such as newspapers, telephones and radios have been added to the internet. Social practices are becoming more connected and even more dependent on the internet.

Mediascape is described by Poster as, "the media constitute a complex, vast apparatus of forms and contents that increasingly characterizes cultural exchanges and do so in an increasingly global expanse. We as a nation are moving more from physical space into the realms of cyberspace.

Poster opens up an interesting argument when he discusses the concept of Identity Theft. Identity theft is usually described as a fraud that involves stealing money or receiving other benefits by pretending to be someone else. However, Poster questions if a persons identity can actually be stolen. He points out the views of different philosophers such as Erik Erikson [2], Descartes [3] and Locke [4]. In the conclusion, Poster states, "The practice of identity theft is conditional on the heterogeneity of identity, the inextricable mixing of consciousness with information machines, the dispersal of the self across spaces of culture, its fragmentation into bits and bytes, the nonidentical identity or better identities that link machines with human bodies in new configurations or assemblages the suturing or coupling of pieces of information in disjunctive time and scattered spaces."

Other Works

This link is to the complete list of works by Poster. [5]