CYBERSPACE
Since the beginning of talk about cyberspace , still in the last century, the technological promises for positivist scholars regarding the emergence of this space, is of a new democratic era in which a global public space without borders would form a kind of “Athenian Agora ” and, consequently, would allow deliberation on public issues by all. These new democratic articulations that cyberspace would allow would be linked to what the French philosopher, Pierre Lévy, identifies as “cyberdemocracy”, as well as to the new political activism that the Spanish sociologist, Manuel Castells, refers to as “cyberactivism”.
Currently, there is already talk of the metaverse , a new advance foreseen in the technological world, in which, in addition to the fun and experimentation of the virtual, it would also be possible to create entirely new professions, economic models and political communities. It would be a space more capable of generating work, value and creating its own currencies than cyberspace .
However, in the same way that there are several researchers who have talked and still talk about the cyberspace utopia and its sociopolitical prejudice, there are also those who talk about the metaverse . Even though some issues have already been overcome, many critical arguments to cyberspace – such as the development of new factors of exclusion and new modes of domination – are still valid to reflect on and it would also be up to this new proposition of the virtual that is so much talked about.
For the English artist Roy Ascott, one of the leaders of this positivist current, the web surfer is no longer a mere passive spectator. From the network, he can be distributed everywhere and, together with other spectators, form a collective consciousness capable of interfering with the flow of ideas that circulate through this new space. He calls this cyberspace hypertrophy capacity, which could constitute a true democracy, which he believes does not happen in “real” physical space.
“The innovations brought by cyberspace as a space for global articulation generate possibilities for interaction, expression of ideas and access to information that give it a fundamental political dimension: they open up to the common citizen a space for visibility and exchange of opinions that would hardly be achieved within the great media structures and institutionalized political forums.” [1]
“The possibility generated by the advantages of cyberspace, as an extension of the Habermasian public sphere of open, flexible and decentralized architecture, which would provide citizens with a space for interaction and deliberation emancipated from corporate interests would actually lead to the weakening of public debate, since is based on anonymous access to unedited and fragmented content that makes it difficult to access reliable information and makes democratic participation unfeasible in the face of such a dispersion of approaches.” [two]
Much of the problems of this public dimension of cyberspace can be summarized in what psychotherapist Peter Levine raised as five key questions:
In addition to technophilic and technophobic tendencies, what matters is to politicize the debate about these virtual spaces, about the possibilities of creation and freedom in a society increasingly programmed and centralized by technology.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES
SORJ, Bernard. Internet, public space and political marketing . New Studies. CEBRAP, v. 76, p. 123-136, 2006.
SILVA, Maria RS Cyberspace: a virtual public space for contemporary democracy? . 2010. Monograph (Bachelor of International Relations) – Faculty of International Relations, University of Belo Horizonte, Belo Horizonte, 2010.
LEVINE, Peter. The Internet and Civil Society , in: GEHRING, Verna V., The Internet in Public Life. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 79-98, 2004.