Hi all

For me the darker side of cyberspace is more conceptual and in turn leaks
into the quotidian. 

I'm concerned about how computers/cyberspace/cybernetics has affected our
view of ourselves.

Back in 1829 Thomas Carlyle wrote about his era and termed the phrase the
Mechanical Age. Here he was not just referring to the fact that there was
now a lot of machines in use but, more importantly, of how the machine had
become an important cultural symbol. In short his concern was that there had
become an excessive emphasis upon means against ends. He described this by
saying that men had grown mechanical in head and heart. That is people
actually started to think of themselves as machines.

As has been pointed out this essay was a precursor to the thinking of Marx
et al regarding alienation.

My interest and concern is that, living as we are in the Information Age,
what it is to be human is being reduced down to the domain of information. 

For example we can look at the Cyberneticist Norbert Weiner in his book *The
Human use of Human Beings*. Weiner's interest is in feedback control, how
the human being is reduced to being a part of a system with the same level
of importance as the machine.

For him the human is  "whirpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are
not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves." In short we
are information. 

This type of thinking, an extension of the religious in some respects, has
engendered a whole new range of fantasy such as Artificial Intelligence and
Extropianism. It has changed the way we value ourselves our lives and
sensuality.

It is intersting that today the Turing test for judging artificial
intelligence is still taken seriously. The test involves merely the exchange
of information in regards to logic with absolutely no reference to the body.
What if this test were to use music  - the abstract emblem of sensuality
(Simmons)- instead? Can we envisage how a computer could understand this? 

Of course there are other concerns as well such as how these machines are
reducing us to information in other ways as in  marketing databases and
surveillance. Our value is reduced to our entries in various databases etc

So in short my worries are about perception. 

I'd like to write more but I'm a bit busy and I'm unable to "multi-task"!

best

Simon