Computer Mediated Communication and the Connection between Virtual Utopias and Actual Realities

People have generally been very ambivalent about the potential future roles of new technologies (and the internet specifically) and their possible effects on human society. Indeed, there has been a tendency for polarization between attitudes or perceptions of naive enthusiasm and cynical resistance towards the use of computers and computer networks, and for such related concepts as ‘the information superhighway’ and ‘cyberspace’. The projection of such ambivalent perceptions into naively utopian (or even ironically dystopian) images and narratives might be seen as the latest and uniquely global permutation of a basic function of human culture that is, to imagine ‘a better future’ or represent ‘an ideal past’. This paper will consider the extent to which the kinds of virtual utopias made possible by computer-mediated communications are ‘connected’ to the actual individual and social realities of human participants. In other words, how important might it be to recognise a distinction between the use of virtual utopias (and utopian representations in any culture) as merely escapist, self-indulgent fantasy on one hand, and as a useful, transformative media for reinventing the human condition on the other? Whether we live in a Panoptic or democratic Net ten years from now depends, in no small measure, on what you and I know and do now. Howard Rheingold, Afterword to The Virtual Community (1994, p. 310) Introduction: Emerging Utopian vs Dystopian Images of Cyberspace In contrast to dominant perceptions of global computer networks as basically an ‘information technology’, the alternative focus on the internet as new or extended media of human communication and, indeed, of human community has been ambivalent at best. Perhaps because the pioneering programs of internet chat (i.e. MUDS and IRC ) were based around ‘mere’ adventure games and social chat, the development of synchronous computer-mediated 174 CAMERON RICHARDS communication (CMC) was often seen as a frivolous off-shoot to the main focus on the internet as an ‘information superhighway’. Rheingold’s popular book The Virtual Community (1994), which celebrated the utopian potential of cyberspace in the tradition of the 1960s counter-culture movement, did help to change the way people perceived the new technology. However, there was an immediate ‘dystopian’ backlash to such a vision as the original innocence of network communities gave way to a recognition of not only the internet being open to use and abuse, but also issues of control and regulation. From such a perspective Clifford Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil (1995), for instance, challenged what Stoll perceived as a selective view gaining currency in the popular media the information superhighway as a ‘computer utopia... said to educate, entertain