On the Seductive Lightness of Being: Insights into Cyberspace

Since the 1980s, the continuing developments, changes and hybridisations in information and communication technologies have essentially influenced our ways of perceiving, thinking and behaving. The media revolution in the Internet Age affects all areas of our society. Today we are living far beyond McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy, but nevertheless we can see the points of reference for at least structural comparisons between both phenomena that of the Internet revolution and that of the emergence of printing. In addition to "place-centric" knowledge perspectives, historical approaches also seem not only possible, but also necessary. The present paper offers a thought project for a kind of macro-philosophy of media, which could be defined as a reflective consideration of global media praxis and media politics, and thus a media ethics with a claim to global validity. Such a thought-project could fill a gap in the scientific discourse on media, which cannot be tackled so broadly by using the differentiated concepts surrounding the "Global Village", which were developed from sociological and macroor micro-economic perspectives. 1. BEYOND POST-MODERNITY 1.1 An Unprecedented Generation of Internet Users In a recent article in a well-known computer magazine, a commentary was provided on an development, which is both socially and economically interesting, in South Korea, where e-mail is slowly but surely becoming "snail mail". South Korean teenagers are obviously some way beyond the