Chapter Three, Disembodied Telepresence and the Remoteness of the Real
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Show posts MenuQuote from: p26. . . the hope is that somehow the power of the World Wide Web will make possible a new approach to education for the twenty-first century in which each student will be able to stay at home and yet be taught by great teachers from all over the world.
Quote from: p12. . . the user of a hyper-connected library [such as the Internet] would no longer be a modern subject with a fixed identity who desires a more complete and reliable model of a the world, but rather a postmodern, protean being ready to be opened to up to ever new horizons. Such a new being is not interested in collecting what is significant but in connecting to as wide a web of information as possible.
Quote from: p13. . . freeing us from anonymous specialists organizing our databases and deciding for us what is relevant to what. Quantity of connections is valued above the quality of these connections.
Quote from: p6-7What if the Internet gave us access to a virtual second life? To the extent that we came to live a large part of our lives in cyberspace, would we become . . . infra-human? . . . we might . . . necessarily lose some of our crucial capacities: our ability to make sense of things so as to distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant, our sense of the seriousness of success and failure that is necessary for learning, and our need to get a maximum grip on the world that gives us our sense of the reality of things. Furthermore, we would be tempted to avoid the risk of genuine commitment, and so lose our sense of what gives meaning to our lives. . . . our sense of relevance, our ability to acquire skills, our sense of resistant reality, our ability to make maximally meaningful commitments, and the embodied moods that give life serious meaning.