User:Jules/baudrillardincyberspace

Nunes Mark,
Jean Baudrillard in cyberspace, Internet, virtuality and post-modernity
1995

1993-1995 → AT&T advertisements and White House policy statements have prepared America for a changed world or more precisely a new one : one that exists on the shimmering surface of our screens .

In response to the rapid growth of the Internet (enormous increase of the number of connected machines), the media has refurbished the old American icon of progress and freedom : the highway

Soon, every American will be back on the open road. New roadside businesses will emerge as the map of Internet continues to encompass the globe. But in its current figuration, the Internet does more than network the globe: it creates a metaphorical world in which we conduct our lives. And the more ecstatic the promises of new possible worlds, the more problematic the concept of "the world" becomes.

Internet, both as a technological artifact and as a popular image, provides a site for exploring «The world» - and the position of such systems of totality of postmodernity.
Baudrillard's work despite not being addressed at worldwide networking provides with means for exploring the metaphoricity of the Internet. - Especially geographical metaphors -
the topological framework beneath the «information superhighway» that allows for travel, distance, and speed in a metaphorical world.

→ Cyberspace does not refer to some fictional «matrix» anymore (aka Neuromancer)

For Baudrillard, the shift from real to hyperreal occurs when representation gives way to simulation.
Just as the highway once transformed the USA, the «information superhighway » offers the image of a dramatic chage in virtual landscape . 
But this overused expression does very little to represent the actual Network architecture that connects these machines, yet the metaphor of the highway persists (-ed) as a media image, functioning as a conceptual model for the world created by this technology.

Highway = subtle metaphorical figuration encompassing potentialities of speed, motion, direction

Internet becomes a simmulated territory we traverse via computer-modem roadster in which the computer screen replaces the windscreen.

Baudrillard says : The driver-viewer interacts with images rather than with the physical world. (not travelling at human's body pace, sight is a sense of distanciation)
But cyberworld doesn't really put images of the physical world (like a windscreen) but simulates a beyond the screen.

The voyeur-voyageur experiences an immediacy that dissolves space and time.

Net neutrality – Fast and slow lanes – Information traffic - Transports metaphors remain