Panel Abstract

Utopian Visions and their Technicalities: Social Change and the Internet

Paper Abstract | Panel Abstract | Questions | 1996 Questions Cyborganic Research

As a mode of social organization, the Internet has been integral to the development of oppositional discourses and knowledge practices that often cast themselves as utopian, egalitarian, "other-worldly", idealistic and anti-establishment. Whether subversive, overt, revolutionary or incremental, collectives of all sorts have adopted and transformed online technologies in efforts to advance their agendas and frame ways of knowing. The net has proven to be a particularly conducive tool for groups with organizational structures that parallel, or benefit from, its dispersed and non-hierarchical roots. In this context, this panel's focus on 'utopian visions and their technicalities' is a call to problematize these terms. Each presenter critically considers the range of values (and their origins) that constitute any given utopian vision and the technicalities with which it interplays. Drawing on ethnographic case studies, the panelists explore this co-adaptive relationship between network technology and a diverse range of groups whose use of it privileges their own utopian values and priorities for social change