- What are the salient points the author is trying to communicate here?
- On page 97 Cortada talks about how Howard Rheingold "homesteaded" on the
Internet. On page 98 Cortada uses the terms "bustling society" and "residents" of
the "cyber frontier." On page 101 he talks about a "community of users" and then
quotes Rheingold talking about "a community accessible only via my computer screen."
First, how would you define the term "community" in the broadest sense? How
would you apply this term to the World Wide Web? Has your definition of community
changed over the past five or ten years?
- Consider Castell's notion of spaces of contiguity versus spaces of flows that
we talked about in class on the first day. What is the website you visit most
often? Does it feel like a "place" to you? Do you feel like you are connecting
with people there? Does it feel comparable to visiting a neighboring town or
village? How so? How not?
- When you are attending class over HITS, is there a sense of place, a sense of
shared space that you inhabit with your colleagues? What gives
you that feeling? What interferes with it?
- Cortada mentions the ability of Internet users in Iran to download western
music, in spite of prohibitions by the Iranian government meant to prevent cultural
pollution coming from the West. Do you think that there is a danger of cultural
pollution? Or perhaps cultural homogenization? Please elaborate.
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