The Flaws of Communicating in Cyberspace & Technology

While the title of this post is a bit of a play on our book title, in chapter 21, Rushkoff describes some of the flaws of "communicating" over the certain mediums. For example, he describes the issues within communicating in a video game, multimedia cd-rom, or web site. Within all of these, the communication is simply one dimensional, even if the user gets to pick his own direction.

A video game has been preprogrammed to let the player choose his own direction. While the player is able to follow his own path in the video game, all possible options have already been exhausted by video game developers. There is no possible decision the player could make that has not been already. The player moves within the constraints of the game.

A multimedia CD-rom is very similar to a video game. Like the "choose your own ending" stories we saw in class, a multimedia CD-rom lets the user pick his own direction, but all possible outcomes have been previously thought out by the developers. The person may think he is choosing his own direction, but truly it is the CD-rom developers who have actually come up with any possible ending.

At the time this book was written, the web was not into its full blown "web 2.0" stage. Communication on the web was one sided, with news and information being simply conveyed to the online reader. It is "a simulation of free choice" (350). In this, the reader is simply told information. But now with the rise of social media such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, each person has the chance to publish and respond to anything he wants. The web became 2-directional with each user able to communicate with others, respond to stories, watch and comment on videos, and so forth. With the ability for so many different people to publish their own information, good and bad material has come. But, I don't think that anyone would argue the bad that the internet offers outweighs the good