Mayhem and Cyberspace

First I have to start by saying those two articles were very interesting to read. The first article dates back to 1996 a time when I was still in middle school and this whole internet and cyberspace idea was still fairly new. What was a wiki back then if you would have asked me I probably would have called it something a female uses for her feminine hygene needs. None the less the article seems to challenge what was going on in America and foretell what is to come in the future. Sure enough over a decade has passed and now a days even a cell phone can access the web. You can use the web to get information on anything or even any one which is some what scary considering that people do enjoy their privacy. To me the article is quite wordy and seems to really just be a vision for what will happen in the future and in a way seems to be a rebellious cry for reasons that I do not fully understand. For whatever reason the author seems to be mad at America and vows that cyberspace can not be contained or stopped which to this point it really has not been. If I need to know how to to deal with an infant child who has a cough I can go and look it up on Web Md, if I want to know the score of the basketball game last night (Go devils!) I can look it up on asu's sports website. All of this is just a click away and it seems as though the web is ever changing becoming faster and more efficient on a daily basis. My question becomes is it possible for cyberspace to actually exist, in this technologically advanced age our brains want everything fast and easy. What if one day we make the machine so smart that like the matrix we are actually enslaved by the machines, the world wide web takes over and cyberspace rules with an iron fist? Of course this is all fantasy and I do not forsee it happening but the question is always out there what if?

The second article which I will briefly touch on seems to be another form of rebellion. I had never heard of the term culture jammer until today when I read this article and I must say the idea seems to be a dead one. Who are these people who come up with these parodies and where are they hiding. I have only been to San Francisco one time I do not recall seeing any billboards with this type of vandalism or exploitation of a company any where. I believe it is a form of protest to the mainstream media but to me its a phenomenon that is dead. I could be way off because for all I know there could be an entire culture of these "jammers" going on right now. I suppose that there are other ways to express this tactic such as screen print t-shirts or buttons, or things of that nature. However the idea is foreign to me. Most screen print t shirts have a positive message to this point (i.e.- the various Barack Obama shirts), but whose to say that in some way some of those shirts dont use that very same type of rebellion. In short I feel as though this idea was a good one to touch as an intro to the class as well as the first article because they both show just how far we as a society have come in terms of the digital age. I just spent forty minutes on my phone looking at a new dance and learning how to do it thanks to you tube. Ten years ago I would have had to wait for a video to come out.