The technology of media utopianism, 1560s-style.
This week’s readings on the future of the internet seem deeply steeped in the utopianism of internet culture. This utopianism has always struck me as the most salient feature of writing about internet culture, especially by those authors who are more comfortable with the label “futurist” than I am. What we had, what we lost, what we could have, what are the threats … these are all questions that only make sense if you fundamentally assume that the internet has the potential to be a radical change agent. I know that this is a drum I’ve been beating all semester, but as a historian of print culture, I can’t help but seeing very strong echoes of much older conversations about the relationships between ideas, media, power, and social change. Read more
