308jnighttheblog Woolley

Reading this article has given me a very interesting look at "Cyberspace". I like how it started out as a fictional concept in Sutherland's work and has become the reality that it is today. It just shows how yesterdays fiction can become tomorrows future, as technology expands. In the article they describe cyberspace as the annihilation of space. McLuhan then says "As electrically contracted the globe is no more than a village." Its kind of odd to think of the world as a village, but through "cyberspace" or the internet its a really easy concept to see. I've never thought of it in that way but the technology really does make it a small world. At any minute I can send a message to someone on the other side of the globe with a response from that person in a matter of seconds and its almost as easy as shouting across the room to a friend. Another thing in the Woolley article that was interesting to me was his section about the virus. Woolley says that the computer virus like the aids virus acquires a moral resonance, and he says that infection is guilt. Like he said the people most vulnerable to the "October 12" virus were the people most deserving of the damage. Most deserving because of their swapping of illicit software and so on. One thing from the article that I didn't quite agree with was the idea that a virus could become an evolving lifeform. I don't know about you guys but I thought that the Matrix was just a movie. It kind of seems in a part of the article that he believes that the machines could take over, and we rely on computers for so many aspects of our lives. I just don't see how it could do any more than what a programmer tells it to do.