ABSTRACT
The development of digital technologies has been a major factor in increasing the speed and extent of social communications, and in many ways it epitomizes the process of globalization itself. The ICT revolution is sometimes seen as a ‘fifth K-wave’ – following cotton, steam power, engineering and electrification – increasing the speed and ease of communications between institutions, governments, firms and citizens, with immense implications for social life (Perrons 2004: 169).1 As with new technologies in the past, the Internet has been invested with utopian hopes for a radically new communicative age as well as dystopic warnings of an electronic anomic ‘lonely crowd’. Again, as with globalization itself, there are many who regard ICTs as ushering in a qualitative break with the past. But the circulation, development and effects of new forms of cultural and technological learning will be organized within social relations. A theme of this chapter will be that, as with extreme reactions to globalization in general, both these responses are flawed. Some similar dynamics apply in online as in offline interactions as – like
earlier technologies – the Internet is being integrated into the rhythms of everyday life.
