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"Cyber-Utopianism" and the Evolution in Utopian Thought
Villemard
"Audition du Journal" [Listening to the Newspaper]
Visions de l'an 2000,1910
Chromolithograph
BNF, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie*With the advent of the Internet and the blank slate offered by the "new world" of cyberspace, utopian thought seems to have come full circle. Indeed, the brief history of the Internet contains many parallels to developments in utopian thinking, which are alluded to here and discussed in more detail in other portions of this online exhibition: Sources, Other Worlds, and Utopia in History explore utopian thinking from its earliest sources in Antiquity and the Bible through the end of the nineteenth century; Dreams and Nightmares considers utopias and dystopias of the twentieth century. As we look both backward to previous notions of utopian thought and forward to the possibilities of the Internet, the question is whether the urge to attain the ideal society will persist and yield fruit in the centuries to come.
In early sources of utopian thought, a metaphysical transformation was needed to enter an ideal place such as Paradise or the City of God; this transformation was achieved through death, intellectual or spiritual transcendence, or otherworldly intervention. A metaphysical transformation also takes place in cyberspace, but, being only a mouse click away, is achieved more expeditiously.
Who has built the Internet, and who lives there? More's Utopia was an ideal place constructed and inhabited by humans, rather than a celestial city peopled by the blessed or the virtuous. Like More's Utopia, the Internet has been built for and by ordinary individuals. While the Internet's existence is less fictive than More's Utopia, its location and inhabitants remain equally ethereal.What does the Internet look like? In the belief that a more orderly, more smartly designed environment based on idealized human proportions could improve society, architects of the Renaissance devised model cities as perfect circles or squares with streets constructed in a grid pattern. Programmers, web architects, and designers similarly work to build an e-topia link by link via the World Wide Web whose architecture can be quickly learned and easily navigated. Unconfined by physical space, the Internet is expanding rapidly and organically, and the perfect metaphor, rather than the perfect shape, has been sought to define and comprehend it.
Why are people drawn to the Internet? Utopias in the past have appealed to those dissatisfied with certain aspects of real life. So, too, Internet users claim that the technology offers a respite from the pressures of everyday life and a sense of well-being and kinship. The resulting proliferation of assumed identities, online communities, and micronations is reminiscent of the growth of utopian communities in the nineteenth century and again in the 1960s, formed by like-minded individuals disengaging themselves from society and starting life anew. Like eighteenth-century American and French revolutionaries and religious and secular reformers of the nineteenth century, cyber revolutionaries and pioneers of the late twentieth century have sought to break with the old regime of big corporations and government and bring liberty, equality, and justice to every netizen.
If faith in technology and the attempt to improve all aspects of society via global networking continues to gain in momentum, then it remains to be seen whether the Internet, and the consequences of life lived increasingly virtually, will, like so many of the utopian experiments of the twentieth century, in years hence be subject to intense scrutiny and reassessment.
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*The New York Public Library provides the information contained on this website, including reproductions of certain items from other institutions, for personal or research use only. Contact the Bibliothèque nationale de France for additional guidelines regarding this image.
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