Status Updates From On the Internet (Thinking i...

Twenty-five years ago this was a small-c conservative-existentialist critique of the virtual- and cyberspaces. Today, it is reactionary.

Conclusion: Dreyfus has “been arguing that the positive claims for the value of the Internet offered by our contemporaries are mostly hype”. Finally, Dreyfus explores possibilities for how the Internet May indeed help solve some of the problems he has explored.

Ch 5: Dreyfus explores the possibility of meaningful experience in virtual worlds, a la Second Life, through the lens of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard regarding experimentation as well as Heidegger’s view of the centralizing power of shared moods in a “focal event”.

Ch 4: Dreyfus explores the anonymous nature of the Internet through Kierkegaard's warnings of the Public and the Press, which he saw as great egalitarian "leveling" agents; reducing all things in the world to a banal base of commonality. Interestingly, however, the modern Internet that Dreyfus does not engage with totally in social media is highly tied to real-world identity.

Ch 3: Dreyfus develops the promises and limitations of telepresence technology in maximizing the potential for human interaction across the Internet. Though many technical possibilities exist (multi-channel conferencing, etc.) our fundamental human experience requires inter-corporeality for true human presence.

Ch 2: Dreyfus examines the limitations of distance learning, examining the importance of embodied sensory experience as a feedback loop; an essential aspect of the learning process. Dreyfus is critical that distance learning will not permit students to achieve mastery, as mastery requires the non-encodable transmission of bodily experience.

Ch 1: Dreyfus explores the Internet as pure technology; a revolution in the capability of publishing and linking information, reversing taxonomical modes of classification (e.g. Plato). He explores the limitation of AI classifiers as machines are disembodied algorithms. Finally, he explains how PageRank/Google solved the seemingly intractable problem of semantic meaning by leveraging the hyperlinks themselves.