{"id":623,"date":"2009-04-14T21:56:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-15T02:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=623"},"modified":"2009-04-14T23:30:12","modified_gmt":"2009-04-15T04:30:12","slug":"cold-war-and-the-net-and-911-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=623","title":{"rendered":"Cold War and the Net, and 9\/11 too."},"content":{"rendered":"

This is\u00a0the third of fourth time I\u2019ve read through the Adams article and I\u2019m still really hung up on the open vs. closed system idea. At first, I think I pretty much bought her argument, although cautiously. I was thinking particularly about the flow of information and how in Pynchon\u2019s world it is overwhelming and intrusive \u2013 this leads to paranoia and chaos; yet in Yamashita\u2019s world it is \u201cdesigned less to entrap both character and reader in a postmodern labyrinth than to evoke the dense networking of people and goods in an age of global interconnection.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

The more I considered this idea, the more I began to agree with Adams\u2019 assessment. The concept of, let\u2019s say, the Internet, would have seemed incredibly threatening to someone like Pynchon in the 60s, through the end of the Cold War. Consider the earlier reception of Sputnik \u2013 an informational satellite perceived as everything from spy to death-ray \u2013 instant and global information-sharing must have been a terrifying prospect to those alive during the Cold War. Flash forward to the 90s, after the Cold War, and in the heyday of the early Internet and society had a completely different attitude towards information-sharing networks. The paranoia was gone and people, for the most part, saw the approaching global interconnectedness as a positive, rather than something to be feared. People sought out information, and instead of information being chaotic and cryptic (Oedipa), it made lives easier (Wikipedia!!!).<\/p>\n

My main issue with\/question for Adams, originally was concerning the effects of 9\/11 on the \u2018new\u2019 era of literary postmodernism. I originally figured that it would have been a Cold War redux situation\u2026in that it would have increased paranoia and a fear of global information sharing. However, while paranoia was on the rise immediately following 9\/11, I think people actually embraced technology and information sharing EVEN MORE. Sure there was some techno-fear (and considering the amount of fear-mongering\u2026I think we all did pretty well..), mostly of the shoe-bomb\/exploding shampoo bottle variety, but consider the boom of the 24hr news networks, the talking heads(not the band), the marketing<\/a>. And here<\/a><\/p>\n

We, instead of developing a legitimate fear of spies or technological home-invasion (at least not from the enemy\u2026possibly our wire-tapping govt though), sought out every piece of \u201cnews\u201d that we could get our hands and ears on. Information (the open system) was our friend, it was comforting, even when it was scary, to know that we knew as much as we could know. And the Internet was the biggest, most instant-gratificacious (not a word) tool at our disposal. We were not, as Adams says \u201centrap[ed\u201d in any kind of \u201clabyrinth,\u201d but rather we reveled in our interconnection. So, indeed, it seems that the end of the Cold War WAS a major turning point, not just in literary postmodernism, but in societal understanding\/comfort with information-sharing and global networking in general. Not even a trauma like 9\/11 could make us turn our back on technology\/information.<\/p>\n

Sure, even Yamashita illustrates that \u201cCalifornia<\/em> (or the Net for our purposes) is a nodal point where globalization threatens to erupt into environmental and human catastrophe\u2026..But she also hints that, as Adams says “[It can] also [be] where people find themselves creating unlikely coalitions that might work to remedy these problems.”<\/p>\n

Horray.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is\u00a0the third of fourth time I\u2019ve read through the Adams article and I\u2019m still really hung up on the open vs. closed system idea. At first, I think I pretty much bought her argument, although cautiously. I was thinking particularly about the flow of information and how in Pynchon\u2019s world it is overwhelming and … Continue reading Cold War and the Net, and 9\/11 too.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[78,79,75,77,57,120,26,13,72],"class_list":["post-623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-13-tropic-of-orange","tag-adams","tag-cold-war","tag-globalization","tag-internet","tag-postmodernism","tag-pynchon","tag-race","tag-technology","tag-yamashita"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=623"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":648,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623\/revisions\/648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}