Ontological Shift Essay Research Paper Ontological ShiftIn

Ontological Shift Essay, Research Paper

Ontological Shift

In Michael Heim s essay The Cyber Space Dialectic , he discusses how our culture is going through an ontological shift fashioned by the Internet. Heim articulates his theory of what dialectic is and how this ontological shift is creating a new dialectic. The Internet is the main place today where people from all over the world exchange and communicate their ideas and feelings. The Internet is a new community in itself. The ontological shift into the cyberspace times will change the way we think, and the way we act; it will change our overall sense of being. These change that Heim calls an ontological shift has brought on questions about changing society. These are similar to the questions that Peter Drucker and Benjamin Barber brought up when they discussed about creating a new society. Will society benefit from this new society in which its central being is cyberspace. This is a serious question since we are living in the phase that is changing into the cyber world now. How will this change affect this new technologically inclined society.

We have all used the Internet to talk to other people, either using chat or emails. We converse with people with different backgrounds and cultures. When interacting with different types of people, it means that we are working in groups and collaborating. This is what the Internet is all about. Interacting with each other in new ways, and learning how to open yourself to other points of views and new ideas. In his essay Heim states,

Computer networks foster virtual communities that cut across geography time zones. Virtual community seems a cure-all for isolated people who complain about their isolation. Locked in metal boxes on urban freeways, a population enjoys socializing with fellow humans through computer networks (Heim 374).

As Heim explains in his essay, the Internet can bring together communities that are

isolated from the rest of the world. It helps communities and different types of people communicate with each other. It creates the idea of group work through computer networks. This was also one theme in Barbers essay; Group work is what makes ideas carry through and productive. In Barber s Making Civil Society Real he states,

Civic responsibility, being a partnership between government, civil society, and the private market necessarily depends on the active collaboration of political leaders, citizens and business people (Barber 106).

Our responsibility as a society is to collaborate our selves with all the groups that make this society function. The theme of group work and teamwork is a necessity when making a community function efficiently. When using the Internet to share ideas, we are helping ourselves to expand our own perspectives to an outside world. This makes us as a society open to new ideas and willing to listen to other suggestions. When we begin to use new tools, and create new opportunities to better society we are changing our dialect from a newspaper, and TV world, to an all-new cyberspace info structure that centralizes what our common feelings and thoughts are. Barber would agree that this would be a perfect stepping stone to bring our society into collaboration with the government and private sectors. It is the perfect way to make the people aware of what is out there and what is needed to be done. Peter Drucker would disagree with this notion because he says the idea of government taking an active part in societies decisions is not there place. He states in his essay The Age of Social Transformation , Government has a big role to play in social tasks But as the agency to run social services, it has proved almost totally incompetent (Drucker 239). Drucker would surely agree that the Internet is great to learn and gain knowledge, but it s not its place to centralize a community. His idea of going straight to a group of people ( knowledge workers ) to take care of a community is contradicting the idea of group work and open mindedness. I think that the Idea of basing our society around the Internet as a gathering place is a great idea. The Internet is a useful tool because it is a common tool in society today. Using it in the manner that we need is essential in order to cope with this ontological shift.

Of course there are always people who oppose to t new ideas and just believe that they are unpractical. In Heim s essay he talks about na ve realists. These were people who say that computers will deny our perspective of the real world. Heim states

Many na ve realists take reality to be that which can be immediately experienced, and then align computer systems with the corporate polluters who dump on the terrain of unmediated experience. The elaborate data systems we are developing still exist outside our primary sensory world. The systems do not belong to reality but constitute instead, in the eyes of the na ve realist, a suppression of reality (Heim 371).

When these na ve realists say that this blocks us from seeing reality, they are forgetting that we are thinking for ourselves, and it is based upon our own mind what is reality and what is not. Reality is what a community says it is. The community is what makes us base our decisions and it is the community who makes us have a sense of being. In Peter Drucker s essay he discusses the knowledge society that we live