Digital Culture – GOOD and BAD effects (utopias and dystopias)

Before we think about technology and its effects, we must understand 2 concepts: utopia and dystopia. What is utopia and dystopia? We can see this picture and think merely that utopia is an ideally perfect place/state, and dystopia is a place/state in which the condition is extremely bad.

Information technology can be seen as something that has made our life easier as a negative influence in certain ways. In the first block of EDCMOOC, we are focusing on building a point of view about the digital development and the effects that it can induce.

Digital culture and digital education are often described as either utopian (creating highly desirable social, educational, or cultural effects) or dystopian (creating extremely negative effects for society, education or culture).

A explanation about utopian and dystopian vision, by Hand and Sandywell (2002):

Utopian claims	Dystopian claims
Information technologies based on electronic computation possess intrinsically democratizing properties (the Internet and/or worldwide web is an autonomous formation with ‘in-built’ democratic properties or dispositions).	Information technologies possess intrinsically de-democratizing properties (the Internet and/or worldwide web is an autonomous formation with ‘in-built’ anti-democratic properties or dispositions).
Information technologies are intrinsically neutral, but inevitably lend themselves to democratizing global forces of information creation, transfer and dissemination.	Information technologies are intrinsically neutral, but inevitably lend themselves to control by de-democratizing forces (hardware and software ‘ownership’ equals anti-democratic control).
Cyber-politics is essentially a pragmatic or instrumental task of maximizing public access to the hardware and software thought to exhaustively define the technology in question.	Cyber-politics is essentially one of resisting and perverting the anti- democratic effects of the technology in question.

Resources: class.coursera.org