Information technology as organization/disorganization

摘要

Information technology is seen, perhaps paradoxically, as having unleashed both more organization and more disorganization upon the world. This organizing and disorganizing potential has in the last two decades inspired a vast literature of enthusiasm and suspicion, anxiety and expectation. Technophiles often conjure Utopian visions of information technology as the agent of individual freedom, consumer convenience, shared knowledge (virtual), community, and frictionless markets. At the same time, these dreams easily mutate into nightmares. Thus, technophobes detect in those same technological developments the birth pangs of Orwellian dystopias, where privacy is extinguished through computer enabled surveillance (an excess of order and organization). Or, alternatively, of Hobbesian virtual worlds populated by pornographers, malevolent hackers, unscrupulous fraudsters, depraved paedophiles and resurgent neo-Nazis (an excess of disorder and disorganization). No matter, hyperbolic such visions of technologically facilitated salvation and damnation may be, we must nevertheless not forget that events such as the dotcom bubble and the millennium bug panic of recent years clearly fed on these kinds of imagery.