Forthcoming in

Administrative Theory & Praxis, Vol. 30, No.3, September, 2008.

CYBERPUNK-WEB 1.0 EGOISM GREETS GROUP-WEB 2.0 NARCISSISM: CONVERGENCE, CONSUMPTION, AND SURVEILLANCE, IN THE DIGITAL DIVIDE
Kym Thorne University of South Australia and Alexander Kouzmin Southern Cross University and University of South Australia

ABSTRACT
The question of paradigm shift or paradigm continuity in the virtual worlds of controllable, and exploitative, existence needs to be canvassed? Web 1.0 hubris seems to be augmented by a newer, Web 2.0-based propaganda, and related, commercial discourses, involving the putative liberating, politico-economic contours of cyberspace. The democratizing and developmental gradients of the Digital Divide, externally and internally, have now been subsumed within a new politics of fear; a new hegemonic discourse of terrorism and security so much so that echoes of past debates about the profundity of ICT developments and democratic, social impacts begin to sound like dystopian subversion. Neo-liberal cyberspace, Web 1.0, or Web 2.0, based, is a coercive space, fraught with vulnerability and exploitation.

INTRODUCTION
The digital revolution represents ignorance meets egoism, meets bad taste, meets mob ruleon steroidstowards the Brave New World 2.0 (Keen, 2007, pp. 1-2). Tethered appliances will eliminate what today we take for granteda world where mainstream technology can be influencedbut the core battle will remain. It will be fought through information appliances and Web 2.0 platforms like todays Facebook

apps and Google Maps mash-ups. These are not just products but also services, watched and updated according to the constant dictates of their makers and those who can pressure them (Zittrain, 2008, p. 5). Engaging cyber-punk hubris involved in the distorting discourses (Castells: 2002) of a liberating engagement with cyberspace (as represented by web-based portals/communities and on-line web sites), requires considerable courage once the Neo-liberal masking functions of Internet-driven cyberspace are fully considered. What is evident in the political economy of cyberspace is that consumption-obsessed netizens (Kouzmin & Jarman, 1999) are not empowered in a cyberspace - a space which does not respect difference; does not provide a level-playing field; does not provide a safe haven for authentic, democratic discourse; let alone safety from the predatory actions of the Homeland Security apparatus of the state (Thorne & Kouzmin, 2008) or other on-line racketeers (Thorne, 2005). The privatization of the Internet is of major concern. This is despite the origins, and the first years of protocols, of the Internet being in the public domain (Kouzmin & Dixon, 2006) and extensively dependent on governmental expenditure (Naughton, 1999; Newman, 2002). This dependency has been obscured by the elaboration of an extensive mythology surrounding Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, drawn from the discourses of the anti-corporate, IBM, blue-suited conformity (see Whyte, 1956); personal computer and anti-regulation narratives evident in cyberpunk science-fiction of cyber-pirates; (Apple) hackers (the Unix community); information liberationists (Yahoo, Google and Wikipedia); online communities (MySpace, Facebook); and Zen warriors (Oracle) blowing apart the old governmental and corporate order. As Murphie & Potts (2003, p. 62) observe, [u]topian hopes in the transforming powers of technology now resides in cyber-culture, where mysticism often fuses with belief in technological progress [and] techno-mysticsdream of transcendence and immortality through the immaterial means of cyberspace. However, within these mystifications, Microsofts much less romantic, corporate approach led it to become the IBM of the personal computer and software era and helped corporate e-mail become ubiquitous within the Web 1.0 universe, while Amazons and eBays commercial success was based on the mastery of global logistics and personalized marketing. Similarly, Yahoos, and especially Googles, search engine optimization made the treasure trove of corporate sites and information, embedded on top of search sites (Keegan 2008) on the Internet, instantly available to anyone connected to the world-wide-net based on clicks and other forms of revenue generation. News Limited (among others) drew old and new media together by its almost simultaneous investments in Facebook and The Wall Street Journal.

INTERNET HISTORY AS MYTHOLOGY

Cyberspace was heralded by technological pundits and free-market advocates as a place for immediate, democratic communication which obliterated all forms of pre-existing difference and presumed a Brave New World. As Gerlach & Hamilton (2000) and Thorne (2005) indicate, cyberspace, supposedly, is an info-machine (Barnatt, 1995). As long as any individual or group of like-minded individuals are able to generate a money-making idea, and are able to access logistical and other digital communities or networks, they are able to dominate the global, virtual economy based in cyberspace. Constant, global, digital motion is everything. The tyranny of distance (Blainey, 1982) has been eliminated. Physical limitations are overcome by cyber interconnectivity. Information becomes the currency of the future. Inequalities and contradictions of physical and social existence no longer matter.

Governance, based on national boundaries, or sovereignty, is deemed irrelevant. Racial, ethnic, sexual and economic differences require no corrective action in non-exploitative, transcendent cyberspace. These Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 discourses envision cyberspace as a virtual place where invisible, flexible, individual masters of the universe, egotistical corporations and narcissistic communities of one can exist and compete with multi-nationals and media conglomerates. Every netizen, or web blogger, is as powerful as News Limited or Disney Corporation. Individuals operating from no precise location can interact creatively and commercially in free cyberspace and their technological smarts, and inherent flexibility, mean that they can outmanoeuvre any inflexible corporation and escape any regulation imposed by moribund nationstates. Web 2.0 mass collaboration (Tapscott & Williams, 2007) mythology goes even further, claiming that digitally-connected, highly-fluid communities of narcissistic individuals, obsessed with some topic or other common interest, can provide better illumination or resolution than anything possibly available from giant corporate, or government, action. The cyber-punk mentality, fundamental to anti-establishment cyberspace, presents fragmented, de-centered experiences as transforming. Renegades Case and Molly in Gibsons (1984) Neuromancer [and echoed by Neo and other revolutionaries in the Matrix trilogy (Irwin, 2000)] jack in and out of cyberspace, merge with each others recordings of information and are constantly reconstructed and re-wired from the ground up (Melley, 2000, p. 194). Yet, the aim of these fictions is to imagine a future in which centered subjects still run free (Melley, 2000, p.194). Melley (2000) concludes that, redolent of the many utopian, liberational and transformational claims made for new technologies by those wanting to benefit from actual and/or purported epochal transformations, cyber-punks re-invention of the American frontier is part of a mythic recuperation of the unconditioned and uncontrolled subject, a fantasy of liberation which has historically functioned in the service of imperialism and a fantasy which critics have rightly linked to masculine self-making (Melley, 2000, p. 194). As Melley (2000, p.194) also indicates, the cyber-punk genre invokes the self-reliant, almost universally-male, protagonist highly sought after for his unique, human ingenuity in combating synthetic, selfgoverning technologies (Melley, 2000, p. 194). Yet, this hero is actually re-fighting much older battles symptomatic of much more important conflicts: By pitting lone, rugged individuals struggling against an immense and powerful organization, these fictions depict precisely the sort of battle William Whyte [1956] urged his readers to wage.recuperating, in displaced form, the comforting notion that rational, autonomous agents still do battle with one and other in order to secure life, liberty, and property (Melley, 2000, pp. 194-195). Ethnic, religious, gender, class and other differences, and their-hard fought political positions, are reduced to dependence on individual agency in an atmosphere where the concerns of difference are considered to be old fashioned, irrelevant or just another cosmopolitan flavor which can be incorporated into those sovereign individuals (Thorne, 2004) contending in boundary-less cyberspace for positions in the global economy. Minority status or the ability to command physical enterprises no longer matter in de-physicalized, cyberspace without limits. Old Nation state-based antagonisms, such as those between capital and labor, are outmoded. Technologicallybased individualistic and communal cosmopolitanism flows beyond borders and subsumes all forms of special interest, especially elite and minority, political compacts (Thorne and Kouzmin, 2004). Cyberspace appears as some strange frontier where pre-existing laws and old ways of doing things no longer matter. The present is notable for the total triumph of global, free markets, information and communications technology (ICT) and Neo-liberal democracy.

An immanent future has emerged in which the constraints of time and space are deemed to no longer matter. History has ended (Fukuyama, 1992) and everything, now, depends on individual and communal ability to marshal and command information in digital cyberspace. Many time/space narratives are possible (Gross, 1981: 59-78; Soja, 1989) but all involve fluxing (in)visible power and the internet narrative is saturated with a post-Hegelian time/space synthesis justifying claims to hegemony. The institutional and legal frameworks which had protected physical capital in the industrial era are no longer of any significance. According to Hardt & Negri (2000, p. 339) the multitude of knowledge workers, connected via the Internet (and especially via the vast possibilities for communal interactions inherent in Web 2.0), represent a project for the democratic management of globalization. It is difficult to accept that the physical dimensions of time and space are defeated within enveloping global cyberspace. More probably, more enduring forces of capital accumulation and competition are at work. Certain geographic locations have more lure and attraction than others. The Internet does not cover all of America, let alone the globe. Despite advertisements showing knowledge workers with their laptops working on mountain tops, and at the beach, not everywhere is equally attractive or competitive. Despite other wondrous advertising about teams/ groups of knowledge workers interacting seamlessly via ICT-driven cyberspace, such networks carry costs and uncertainties. Thorne (2005) demonstrates that the realities of physical, marketbased competition are more than evident in dis-embodied cyberspace. Enduring aspects of tangible capitalist competition, such as size and scale, rule even the most digitallyconnected, intangible spaces. These include the global, media industries where some brands are more important, more visible, than others. Most significantly, information is not free or unrestrained in the new Internet economy. In fact: expanding systems of intellectual property...have enabled a relatively small number of [US] corporate players to amass huge intellectual property portfolios (Drahos & Williams, 2002, p. 5)When the history of 20th-century business regulation is [re-] written, this will come to be seen as one [of] the centurys most remarkable achievements (Drahos & Braithwaite, 2002, p. 28). Even digital code is not instantaneous - cues need to be sequenced and complex interactions of hardware, software and human action are required. Digital pipelines in cyberspace have capacity restrictions and huge infrastructure and resource costs. Cyberspace is not separate from physical space (Crampton, 2003). Completely de-physicalized, virtual organizations are not evident within cyberspace (Thorne, 2005). Boundary-less, constantly switching communities and/or networks are not decisive within cyberspace or global competition. Thorne (2005) locates purposeful, often large, organizations with some virtual links (based on enduring visible and invisible characteristics) operating with carefully chosen partners, within well-crafted, continuous networks, as being capable of superior performance within Twenty-First Century global competition. 24/7 competition is not required in every industry, in every possible location. Local, highly-physicalized factors such as intrinsic knowledge, which cannot be captured by data mining, or incorporated into digital code, still resist incorporation into cyberspace. Agency, whether based on rugged or cosmopolitan individualism, or selfish communalism, is extremely difficult to envision in such de-physicalized cyberspace and de-territorized, physical space. As Melley (2000, p. 186) notes, boundary-less, dis-embodied, agency poses special problems for Liberal theory, fundamental to both global capitalism and global cyberspace. Cyberspace and ICT are not independent of governmental and business interests. ICT is not revolutionary - technology does not seek, or require, freedom. As Ralston Saul (1997, p. 144)

reminds one, Government and industry have been at the centre of development, constantly striving for control. Even as the information highway takes form, public and private interests are carving it up as an information control system and a sales mechanism

INTERNET INDIVIDUALSM AND AN ONTOLOGY OF FEAR

Cyberspace - even communal-cyber activity - is essentially formulated on the triumph of certain technocratic, enabled forms of self-reliant, yet networked, individualism (Castells, 2002). This individualism rejects the efficacy of relying on pre-conditioning and constantly reinforcing notions of religion; ethnicity; national identity; gender; class; and similar crutches. Rather, what is actually going on under the cover of cyberspace is what has the most significance for those wanting to subsume their difference into a cosmopolitan, technocratic individualism which seeks to be successful in global cyberspace. The epochal flux of visibility and invisibility (Thorne & Kouzmin, 2004; 2006) which has accompanied the rise of cyberspace, and the faith in global, free markets, ICT and Neo-Liberal democracy, disguised the extension of existing physical and newer, supposedly de-physicalized, forms of exploitation by global, corporate capitalism. The interests of corporate capital and other elites benefiting from the hegemony of an imperialistic empire (Johnson, 2000; 2004; Harvey, 2003) were maintained by the obscuring, deflecting shock strategies (Klein, 2007) evident within cyberspace. The profusion of global, corporate capitalism has led to an internet economy in which: the wealth share of middle-level employees has stagnated over the past generation, even as the wealth of those at the top has ballooned. One measure is that, in 1974, the chief executive officer of a large American corporation earned about thirty times as much as a mediumlevel employee, whereas in 2004 the CEO earned 350 to 400 times as much (Sennett, 2008, p. 35). Under the veneer of this easily-disturbed, cosmopolitan individualism (Albrow, 1996), there are separate and unequal networks, separate and unequal communities and separate and unequal ways of life. This has resulted in the development of new forms of actual and virtual surveillance (Bogard, 1996). Even within imaginary cyberspace, it is not actually possible to make physicality go away. Individuals within cyberspace are still treated as mechanisms to be managed or controlled. It is this fetish for control that is the reality of cyberspace, and corporate capitalism, and this fetish drives the outlandish expenditures on military and other technology, even though the returns have been debatable. The problem is that the instrumental worship of technology is being used to drive out the best and the worst aspects of physical existence, and to reinforce the notion that unruly physicality always requires technological regulation. The US, and Australia, have been notable for the speed with which they moved from championing a New World Order of globalization to re-asserting, via the War on Terror, the surveillanced, and militarized, nation state (Thorne & Kouzmin, 2004; 2008). The USs farreaching legislative/legal response revolved around The USA PATRIOT Acts 2001 and 2006 and The Department of Homeland Security Act 2002. Australias response involved legislating for new criminal offences in the criminal code (The Anti-Terrorism Act (No.2) 2005 (No.144) (Australian National Security, 2007; Lynch & Williams 2006)). Both countries significantly extended domestic and non-domestic counter-terrorist intelligence gathering and response activities. Both countries kept their populations in fear of a constant threat from terrorists - a tense state of fearful emergency (Thorne & Kouzmin, 2008).

Furthermore, the emergent visible and invisible stratagems in the War on Terror pushed New World Order notions of benign cosmopolitanism and - especially ICT - into a contradictory reliance on overt nation-state-based military action (Atwan, 2006, p. 233) and the very overt curtailment of hard-won civil liberties. Secret evidence; closed trials; false imprisonment; warrant-less searches; involuntary drugging; and the seizure of private property seem like something out of the Nazi [and Soviet] era[s] (Marrs, 2006, p. 307) but the politics of fear allow for such acquiescence. Thousands of pages of public documents in the public domain have either been re-classified (Kouzmin et al, 2002) or deleted from the internet. Wikipedia censoring/re-editing is rife from the Australian Prime Ministerial office to global corporations and, even, the CIA (Hafner, 2007; Moses, 2007). Nield (2005, p. 110) indicates that the War on Terror is the chosen pretext for the global integration of police, intelligence and military functions.[and] governments across the world are promoting the idea that society must militarize itself in order to be free of terror. The personal safety state, the latest replacement for the ailing [privatized] social state is not known for being particularly democracy friendly. Democracy draws on the capital of [citizens] trust in the future and sanguine self-confidence in an ability to act. The personal safety state draws on fear and uncertainty, arch enemies of confidence and trust.. it saps the foundations of democracy (Bauman, 2006, p. 154). Intelligence centers, run by the US government, have access to personal information on millions of US citizensfrom un-listed mobile phone numbers (Web 1.0 data bases)to group photographs (Web 2.0 vulnerabilities). Many organizations, known as fusion centres, created after 9/11, were created to improve the way in which information was sharedfusion centres use face-recognition software and data brokers who maintain records on 98 per cent of Americans (The Sydney Morning Herald, 2008, p. 8). Keen (2007, pp. 184-185) identifies Googles holy grail, as the ultimate search engine, the modern-day version of the ancient Greek oracle that re-defines ones existence by supposedly knowing everything about everything, whilst anticipating an age of total digital surveillance in which no information is private. In actuality, the Internet is far from being a viable location for individual and/or collective empowerment. Knowledge workers and knowledge communities, connected to the Internet, are kept in a constant emergency time or in a permanent state of tension about how to survive in the seemingly elusive, but ever threatening, technocratic Brave New World - an existentialism as to how to frame and utilize physical and non-physical arenas of visibility and invisibility, and how to act or not act in everyday life (Thorne & Kouzmin, 2007a; 2007b). The abuses of the Internet in these proprietal politics of fear contexts identity theft; pornography; pedophilia; violence; and increased surveillance capacities need auditing. In other words, a cost/benefit of the dark-side of ICT (Korac-Boisvert & Kouzmin, 1994) is called for, especially in the vulnerability context of the North/South Gradient (Faux, 2001). Increasingly visible within cyberspace is the reproduction of conflicts evident within physical and social space. Conservative and libertarian debates over sexual activities; personal freedoms; and instinctual behavior have transferred to cyberspace. Most apparent is the use of the Internet to demonize individuals, and groups, and to engage in scape-goating and proxy wars which reinforce the deprivitization of information and the de-physicalization of human life - for example, the

unexpected alliance between religious fundamentalists and feminists against on-line pornography and digital pedophilia. This involves the un-warranted fanning of the fear of the cyberspace stranger rather than the physically-proximate family, or extended-family, member. In this strangely inter-mingled, ideologically-driven approach to physical and cyber- space, thinking about doing something is the same as actually doing the thing. Gazing is the same as being involved in the actual event. Science-fiction techniques of surveillance and capture meld into the War on Terror, intensifying the politics of fear, creating a world where potential enemies/criminals are everywhere. Just as with the physical pursuit of terrorists, cyber, pre-crime profiling is used to entrap, or arrest, potential offenders before anything actually happens. Even more disturbing is the possibility of the mutually-reinforcing mythology of rampant, Web 1.0-enabled masters of the digital universe and the Web 2.0 fantasy of constantly forming and reforming issue-focused, transformative, on-line communities masking a much sadder, almost tawdry, actuality. In Barhams (2004, pp. 307-308) investigations into British youth culture in todays...fragmented, contradictory, multiple, disjointed and electronically-mediated, Western world: located neither in widespread connections nor in actual or civic actions, one finds a series of disconnect zones or gated, entertainment communities keeping governments and other authorities separate and outside the shared interests of those disengaged, tight-knit, social groups.operating in secluded physical and/or cyber spaces with highly-localized frames of action. Barham (2004, p. 309) acknowledges that there is on-going contact between members, via websites, chatrooms and mobiles, offering a uid and almost permanent means of staying in touch, and organizing the next events - yet, any evident restless desire for transformation is limited to the possibility of visibility within [ones] community of local fame (Barham, 2004, pp.308-309).

PUBLIC DOMAINS AND THE EXCLUSIONARY/EXPLOITATIVE PROBLEMATICS

The public domain context of the (ICT)/Digital Divide (DD) (Korac-Kakabadse, Kouzmin & Korac-Kakabadse, 2000a) is conspicuous in its absence in the increasingly monopolized discourses involving ICT. For many minority groups and individuals, other non-digital divides involving such issues as poverty; educational attainment; and remoteness still persist and are still decisive. Far from a world of knowledge workers fused with everyone else via the Internet, there are a number of other indicators of separate and unequal networks and separate and unequal ways of life. Geographic regions in macro-and micro-aspects resemble patch works of inclusion and exclusion for both individuals and groups. These economic and social gulags are often connected by purposeful, point-to-point networks which re-create social networks, such as those associated with criminal activity existent for a millennium (Thorne, 2005) and those economic networks which have corralled human and other resources for capitalism since its inception. Furthermore, digital connection is not the same as physical connection (Millar, 2000, p. 21). The Sweeney Report (Sweeney Research, 2003) concluded that the connectivity afforded by ICT is not sufficient to render supposedly invisible, cyber-enabled workers immunity from the machinations of organizational politics or the insecurities of part-time work.

The proliferation of ICT offers challenges not only to developing countries which struggle with basic human needs. The key to development is in information which is inaccessible to them. Facing these challenges, developing nations start from a position of frailty based on low levels of capital; a limited information infra-structure; dependencies on foreign aid and multinationals; and an ever-increasing population growth. The effects of current ICT policies and corporate and government praxis lead to electronic futures which a majority of the world population, arguably, would not choose and would actively seek to avoid. Growing discrepancies between information rich and information poor and the problematic future of employment in an electronic society - very much contrary to "anarchic" and individualistic rhetoric - focus on the growing "dark side" of ICT, its abuse and its addictive potential. "Techno-stress" (KoracKakabadse, Kouzmin & Korac-Kakabadse, 2000b) in the "wired" economy matches the socially dys-functional consequences of ICT abuse. The contestable issue of re-regulating the internet for social and economic purposes is an under-discussed issue (Kouzmin & Dixon, 2006). Korac-Kakabadse, Kouzmin & Korac-Kakabadse (2000a, p. 172) have pointed out that the information gap between rich and poor in the world is not difficult to assessthe Bangladesh economy devotes one-tenth of one per cent to hardware and software products and related servicesthe US corresponding figure is one hundred times larger - ten per cent of the US economy goes to ICT (see also, Dertouzos, 1998). Similarly, with poor Americans, there is an equally obvious dissonance between ICT expenditures in the inner city and the suburbs - people struggling for the daily bites of food having nothing left over for "bytes" of information(Detouzos, 1998; Korac-Kakabadse, Kouzmin & Korac-Kakabadse, 2000a, p. 172). The ICT revolution will increase the gap between rich and poor nations and rich and poor people within nations. Whatever ICT "opportunities" present themselves, they are dependant on communication-systems infra-structure and training needed to join the "IT-harems", otherwise known as the "information club" (Dertouzos, 1998; Korac-Kakabadse, Kouzmin & KoracKakabadse, 2000a, p. 172). It will be very difficult to recover the non-instrumental, social life of information (Brown & Duguid, 2000). As globalization and ICT impacts sovereign nations, the global economic tendency to reduce job security, increase distress, corrode cultural diversity, limit access to knowledge and human rights when less than 5 per cent of the world's population uses ICT (Hong Kong Business, 1998) is disturbing (Korac-Kakabadse, Kouzmin & KoracKakabadse, 2000c, pp. 20-21). ICT has facilitated downsized, tethered (Zittrain, 2008) business executives to follow itineraries that place them on global, round-the-clock time schedules, subject to laptops, modems, mobile phones, faxes, e-mail and other messaging at any time of the day (Tonn & Petrich, 1998: 270). In the past twenty years, in the US, the vacation time has decreased for the average worker by three-an-a-half days and commuting time has gone up by twenty-three hours per year (Tonn & Petrich (1998) cited in Korac-Kakabadse, Kouzmin & Korac-Kakabadse, 2000c, p. 21). A Wall Street Journal poll found that 80 per cent of respondents describe their lives as busy to the point of discomfort (Korac-Kakabadse, Kouzmin & Korac-Kakabadse, 2000c, p. 21). The tension in industrial society between work, family and leisure, is more so in an informationeconomy where work places major constraints on the amount and quality of people's discretionary time and attention (Lobel, 1992). The information-age produces a society in a "realtime" mode composed of people who are economically pressed, politically depressed and socially stressed (Beeman, 1996, p. 3; Sennett, 2008, p. 34). The emerging "Techno-stress" agenda (Korac-Kakabadse, Kouzmin & Korac-Kakabadse, 2000b) challenges human resource management responsibilities, considerably. Emerging less from stress due to conflict over accepting, or adjusting to, new technology, as cyber-life replaces physical-life, "techno-

stress" will grow due to increasing, commercially-motivated and state-condoned, overidentification with, and dependency on, existing and emerging ICT. A growing aspect of corporate and governance capabilities associated with "Techno-stress" and the "dark side" (Korac-Boisvert & Kouzmin, 1994) of the information age is the abuse by individual actors and organized groups of opportunities afforded by ICT. Although electronically-mediated inter-action can be more egalitarian, it also may be more "dis-organized". The regulatory, as distinct from the libertarian, implications of managing trust, are harder to redefine and enforce through an ICT medium. The crisis implications of the "dark side" of ICT behavior is an emerging policy issue of the first order within the divides increasingly evident with the "information society" and for the development of an ICT meta policy aimed at tackling the impending crises of "digital divides" (Korac-Kakabadse, Kouzmin & Korackakabadse, 2000a, p. 182). . The War on Terror compounds the current dilemmas of ICT/DD and its exclusionary impacts. Government agencies have shut down web-site after website; have re-classified documents previously de-classified; and have now rendered information as dangerous within this newer, security fortress context. The securitization of E-government is not being adequately addressed. The loss of accountability capacities under commercial-in-confidence requirements of privatization/outsourcing does not auger well for the putative democratizing assertions of ICT/DD Web1.0 or Web 2.0 based. Recent events in Burma, and elsewhere, have demonstrated the ease by which governments are able to disconnect the supposedly open, mutable democratic network of Internet connections. Similarly, Google has subverted its position as the enabler/protector of Internet searches and communications to serve its own commercial interests (Keegan, 2008) and the anti-democratic interests of the Chinese government. It is clear that new vulnerabilities and regulatory questions arise from tracking developments in benchmarking Internet-based, economic dependencies. E-government is one measure of the ICT/ DD, but the exclusionary impact of ICT/DD lies in the emerging Web 1.0 individualized and Web 2.0 communitized E-society developments within a Neo-liberal agenda of market fundamentalism and ICT/DD strategic competitiveness. ICT Research and Development has become economic and geo-political warfare. Despite the protestations of utopian technocrats and cyber-geeks to the contrary there are very few voices presenting a worldwide, sociallyinclusive framework for the ICT/DD (Johnston & Stewart-Weeks, 2007; Kouzmin, 2007). There is, also, the need to disaggregate the consultant/corporate strategic interests in the issue of ICT. For example, can developing societies leap frog/technologically-migrate upstream in the political economy of the ICT/DD? Can there be any level-playing fields within the ICT/DD? There are convergence assumptions about ICT/DD which are not warranted and Formative Contexts (Unger, 1987) of sovereign nations and the continuing impact of their democratic and anti-democratic impulses are devalued. Can convergence be achieved through ICT? Should it? The ICT/DD is a divisive policy agenda it subsumes culture wars and many other polarities the role the English language; gender and ethnicity in ICT use; consumer versus citizen conceptions of participation; and exclusionary information clubs. Tracking the ICT/DD set of contradictions over the next 20 years will be an important task. The North/South Gradient persists (Faux, 2001; Kouzmin, 2002), perhaps, even more so through ICT/DD. The lack of a level-playing field in cyberspace and it inability to instigate equal competition, let alone a level-playing field for individuals and communities, especially those with distinctive differences, is most pronounced in the emblematic cultural industries. As Millar (2000, p. 149) found, one is bombarded by a data storm in which it is increasingly difficult to achieve shared

understandings in the face of difference. Yet information, the currency of cyberspace, is not differentiated in terms of quality but is viewed, instead, as quantitatively significant, as a means to accumulating power and wealth (Millar, 2000, p. 149). Successive waves of technology have failed to bring about the nirvana, or the widespread sense, of economic, cultural or social improvement: The political economy of the Knowledge Society is about the emergence of new property rights and their global enforcement (Kouzmin, Shankaran, Hase & Kakabadse, 2004). Yet the emergence of new property rights to be enforced in a globalized regime will not help the physical/cyber-dispossessed and the expropriation of knowledge will become increasingly contentious. Despite protestations to the contrary, unrestrained, neo-liberal, corporate capitalism has not resulted in new era of economic productivity, let alone an innovative Brave New World. The Millennium Bug never eventuated, the Dot-coms crashed. Instead, within Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, it is possible to locate the continuing, physically-exploitative forms of capitalism, conjoined with newer forms of cyber exploitation and interwoven with a militarism, which perverts democracy and the commons (Klein, 2007) (see also, Lichtenstein, 2004, p. 124).

HESITATIONS IN A BRAVE NEW WORLD 2. 0

Current ICT problems range from Internet pornography to on-line forgery; credit card theft; identity theft; virus attacks; unauthorized access to a system to destroy data; hacking in to read Email and cracking passwords; and taking over accounts may also erode electronic democracy .Using technology to modify voting patterns may be a new avenue of computer crime (Kakabadse, Kakabadse & Kouzmin, 2003, p. 51; see also de Haven-Smith, 2005; 2006). Computer crime units are a relatively recent innovation in policing, emerging only since the 1990s (Creedy, 1997). In the increasingly inter-connected economies, exemplified by stock exchanges and frontier-less capital markets, globalized production and marketing, ICT crime combat and prevention requires global policies and co-operation. Instead of creating a community based on consensus, un-thinking ICT applications can easily create states of alienated and atomized individuals who communicate with each other through computer terminals, terrorizing and being terrorized by all those who value conflict or are determined to pursue their own agenda (Kakabadse, Kakabadse & Kouzmin, 2003, p. 53) (see also Ogden, 1994; Sardar, 1994). The development of Web 2.0, interactive technologies immerses users in a totally convincing illusion. They seek to assemble a "real" and sharable environment within a cybernetic "tele-place" - the synthetic equivalent of a fully "inhabitable" alternate world - in which increasingly alienated individuals have difficulties distinguishing between real affection from "techno-affection"(Kakabadse, Kakabadse & Kouzmin, 2003, p. 53). The results of such developments are socially dangerous. The infinite desire for personal attention is driving the hottest of the new Internet economy..social networking sites such as Myspace, Facebook, and Bebo all claim to be about social networkingbut in reality are about advertising one selfthe increasing tasteless nature of such self advertising has [supposedly] led to an infestation of [actual] anonymous sexual predators and paedophiles (Keen, 2007, p. 7).the holy grail of advertisers in the world of Web 2.0 is to achieve the trust of others (Keen, 2007, p. 25).

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Research laboratories and arcade virtual reality (VR) implementations already enable the user/participant, masked or wrapped in sensory effectors, to walk through unconstructed buildings, feel the pull of molecular gravity or engage in a high-tech "shoot-out" with a computer or a human operator. Although VR peripherals are limited, at this point, to primitive step platforms, data-gloves, bulk head-mounted audio/video displays (HMDs) and tactile effectors are already being tested. Systems with tactile effectors, which transcend current definitions of simulation, may become a convenient substitute for reality (Kakabadse, Kakabadse & Kouzmin, 2003, p. 53). Kakabadse, Kakabadse & Kouzmin (2003, p. 53) further argue that tactile effectors, such as "remote intimacy" dimensions, have the potential to alter, forever, the legal and social landscape (Fogelman, 1994: 299).network pirates could, someday, employ recorded or counterfeit "bit streams" to commit heinous acts of breaking and entering; "virtual sexual harassment"; "information kidnapping" or, even, "remote statutory rape" and "remote murder" (Fogelman, 1994: 299; Stephenson, 1995). the threat of being cut-off from ICT, like being held hostage or being kidnapped, is a very real possibility..terrorists could cut-off communication to an individual, a group, a community or to an entire governmentand considering that "tele-medicine" will include the automatic transfer of data from consumers to their medical records, and that home care will increase (Olson, 1996), sending counterfeit "bit streams" to patients can induce murder (Kakabadse, kakabadse & Kouzmin, 2003, p. 53) The concept of "cyber-space" which coalesces around visions of virtual community-centred and networked, citizen-controlled, "Jeffersonian networks", or autonomous collectives of virtual communities is a concept of a transcendent meta-community (Kakabadse, Kakabadse & Kouzmin, 2003, p. 57) (see also, Rheingold, 1993). What rights and freedoms of "new speech" (many-paths of sharing multi-dimensional worlds of sight, sound and touch over invisible and ubiquitous "tera-byte" highways) can be applied in the era of the information super-highway (Kakabadse, Kakabadse & Kouzmin, 2003, p. 57), especially in a Web 2.0 world which is so digitally fragmented that no informed debate is possible.a form of digital narcissism prevails and the only conversations one wants to hear are those with ourselves or those like us (Keen, 2007, p 55)? In fabricating the people (Catlaw, 2007), especially netizens, "political ergonomics" (Winner, 1987) will need to be re-invented for any prospect for democratic praxis within Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 cyberspaces.

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ON CONNECTIVITY

Technology only properly becomes an economic issue when the question of relative scarcity and cost arises (Freund, 1972, p. 161). Despite the claims of the digital-ati, it remains most important not to forget Webers admonition not to confuse technological efficiency with economic viability (Freund, 1972, p. 161). However, the early Twenty-first Century is distinctive for an enveloping and simplistic [p]romise of technological progress [which] not only stimulates technologic fantasies and generates consumer excitement, but, also, continually holds

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out as the ultimate panacea for all manner of social illsThe future, one is simply, and repeatedly, told, is digital a veritable techno-topia in which only the fully wired will survive (Millar, 2000, p. 13). Yet, in Millars (2000) view, most of the web/cyberspace content is disappointing. Apart from the commercial sites that reinforce the constant need to consume goods and services, the rest is largely [a] toilet wall, where individuals and groups project their darker side on the hypertext world of cyberspace (Millar, 2000, p.149). Ralston Saul (1997) is also equally disappointed by the content of cyberspace where, as the result of corporatist domination, we are inundated by non-information information. Already government departments and corporations are beginning to flood the Internet with their rhetoric and propaganda, all in the name of public debate (Ralston Saul, 1997, pp. 145-146). Crumlishs (2004, p. xii) claim that the Internet and the World-Wide-Web enable collective action to change the nature of governance possibly everywhere is an exceptional misconception and over-estimation of the revolutionary significance of cyberspace and ICT. Individualistic cyberspace does not naturally produce communal action which transcends the need for external regulation. There have been other, supposedly un-governable, technological frontiers. According to Spar (2001), every one was initially notable for a rush away from governments and a surge to individualism and, then, a move, inevitability, towards self-serving regulation. Clayton (2003, p. 201), drawing upon Lessig (1999), indicates there is nothing in the Internet that makes it inherently beyond regulation. What is required is a Public Administration discourse prepared to interrogate and engage in the continuum between physical space and cyberspace - a discourse reflecting cyberspaces interaction with cyber-punk, science fiction (Gerlach & Hamilton, 2000; Thorne, 2005) which exhibits what Csicsery-Ronay (1991) notes as science-fiction genres serious, passionate concern about a social responsibility to recover multiple histories and to imagine better, even if more uncertain, contingent futures a discourse which adopts science fictions two hesitations historical/logical and ethical a discourse which effectively embeds scientific concepts in the sphere of human interests and actions, explaining them and explicitly attributing social value to them (Gerlach & Hamilton, 2000, p. 287). This type of Public Administration discourse relates to Farmers (2005) invocation for an ethical hesitation to be displayed by public administration practitioners - the type of ethical hesitation which resists the state/government being used by cyber-rebels to secure the empires that they [wish to] buil[d] (Spar, 2001, p. 21). This also involves a discourse understanding, and acknowledging, the extension of corporate capitalisms imperialism under the rubric of globalization, virtuality and individual sovereignty as a form of deception - one needs to see that cyberspace is a natural playground of corporate capitalism. Both cyberspace and physical space have suffered from the actions of heroes who have had an ethical certainty about the current state of (in)visibility and the administration of the named and the unnamed. Effective ethical action is not simply a matter of increasing transparency but of understanding the interplay of visibility and invisibility in relation to cyberspace. Despite the neoliberal and cyber-pundit denials that nation states have any physical or cyberspace jurisdiction, borders are made to appear or disappear and the nameless become the named simply as another flux in the great game of (in)visibility (Thorne & Kouzmin, 2004). Following Millar (2000, p. 14), we must recognize the relationships between those who produce, consume, service and promote digital technologies and cyberspace and, especially, discern the interests of those who benefit the most from the promotion of cyberspace and ICT the critical, problematic, qui bono question.. One must carefully, continuously interrogate and confront, with an appropriate, proportionate refluxing of visibility and invisibility, any unwarranted claims that cyberspace

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represents a refuge from differences, a level playing field for every group or person and a safe haven from any form of discrimination or exploitation. The requisite, carefully-calibrated reflexivity (Gouldner, 1970) will be difficult to achieve if one continues to be subservient to the embrace of emergency time which leaves little time for individual or communal reflection. Kroker (1992, pp. 2-3) reveals that the Post-modern notion of virtual reality, pace (Gibson, 1984), invokes the world of digital dreams revolv[ing] around the possessed individual, enfolded within. eerie and disturbingcynical technology which denies both the physical and cyber worlds any viable form of agency. According to Sim (2002, p. 169), this involves a post-modern discourse in which technology is co-opted into a [seemingly] radical program designed to bring about the end of the self [or community] as we know it. However, despite Sims (2002, p. 169) claim to the contrary, Kroker (1992) does not present a compelling account of technology as ideologically subversive. The individual is privileged over the communal with devastating implications for the possibility of any civil or political action. The individual does not have to be coherent or contained as no meta-narrative is able hold sway. Yet, this leaves dis-embodied, de-physicalized, experimental, technologically-obsessed selves floating around physical or, more likely, cyber space, interacting with unlimited, little narratives [that] are free to operate without interference from either authority or convention (Sim, 2002, p. 169). This produces a self-serving, narcissism which inter-merges with neo-liberal, corporate capitalisms fantasy of constantly evolving, increasingly free, egotistical masters of the universe. But, much more seriously, it distracts intellectual and critical attention from realizing that some narratives are still not as little or as undirected as others and that capitalism is about the relentless accumulation of capital and masking, within (in)visibility, the interests of those who benefit from its activities. Neo-liberal, corporate capitalisms t]echnologies, geared towards regulation, containment, command and control, are not feeding into the collapse of everything they once supported (Plant, 1998, p. 143, cited in Sim, 2002, p. 174). More frighteningly, the technologies (used in the widest instrumental sense possible) of neo-liberal, corporate capitalism are enveloping, increasingly undefended, physical space and colonizing open, equally-undefended, cyber space. Centralized control and hierarchies are increasing in both physicality and cyberspace, via tethering (Zittrain, 2008). Nunes (1997) also conveys that there may be minimal room in global cyberspace for any democratic involvement in society. Sennetts (2008, p. 36) investigations found that new Internet economy workers are skeptical of institutions and exhibit lower rates of voting and political participation than technical workers two generations ago. The Internet/cyberspace provides an ideal (or rather model) world for economic, political and cultural control [Selznick, 1952; 1957], one which is always already conquered and colonized (Nunes, 1997, p. 165). Nunes (1997) locates within Kroker & Weinstein (1994), and other Neo-liberal and Post-modern exponents of virtual cyberspace, the view that [e]mpowerment is a kind of liberal seduction into virtuality.In this seduction, the enlightenment liberation of (mental and economic) energy becomes, in practice, the abandonment of flesh to a virtual world of pure circulation (Nunes, 1997, p. 165). Adapting Furedi (2005), it is questionable whether this seductive fiction of empowered cyberspace allows one to move away from the Stone Age of ideologies and whether the underlying ideology that promotes and protects a egotistical individualism and narcissistic communitarianism, is part of a time when the transformative potential of people has achieved a

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remarkable force [?] (Furedi, 2005, p. 168). Does one want to be empowered in a cosmopolitan, individualistic or communal cyberspace when it presents a vague, incoherent doctrine that has little to say about genuine public engagement (Furedi, 2005, p. 167)? - nor democratic governance? Furthermore, the increasing privatization of cyberspace and the growth of the new Internet economy [1.0 or 2.0]: make democratic citizens trespassers on knowledge that should be the common heritage of humankind - their educational birthright. Ironically, informational feudalism, by dismantling the public-ness of knowledge, will eventually rob the knowledge economy of much of its productivity (Drahos & Braithwaite, 2002, p. 219).

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Kym Thorne is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Commerce at the University of South Australia. His current research is at the penumbra of cultural theory and political economy, seeking to accommodate a more reflexive, post-modern position within the prevailing neo-liberal Project. He is published in leading critical journals and has presented many papers at international conferences. In 2006 Kym received an Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence. His new book deals with the Political Economy of Invisibility. Alexander Kouzmin is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Commerce and Management at Southern Cross University; Adjunct Professor in Management in the School of Management at the University of South Australia and Visiting Professor of Management at the University of Plymouth. He has published eight books; contributed some 60 chapters to national and international monographs/books; presented research papers and keynote addresses at more than 200 international conferences and has published, to date, some 180 refereed papers and review articles.

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