Living in Dsytopa? Digital (non-) places in postmodern films and in the internet

Lars Dittmer

• Publisher: GRIN Verlag
• Year: 2007
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9783640090310
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Seminar: Der Fremde. Bausteine zu einer kineastischen Anthropolgie, language: English, abstract: online gaming has become a standard feature of most games that are put on the market. As a result, online communities and new "social relations" - the phrase is put in quotation marks with a clear intent here - are established on a permanent basis in these realms with after-effects that seem to be barely controllable by the societies. The people who participate in such games, mostly boys and men between 13 and 25, are confronted with a completely new type of social pressure – online obligations. They are grouped in online "guilds" that meet and play at certain times of the day, there are special events in which they are expected to join, and if they are not investing a certain span of time daily into their online-characters – which need to be advanced – they are outdone by other guilds or members of their own groups. Indeed they are spending days of their lives in these realms, which allows for the statement that these places have become anthropospheres, spaces that are filled with human life and everything it entails. The potential to lose contact with real life (rl as it is called among players) is massive. Early the culture industry has been fascinated with living in alternative or simulated realities and its "perpetual oscillation between utopia and dystopia" (Durham 5). Many visions, as I shall point out in this term paper, presage today's developments to an astonishing degree – sure enough the ones I deal with are rather dystopian. Notably, the most prominent in recent years has been the 1999 film "Matrix" by the Wachowski brothers, which has been extended to a trilogy. Also science has come up with certain models that can be employed to conceptualize these spaces – I will outline some of these and try to put them in the context that serves my problem. It is, in my view, necessary to view today's colonisation of and living in these spaces that I have outlined above and will further detail in the course of this paper, in front of a background of media production of the period since WWII. The idea that informs this undertaking is, that there have been numerous accounts who predict what is being made accessible to computer users at the moment – Cyberspace is no longer a room that can be inhabited in the future, but it is right now open to everyone; the Cyborg has come into existence.