Local vs. Global Connectivity

Definition

A local node can have gravitation in a local community, but its gravitation pull is like that of a small planet compared to the sun sized pull that a global node has.

With Twitter, celebrities can teleoperate – that is, they can connect with followers and fans without actually having to see them in real life. The celebrity’s actual body is protected from access by fans through the digital technosocial interface of the social network architecture.

The idea of envy in the face of celebrity is being discussed. At the highest levels of society of the spectacle people become nice in the face of those with high Whuffie. There are many people who have studied this before, Alice Warwick, a woman who supervised my panel at MIT.

“Now they swarm in large colonies, safe inside gigantic, lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines” (Haraway 1991f, 43). (Source: Transcoding the World: Haraway's Postmodernism, Jonathan Crewe, Signs, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Summer, 1997), pp. 891-905, Published by: The University of Chicago Press, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175223). We too, as humans, are sealed off from the outside world of Cyberspace – we too communicate with it by remote control – by the safety of our space suits, our interfaces: our computers