Habermas is famous for his “Unfinished Project of Modernity”, and I have a “Project of Internet Illegitimacy” yet to be cherished. The following is an abstract of the draft of my proposal not yet accepted:
Unlikely social scientists would dispute we have already entered an information era since the latter part of the twentieth century. Castells has put forward that networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies and have become the basic units of modern society. In the context of this social transformation, we have the Putnam-Fischer debate about the decline of social capital due to the Internet use. This is literally “a continuation of a 150-year-long tradition in the social sciences on whether the community is declining or flourishing the Industrial Revolution” (p.114, Quan-Haase, Anabel and Barry Wellman. 2004. “How Does Internet Affects Social Capital” in Social Capital and Information Technology, edited by Huysman, Marleen and Volker Wulf. London: the MIT Press).
I’m particularly pessimistic in this issue. Notwithstanding ICT is a two-edge sword which allows both legitimate global economies and illegitimate use of information networks, in this global criminal economy, there exist ever-growing cybercrimes ranging from large scale money laundering to petty instances of computer hacking, amounted to numerous IT-enabled abuse, attacks and crimes, among others. By the “unstarted project” that might be hung up forever, I wish to contend: the more people learn about cybercrimes, the less trust they might have in people, both online and offline. As a cynic, I’d criticize that we might be walking away from the “community” and towards a river of no return, going nowhere on a trackless engine.
