Gergana Pencheva-Apostolova
Bulgaria, South West University “Neofit Rilski”-Blagoevgrad
apostolovag@yahoo.com
Abstract: The proposed paper is in the general field of philosophy of the infosphere and its primary concern is the ethos of the transcending humanity into the virtual spaces of the electronically supported World Wide Web. This transcended virtual projection of humankind I have chosen to call e-kind. Its nature is seen as virtual and based on the communicated human nature over a talkative web engaging the mind in the debating culture of the e-agora. The motivation of our present focus on the ethos of e-kind lies in tracing the initial enthusiasm of the developers of the Internet, that has reached much farther than the reaches of science, getting ahead of the awareness of the changes within and the effects on the connected mind of e-kind or its growing self-knowledge as the (episteme of the) Self in (and possibly of) the net. Kantian imperative and the antinomies of the mind fit to the Self, weaving the Web and getting caught in it. E-kind is talking worlds and sets of worlds, and shelves of sets of worlds into being creating the image of e-agora where ethos, pathos and logos weave up into the entity of e-kind coming into awareness of the power of its Self and the limitations of its existence somewhere between wisdom and calculation. Knowing these might serve for the prevention of damages of the Self of a shocked humankind transcending into e-kind.
PDF Key words: e-kind, info-sphere, e-ethos, the Self in the Net, antinomies of e-kind, e-illusion.
There might be God or there might be no God at all, but let
us live as if there were one: for when we are to be lain in
the earth of which we have been so caring, all our lives we
shall be placed facing the sky.
Yordan Radichkov
Introduction
Here we shall pursue to develop a project in the field of e-philosophy, based on the following premises:
Firstly, the transformation from traditional to cyber culture [1] is based on the development of the virtual reality, which is different both from the material and the ideal, the subjective and the objective, as they are interpreted in traditional philosophy.
Next, the specifics of the cyber reality enable the appearance of virtual culture which has a number of specific features making it different from traditional culture [2].
Thirdly, virtual culture is released as virtual communication and the communicative means and environment of the virtual culture are analogous to those of oral cultures yet the transformation from traditional to electronic culture has the opposite direction to the process of transformation of oral to written culture, and a more complex nature. Therefore, a holistic approach is expected to provide a working methodology of investigation of that growing complex e-space of our contemporary info sphere [3].
In the fourth place comes the hypothetical statement that the ethical standards of the cyber reality double traditional ethical standards and raise antinomies and controversies leading to the transition of standard human values into something else turning the human abiding the virtual space into an extension of the individual universe or homo coniunctus – a category, derived from the hermeneutic interpretations of the ‘stellar man’ of John Baines [4], yet neither hermeneutic, nor the same as it is for Baines except for the feature – ‘unprogrammed intelligence’.
Electronic media of communication have provided the environment for a new literacy based on a use of language very similar to the direct, living communicative situation or a network of speech situations. Writing for the Internet, or for any type of software, is speaking to an audience including our own selves. It is a space where our speech is viewed, shared, enacted, supplied with a feedback including both its reflection and its answer. This space, or communicative environment, is different from real life since it creates realities of shared mind. Yet it is different from the realities of human mind since it is virtual, electrically-powered and technologically dependent. However, it is capable of supporting a communicative space where verbal proceeding runs to its complete unfolding as logical, emotional, linguistic, and deictic complex, saved and replayed within a vast body of shared intellectual capacity and interplay of signs, both human and technological, of indicative, iconic and conventional nature.
From a pragmatic point of view electronic communication provides an approach to language usage analogous to that of the period of transition from oral to written culture but carried out on the complex level of hyper-cultural transformation and of opposite direction – from written culture to electronic orality.
The problems which arise from this transformation concern the very nature of the new speech situation: the nature of the reality created by means of electronic communication; the agents of the speech situation; the characteristic features of the message; the extra linguistic factors; the psycho-physiological effects – all of these reflected in the ethical aspects of the cultural transitions from the physical to the virtual space and from the mental to the virtual space, and vice versa…
Through the Looking Glass: the premises for arising of e-illusion [5]
Virtual continuum is where the spiritual power of the agents is realized.
Technically the super world of the virtual complex space is realized in the network: Internet and its on and off line extensions; the cyber products – programs, games, films, sites and pages; the material carriers of software – CD, DVD, discs, magazines, pagers, mobile phones; the society of the producers of cyber products, the offices using specific software; the places and their communities of frequenters – the arcades, clubs, university and institutional networks and computer rooms; the study at home where in a corner of the room new space is opened behind the PC-monitor.
Virtual continuum is the environment of virtual reality produced through the interaction of the agents entering it in their specific functions, and the messages exchanged in their infinite dialogue on all possible levels.
Virtual reality is dependent on both the technology (its machines and products which serve as its ends into the non-virtual world – entrances, exits and framework), and on the human agents supporting, creating, demolishing or changing it. Therefore, it is discrete while it is realized as incessant process of communication. There is nothing outside communication. This is what makes it unique: it differs from the realities of the individual mind in that it is being shared by all involved in it in the very process of its changing; it differs from the actual everyday life in that it is re-playable in each moment of its discrete structure: all final choices are re-adjustable within its complex hierarchy of admission and task-solving conditions. The existential categories are, consequently, to be applied to a new context: life and death in the virtual reality receive new extensions from their material and spiritual contexts. The ethos of the cyber reality should also rely on a changed value system following from the changed context of existence.
The existence in the cyber reality means taking part in that specific communication. Since the latter is carried on various levels of technology, abilities and limitations of fields and secrecy, which provide access to a given level, existence is bound with the notion of ‘access’. The levels of access create hierarchies where existence is relative, depending on the access to one or a number of levels in the vertical and horizontal hyper-dimensions of the virtual continuum. It is interesting to note also that temporality is bound with the hierarchy of levels: ‘now’ is a simple dimension while the movement from ‘now’ to the ‘future’ would mean claiming for a new access, and the movement from the ‘now’ to the ‘past’ and the ‘future’ means a greater access within the explored levels.
The above said, concerns individual access while in the whole universe of cyber communication existence is resolved in the ubiquity of that communication. It has its exits into the individual mind and the real life of society, which secure it against any switching off the power supply.
Virtual existence is extended into real life because it is an extension of both the ideal and the material existences of humanity into the virtual continuum. This is the space which is created in the material world yet it employs intellect and emotion in an intensified reproduction of human culture where each individual is reflected as a carrier of all aspects of humanity available in cyber space by far, and against the background of society in its extended capacity including all human societies represented in the levels of cyber reality.
Cyber reality is a space where the human mind can operate within the limitations of both its own capacity and the technological base underlying this reality. Operating in it, our mind can create extensions to cyber space and this is done in the process of virtual communication. It is hyper dialogue where levels are established and access is sought to the deeper layers of shared intellect. One single mind can find paths to self-study through self-realization in that dialogue, where at the other end is the common product of human intellect – a ‘looking glass’ where the self explores its own boundaries in action which is communication. Cyber space is an open system: at its ends there stand real people who transfer the input and the output between the virtual and the ideal on the one hand and the ideal and material – on the other hand.
Virtual space does not possess the elements of the ideal yet it possesses the routes towards it: it is loaded with value and arouses emotion since it is communication and has the keys to perception. This is so because it is based on verbal codes – and in the words of Iris Murdoch ‘language is soaked in value’ [6], – and it draws on non-verbal access to human senses by using sophisticated audio and visual tools, and by involving the individual in an intellectual puzzle. Residing in and besides cyber space the individual is also subject to radiation and tiredness, and open to all emotional effects of the virtual dialogue, negative emotions grounded on exhaustion, and positive emotions stimulated by the satisfaction of coping with the intellectual challenge and the pride of belonging to the cyber society.
Virtual culture is the sphere containing all controlled (primary) and automated (secondary) processes, human activities, relations and products realized in virtual space. At this stage of its development it is characterized as a specific extension to traditional human culture: it is its product and its adaptation.
The evident characteristics of virtual culture are: it is communicative; it has a technical carrier; it uses energy from an outside source; it exists only for those who have access to it.
These features determine the outside boundaries of virtual culture fixing its practices, heroes, rituals and values within matrices. The vast continuum of traditional culture is contained in those matrices in the way they allow it at the present state of technology, capabilities, knowledge, understanding, interest and values both on the level of present-day society and on the level of the individual. Virtual adaptations of culture are interpretations where the present plays the role of an interface letting only the current image of culture – its existence for the ‘now’ – its dimensions reduced to the point of the moment – its significance for the virtual individual regardless of the innumerable interpretations or significances of the same events for generations of human individuals. This reduction is inevitable like pouring the content of a stream into the system of an electric power station where the same water is to fulfil a function very different from its natural or previous man-designed functions. The change of functioning of culture is consequent upon the change of communicative reality where the source, the encoder, the channel, the noises, the decoder and the user employ new means to produce a message different in form, intention and effect while using the same material traditional culture has supplied.
The agents [7]
Virtual practice has produced a variety of agent types depending on the level of their access or interest in creating connections throughout their interaction directly or indirectly. Although they are all active (otherwise they cannot take part in cyber communication – they have to enter cyber space on their own will – and ‘enter’ means ‘communicate’ since being ‘silent’ in cyber space is equal to being ‘non-existent’), the agents of virtual interaction form hierarchy based on the level of their access and the significance of their activity or, in more general terms – on their virtual freedom.
This hierarchy of the connected includes: mail-users, entertainment users, business people of various trade and status, gamers, amateur adventure-seeking surfers, professionally interested, fans to addicts, chatters, site-creators, the owners of space, programmers, cyber sharks – generators of great cyber spaces through internet and software). There are also additional branches to this hierarchy including hardware producers, hackers, pseudoservers and all cyber outlaws, internet service and internet police.
The subject of the virtual space is an abstract entity: the shared subjectivity – the gestalt of the connected functioning on different levels as creators ( the demiurge and the demolisher), customers (the users), abusers (the hackers), community members (the chatters, the gamers), adventurers (the surfers, the learners).
Existentially the individual is an intellectual entity whose conscience is extended within the borders of the virtual universe – actually or as a possibility of which the individual is aware. In the virtual space the human being has new dimensions and that requires new standards of humanity.
Since virtual culture, and its ethical system in particular, are based on the cybernetic mechanisms of extending the human conscious, it is important to consider these mechanisms before establishing the hierarchies, principles and criteria of this new ethical system.
The extended conscious is related to the virtual realization of the individual as a hyper personality. The individual enters a community of expert minds of different levels of competency. The communication of the individuals in the virtual space is a self-reflection, since the individual conscious enters the virtual space alone and remains such throughout its virtual existence as a connected mind. The principle of the creators of computers is “There is nothing in the computer which has not been placed there by the human’. Even the beginner, who has just covered the level of ‘literacy’, is expected to generate information units or virtual objects. The individuals form a hierarchy, which is based on the level of knowledge and virtual experience.
The connected form a specific community – a virtual gestalt coordinating their activities in the virtual space which can be viewed as the “collective subconscious” of Jung:
“We have no knowledge of how this unconscious functions, but since it is conjectured to be a psychic system it may possibly have everything that consciousness has, including perception, apperception, memory, imagination, will, affectivity, feeling, reflection, judgment, etc., all in subliminal form.” (Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche, p. 42)
In the virtual space the collective subconscious is a psychic entity but at the same time it is a functioning social entity: it is a society of individuals, a dialogue of selves where the self is preserved no longer as an individual but as an individually-oriented realization of the virtual reality in a gradually activated network of steps covering the space on successive levels of access. This virtual unit is bigger than a human individual. Therefore, the ethical standards reach beyond the common human standard.
Virtual space is technically limited, yet it has no boundaries for the extended conscious, which is a hyper reflection of the individual conscious itself.
There can be distinguished three types of extensions of the conscious:
The first type includes the reflected self: the computer can operate with a database, organization and style which have been input in it as well the program of improvement. Each individual carries in his conscience his own model as an ideal goal of his self-realization. Technologically virtual space offers intellectual organization, which is a simplified display model of our minds. We input in this scheme the complex of our individuality and it is reflected in a definite ‘other’ – simultaneously simplified and comprehensible in its new complexity at a higher level of informational organization.
The second type of extension is the individualized individual: everyone is alone and is multiplied by the network of the virtual space, which enlarges its range to cover multiple exits to other people, programs and institutions. This in itself evolves the feeling of power.
The third type we shall call the Connected individual: the individual entity of dialog projections of all the reflected minds Within this entity of connected individuals there are rules for ‘social’ behavior different from those which act in the common human society. They are determined by the awareness of the projection of the self beyond the limitations of the physiological and sociological human unit. Consequently, all norms referring to the biological aspect of the human become irrelevant. The positive and the negative are associated with the success and failure of the self-realization on the various levels of the virtual hierarchy, where every next level gives greater access and opportunity to operate with information.
It is interesting to trace the possible extremities of the hyperspace which in every separate moment of its functioning limit the levels of the virtual hierarchy. To explicit them we shall move along the basic communication scheme: who – what – whom – when – where – how – why. The basic types of extreme oppositions, or antinomies, then would be those of the agents, the functions, the effects, and the situation or the spacial and temporal parameters of the virtual context.
Antinomy of the agents: in the network space there are the two opposite groups of the subjects of cyber communicative situation – the creators of programs and the users while in between there are those who upgrade or break the programs. The intellectual relationships here are business relationships. As far as the objects are concerned, unlike other cultural products here each artifact could be immediately shared and multiplied as it is because ‘multiplication’ is bound to the entrances and exits of the display while in its virtual nature the object is one and the same. Thus, through the entrances of the network only one virtual object is the subject of input and the users receive each time the original product at their exits.
Antinomy of the functions: construction and destruction are the two aspects of the existence of the virtual cultural space since the creation of any electronic object demands clearing of some space.
Antinomy of the effect: the existence of the cyber society of the connected individuals effects in individualization and participation in the network, which is either of the two states of being connected or disconnected.
Antinomy of the space: ‘here’ is the relation of the entrances and the exits to the computer space.
Antinomy of the time: ‘now’ is opposed to the virtual time needed for the realization of the program.
Socially there is the opposition of the computer societies and the non-computer societies. The former is an entity of super practice, which has created the opposition by its very existence: traditional culture has been turned into just another form of human culture.
At the present stage of technological development, the virtual man comes up against the problem of doubled ethical norms. The reason for this doubling of the moral norms and principles of the agents of the virtual space is that the network as a flexible mediator between the material world and the universe of conscience doubles the standards for the individual mind on the entrance and the exit of the virtual space to overcome the inadaptable features of the common human stereotypes. It creates imagery, which is considered harmful by the common conscience since it does not recognize them at all and fears they might destroy common culture, or recognizes them as monstrous, ugly, perverse, impossible and strange.
The virtual man is doubled because his biological existence remains outside the virtual space: the mind is freed from the body by its transfer into the virtual reality, which is a common conscience. That makes a new ground for evaluating life and death. The life and death of Homo coniunctus are connected with the oppositions: individual – shared; participation – exit; loss of information – turning off power; deleting or saving of the individual as an information unit in the connected conscience. Altogether the improvement or the ‘healing’ of the virtual individual is carried out through replay. Death is leaving the virtual space and passing into the space of common humanity. Life is very close to the Cartesian principle Cogito, ergo sum, which can be altered to fit virtual space – I am connected, therefore I am. As it has been previously stated, being connected does not possess temporal parameters – it does not coincide with the incessant spells of working online in the Internet. Disconnection is not death – it is the common time when an individual is outside the virtual space in any of its forms – it is irrelevant to being connected since it does not count within the life of the virtual individual.
This leads to a new notion of history: it exists as database with its own temporal parameters, yet it happens at the present moment of the virtual reality of the connected mind.
The double nature of the philosophy of the virtual space is based on the antinomies of the virtual culture. It has to consider the common conscious generated in the electronic environment. At one end it is pragmatics of tangible artifacts and concrete data; in the opposite extremity it is to act as teleology, explaining and motivating the very existence of the virtual human.
In that we come very close to M. Heims opposition of nature and cyberspace:
In Larsen’s six features of nature (Svend Larsen determined them as: Infinite, Inaccessible, Overwhelming in Power, Fearsome, Wild like “the moors of Jutland”, Primal) I saw a way of cataloging the psychic framework of cyberspace. If we see ourselves migrating from nature toward cyberspace — at least as I and many others experience it — we can describe the psychic framework of cyberspace as patterned on nature.
Thus it comes out that the double ethics of the ‘virtual human’ is grounded on the premise that at the exits of all virtual routes there are real things: the exits are respectively treated as concrete or abstract sites for the transfer of human personality into the real world or for its remaining in the virtual world.
The characteristic features of the agents of the virtual society are the same as those of the hermeneutic society: hierarchy, extension of the individual beyond the common psycho-physiological, moral and social entity of the common human; independence of time and space; development of the reality of the intellect; neglect to human civilization and common cultural values.
At the present stage virtual culture is still developing. Its double standards are due to its imperfection. Virtual culture, however, possesses the premises for the transition to a new level of humanity: an intellectual plan and a system of values. The technical carriers of virtual culture support the attempts of the human mind to find its non-material being. What will be the results depends on the further development of this carrier and the perfection of the ethical standards and criteria of the virtual man.
Divide et Computa [8]
The formation of E-kind seems to have been dependent on the interculture of informed individuals on the internet. The 4-I have turned into a vast space for social performance of diverse and disputable content.
Accepting the tech-platform of the E-agora, we have let its principles of communication become the regulators of our civil minds and challenge our public outcome. It is amazing how smooth a matrix fixes out of Aristotelian Rhetoric, and how flexible it proves in a series of optimizing procedures where some of the agents can be situationally dismissed as insignificant.
The adoption of a holistic approach is functionally bound to the basic formula:
Who – is telling what – to whom – when – where – how and why?
This enables us to build the basic matrix for analysis of crosscultural talk where two Cultures are involved, C1 and C2 in a shared situational context SC enriched by both cultures’ contexts, CC1 and CC2:
Fig. 1 Basic Matrix
| Who C1 | What | To whom C2 | When
SC +CC1 |
Where
SC + CC1 |
How RT1 | Why Intention1
|
|
| Who C2 | Hierarchy of subjects | Fact 1
Argument1 |
Evaluation of C2 | Importance of time for C1 | Importance of place for C1 | Rhetoric tools of C1 | Objectives of C1
|
| What | Fact2
Argument2 |
Matter of discussion
(sides) |
Evaluation of relation
C2: FA2 |
Time C1:FA2 |
Place C1:FA2 |
RT1:FA2 |
OC1:FA2
|
| To whom C1 | Evaluation of C1 | Evaluation of relation
C1: FA1 |
Hierarchy of objects | Evaluation of relation
CC1: TC1 |
Evaluation of relation
PlC1: C1 |
Evaluation of relation
RT1: C1 |
Evaluation of relation
RT1: C1 |
| When SC + CC2 | Importance of time for C2 |
Time C2:FA1 |
Evaluation of relation
CC2: TC2 |
Temporally-bound background |
Place C1:TC2 |
RT1:TC2 |
OC1:TC2 |
| Where SC + CC1 | Importance of place for C2 |
Place C2:FA1 |
Evaluation of relation
PlC2: C2 |
Place C2:TC1 |
Place-bound background |
RT1:PlC2 |
OC1:Pl2 |
| How RT2 | Rhetoric tools of C2 |
RT2:FA1 |
Evaluation of relation
RT2: C2 |
RT2:TC1 |
RT2:PlC1 |
Compati-bility of codes |
OC1:RT2 |
| Why Intention 2 | Objectives of C2 |
OC2:FA1 |
Evaluation of relation
OC2: C2 |
OC2:TC1 |
OC2:Pl1 |
OC2:RT1 |
Discussion or dispute
|
Placing concrete units of information in this matrix provides a definite basis for calculating the rate of acceptability of a certain unit, piece of setting or agent of a prognosed situation. Such calculations can serve greater international projects and negotiations as well as a national versus global choice (e.g. Moscovitz)[9].
Next is the level of reducing the general matrix to operating optimal matrix relying on an open set of optimized situational status. This is an approach which allows statistic and probabilistic record of communication practice from the point of view of e-management of analogous situations. Here is a random example of such reduced matrix:
Fig. 12 Optimized Efficient Matrix
| FA=FAC1 | Ev=EvC2 | Time | Place | Objectives | RhTools | |
| C1 | FA | EvC2 | T0 | T0 | OC1 | RTC1 |
| C2 | – | – | T0 | T0 | OC2 | RTC2 |
Practically efficiency is acquired in two ways in traditional culture: by using teams in place of individual representatives for a debate in a round table or other kind of team discussion, or by studying previous experience and eliciting the most efficient representative.
Web technology allows that these two approaches could as well be based on previously developed models by exact (as near as possible) calculation of the parameters of a situation, thus relying on relevant cultural training rather than on natural and undeveloped talent or intuition.
In this we come very close to a basic statement of Rhetorical Design Logic:
The Rhetorical Design Logic, finally, assumes that “communication is the creation and negotiation of social selves and situations.” Rhetorical messages …display a characteristic pattern of content and structure: We expect to find “elaborating and contextualizing clauses and phrases that provide explicit definitions of the context,” a definite sense of role and character “through manipulation of stylistic elements in a marked and coherent way,” and “classically ‘rational’ arguments and appeals designed to persuade the hearer that the speaker’s symbolic reality is true or correct (but not legitimate or powerful or conventional)” (O’Keefe, 1988:88) ( In Fundamentals of Argumentation Theory, 1996 ).
Another line of studies which is very close to this systematic approach is pragma-dialectics:
Pragma-dialectics is an argumentation theory developed by Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst in the Speech Communication Department of the University of Amsterdam.Van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s most important publications in English are Speech Acts in Argumentative Discussions (1984), Argumentation, Communication, and Fallacies 1992a), and (together with Sally Jackson, and Scott Jacobs) Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse ( 1993). (In Fundamentals of Argumentation Theory, 1996 )
A further content-design model of the offered system of intercultural rhetoric would view certain aspects of those two aspects of rhetorical analysis especially when the arguments and figures are isolated, studied and re-combined to suit new purposes.
SIAN
The philosophical grounds of a complex study of the e-agora can be found in the recovery of practical philosophy.
This theme harks back to the classical concept of phronesis, practical wisdom in a given case. Toulmin is a major figure in the recovery of phronesis, especially with the publication of The Uses of Argument (1958) and Human Understanding (1972). The other major figure in this recovery is Chaim Perelman, with The New Rhetoric (co-authored with L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1958/ 1969). Both Toulmin and Perelman were surprised to discover far more interest in their work among speech communication scholars than within their own disciplines. (Fundamentals of Argumentation Theory, 1996:202).
One is socialized into language games by acquiring their endemic myths, conventions, rules, moves, and substantive beliefs. These elements get their meanings in their uses. Thus Toulmin (1958, 1972) proposed that people organize their affairs around pragmatically incommensurable bodies of knowledge. … He was thinking chiefly of the differences across academic disciplines, but the idea of a field of knowledge can be extended as well to social movements, families–indeed human groups of any sort. (In Fundamentals of Argumentation Theory, 1996:203).
The instrumental aspects include the mechanisms for inventing, combining, using and improving the expressive means of e-kind – the figures, which tradition has viewed as figures of thought, figures of speech and figures of style (Murphy, 1974). Further we have isolated three layers of expressive instrumentaria.
The first layer includes the figures of language, which are the concern of linguistics and stylistics: syntactic, textual and lexical. Since they are generated within the means of natural languages, they are culturally dependent and bear national or transnational values.
The second layer includes the figures of thought which are universal but can be individually encoded. While the validity of an argument is a concern of logic, the choice of an argument-type and the choice of verbal forms is of concern to rhetoric. This is the fundamental layer of dialectics, where our matrix as displayed above is to be applied to effect.
The third level could be called generic. It is concerned with the processes of encoding and metaphorisation both in diachronic and in synchronic respects. It is a concern of the studies of cultural conscience and touches upon the grounds of rhetoric and linguistics where verbal encoding-decoding, language creativity and situational variation of choice are concerned. This is a problem of further project but our hypothesis is that metaphors are expressive complexes – engine programmes – serving to guard the main stem of the cultural identity of humanity (Apostolova, 2005) [10].
The Internet is based on metaphor as the main vehicle of translating our specific practices into generally acceptable activities. Huge blocks of information are exchanged in messages where clichés, e-pictograms, signs of approval or disapproval, emoticons and links combine to take a couple of lines only, and less than a minute’s performance of compressed layers of meanings of intercourse.
How this exchange within the web spaces turns into practices at the exits of the net and why it is so are the two questions that have tempted me into studying a rhetoric of meanings based on the triadic unity of ethos, pathos and logos as aspects of the performances of social mind in the infosphere.
These three agents form the further dimension of our e-model and it turns out easy to operate when concrete sets of parameters (values, concepts, symbols, functions, types of agents) are translated into them.
Conclusion
The outlines of the nature of the cyberspace and its impact on the agents form the direction of a bigger project researching into developing an e-model of education where education categories are seen in their hyper functioning as engines of codifying in simpler ways the complexity of human dialogue within the virtual space.
Since the existence of the virtual individual is through communication which is ubiquitous in being the continuum of existence itself; and since the dialogue in the cyberspace is carried on the surface through the natural language – then it is justified to adopt a methodology we can call argumentative after Ch. Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca’s idea of argumentation as a network of logical, quasilogical and extra-logical arguments leading to common agreement. Ethic categories can be traced within the cyber space where they are interpreted in different layers of meaning: emotive, digital restatement through psycho-physiological action, beneficiary, punishment, climbing levels, competition.
Further, the metaphorization of the moral categories as speech acts would be a translation of locution and perlocution into locution which is reduction of the level of ordinary speech.
The ethic categories in the cyberspace can be divided into two groups: virtual correspondents to normal values, and metaphors proper. Their study is to give clues for the techniques of their translation from common communicative practice into the cyber space.
Since English is the dominant language in the cyber space, it would be challenging, too, to do a comparative study of the complex interpretation of the verbal explication of the ethical norms in this language (quality of sounding, layout parameters, perception, cultural positioning in the network of the who-what-whom-how-when-where-why hyper matrix). The introduction of ethic codes in varied environment is to be carried out through their varied representations as perceptions or mental objects.
Ethic categories can be seen as the doorways to encoding the ideal framework of humanity: their analysis is to reach their atomic structure in the terms of Wittgenstein, and translate it into binary codes. There is more that can be done to e-education besides instruction into successions of smaller activities – or explicating the program as a row of commands – in the natural language in the form of web-counseling. The clues lie in the translation of ethic codes doubling them at the entrances and the exits of cyberspace so that to give the individual the freedom to reach the stars of both our outside and inside universes – virtually.
References
[1] ‘Cyberculture’ is borrowed from the Sci Fi writer William Gibson who first coined that word, here in the quality of an initial chronologically term before the clarification of the concept of ‘e-kind’ further in the text, and quite in agreement with Pierre Levy.
[2] In the terms of Hofstede and the scope of Cassirer.
[3] ‘Infosphere’ is defined by Luciano Floridi as ‘the whole system of services and documents, encoded in any semiotic and physical medid, whose contents include any sort of data, information and knowledge… with no limitation either in size, typology or logical structure’ (Floridi 1999:8); here I tend to use it in its particular reference to the ‘symbolic computational power of ICT tools’ (Ibid.).
[4] John Baines could have had no importance for the present text but for the sudden interest the book of that preacher aroused a couple of years ago amidst the reading Bulgarian audience thus provoking clarification of the diffrence between a scientific approach to the Net and his popular hermeneutics.
[5] E-illusion is the coinage for a parallel concept to Kant’s illusions of the pure mind.
[6] Murdoch 1998.
[7] The following part is a summary of my previous development on the subject of E-kind in a series of articles dating back to the year 2000, revived in 2012 in Cultures and Texts. Internet, Intertext & Interculture.
[8] In the understanding of Oxford philosopher of the Infosphere Luciano Floridi
[9] Moskovitz has given to me the idea od applying the studies of the communicative situation to a broader object as is the WWW and by far it continues amazing me with its easiness of operation and productivity: analogs to be found in the methodology ised by Gofman, A., Moskowitz, H.R., Manchaiah, M., Silcher, M., “Prescriptive Public Policy,” Proceedings of IPSI Conference, Montreal, 2006.
[10] These ideas were discussed in public at the presentation sessions of two important conferences: Apostolova, G. FROM HOMO CONIUNCTUS TO HOMO ASTRALICUS or THE VIRTUES OF VIRTUAL CULTURE – http://internetconferences.net/: IPSI-2005 VENICE – proceedings, November, 2005 and THE SELF IN THE NET – VIPSI, Montreal – New York – Boston, June – July 2006
Literature
Apostolova, G. Cultures and Texts. Internet, Intertext & Interculture, SWU PRESS, Blagoevgrad, 2012
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