IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/vua/wpaper/1998-4.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Postmodernist study of the internet

Author

Listed:
  • Heng, Michael S.H.

    (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Faculteit der Economische Wetenschappen en Econometrie (Free University Amsterdam, Faculty of Economics Sciences, Business Administration and Economitrics)

Abstract

The point of departure is that the activities associated with the Internet are organizational and societal activities taking place within a given historical context. As such they can profit from sociological theories such as postmodernism. Postmodernism can be seen as a reaction to some signal failures of modernism and the modernity project. It is very much a socio-cultural and philosophical system of thoughts which sprouts in a post-industrial society. The relevant elements of postmodernism used here are: (a)power is diffuse, (b) there is no grand theory to make sense of reality, c) the world is fragmented and chaotic, (d) information technology has an ambivalent character. It is argued that postmodernism offers a fruitful way of understanding and explaining the range of possibilities and challenges that accompany the advent of the Internet.

Suggested Citation

  • Heng, Michael S.H., 1998. "Postmodernist study of the internet," Serie Research Memoranda 0004, VU University Amsterdam, Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Econometrics.
    • Handle: RePEc:vua:wpaper:1998-4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://degree.ubvu.vu.nl/repec/vua/wpaper/pdf/19980004.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    The Internet; Modernism; Postmodernism; Sociology of computing;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Z10 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:vua:wpaper:1998-4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: R. Dam (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fewvunl.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.