ridaalbarazi.welcome

The new concept of socializing and interacting online has given all of us some sort of virtual identities, sometimes it is the same personality we have in real life and sometimes a little different or more ideal personality. It is a completely new zone, a virtual one with different kinds of power, Cyberspace has been the ultimate virtual world where people are finding their true selves in.

No matter what our nationalities are, or where we live, once we are plugged and connected we enter this virtual world, this reminds me with the Matrix movie where they had to be plugged in order to get into the Matrix, although I don’t agree with its negative view of the AI evolution, I prefer Isaac Asimov way of humanizing the machines by giving them feelings and not taking them as enemies, but in both cases the question is about the new technologies and what new concerns they will make. What about cyberspace? Hasn’t it given us a strange power as individuals?

Information Overload

When we decide to dig for a piece of information, few years back we used to get short with the found information from books and papers or even asking experts, spending a lot of hours and we still feel that a lot is missing, but now online by surfing the web for few minutes we can find more than we need, we start selecting, choosing, and filtering, there are a lot of results and alot of answers for the same topic we are looking for. When google gives you over a milion search results it’s impossible to see them all, you will filter and choose, this is the information overload, it has even created the new concept of procrastinating where we start going from site to another and forgetting what we were doing in the first place.

Information overload has given us this individual cyberpower, being able to find any information about anything at anytime. We feel powerful and able to seek anything, like if we have it all in our minds, we are not afraid of difficult questions, but we developed our skills to find them and filter the results effectivly.

Having more knowledge and the ability to learn faster have encouraged people to produce more than consume, like this article for example, there are many resources online about cyberspace and cyberpower, but I felt that I have another vision so I didn’t hesitate to share it online, another source, another information overload, and it’s up to the users and readers to choose from.

Different Identity

For individuals cyberspace has opened new gates, bypassing censorship, participating in decisions, the ability to know the forbidden and even share all of this, this power is still evolving, with the revolution of Web2.0 people are not only consuming and producing information online, but they are interacting with it, and developing new types of information, wikis and web applications, everybody has his own home (account) in every website, it’s not only being plugged, now it is being logged in too.

Whatever you are in real life, whatever your work is, or your physical conditions are, it doesn’t matter, it’s just about your ability to use the computer and surf the web, and you’ve got this power, in cyberspace there are no nationalities or skin color or lifetime disability, you can be what you want even if you can’t be it in real life.

We still hear a lot about people who fake their identities online, sometimes it is not really faking as much as it is showing the real inner personality that they can’t show in real life, expressing some sort of ideas that they can’t express in real life, or they don’t have anybody to share it with.

Credibility

What about the credibility of these information and knowledge online? How much are they trustable and how much they are not? It is interesting how some individuals has developed a new way of trust, it’s not about reading the information, they prefer to know who wrote it, or where is it from, they check the site name, the writer name and sometimes they dig to check their credibility, this may sound a good way, but at the end not all internet users are able to judge their sources.

In the other hand it became more difficult on the authors themselves to maintain and establish this credibility, there are no jury to judge them, it’s their readers who will trust them or not, anyhow credibility is still a big unsolved issue in cyberspace that require some more research and work.

Cyberspace is a space that powers the individuals and get powered by them, cyberpower is really a huge subject with a lot of things to discuss, in this article I tried to summarize the individual cyberpower from my point of view, there are still some other cyberpowers to talk about like the community power, and the giants power, which I’ll be posting about shortly.