Hybrid Assignment 09
Fred Turner (2006:38) writes that “For both the New Left and the New Communalists, technological bureaucracy threatened a drab, psychologically distressing adulthood at a minimum and, beyond that, perhaps even the extinction of the human race. For the New Left, movement politics offered a way to tear down that bureaucracy and simultaneously to experience the intimacy of shared commitment and the possibility of an emotionally committed adulthood. For the New Communalists, in contrast, and for much of the broader counter-culture, cybernetics and systems theory offered an ideological alternative.” Explain how Turner distinguishes the New Left from the New Communalists through the affinities of latter to a cybernetic vision of the world “built not around vertical hierarchies and top-down flows of power, but around looping circuits of energy and information” (2006:38).
While both movements of the New Left and New Communalists were revolutionized because of the fear that both sides had, due in part to what they considered as being inconsistencies in governmental monopolies and problems that steered separation and phobia after the war. The New Left was nervous about the process of change and the New Communalism formed communities that were not against the war. Turner distinguished the New Left from the New Communalist through different visions, one from the other as having the same ideas of technology and war while the other is the formed communities and organizations to make for a stronger design made by all. However both were overshadowed by forces of capitalism and according to the Book Review by Anna McCarthy: Turner’s history of the New Communalism, a cultural formation as rooted in the collaborative, interdisciplinary research culture of Cold War defense science as it is in Trips Festivals and tofu potlucks, offers us a far more complex, and to my mind, more interesting and politically necessary story of how present day visions of new media came to be. If contemporary spin offers us a potent, if naive, vision of the digital network as a space where community, democracy, and economic growth can finally coexist, Turner’s book is a convincing account of very tangible social networks, embodying and disavowing certain forms of power and privilege, that made such visions possible.
Reference:
Volume 1 Issue 1 (2008) DOI:10.1349/PS1.1938-6060.A.316
