10 - Dialogicality and the internet

Summary

The advent of the internet (Net) in the closing decades of the twentieth century was a technological innovation with a potentially profound and influential effect upon human beings, individually and communally. This chapter examines crucial aspects of the internet, which functions as a particularly rich instantiation of the forces of globalization and the emergence of the self as dialogical. It highlights three more specific points of intersection between dialogical self theory (DST) and how the internet functions dynamically as a globalizing experience. The chapter suggests that the internet alters the personal and social experience of Cartesian space and time and the internet may foster or undermine dialogical exchange depending upon the degree of anonymity and isolation users' experience. It also suggests that the internet facilitates the expression of extreme forms of monologicality including what might be termed voices of darkness and the irrational.