The Neo-Genesis and the Potential Popular Rule - Information Evolution Part 3

This is Part 3 of a 3-part series named "Information Evolution". The series explore the evolution of information technologies and the 3 stages of its existence. Read Part 1 here: Divine Information and the Unrecognized Mass - Information Evolution Part 1.

People are witnessing even more advanced informational technology in the contemporary age. From 1950 onward, the ongoing digital revolution through a new range of internet-related technologies further advanced historical informational material capabilities. The internet is a powerful information technology as it serves both the function of preserving information and transmitting the information. While the printing press could produce preservable information that has a long service life with modest costs, the internet can store information that will never disappear at nearly zero cost. A limitless amount of information can be produced or preserved without even the need to occupy any physical space. Today, information has become the most common thing on earth. The internet is also transcendent in information communication. Compared to the postal system through ships and railways, the internet can deliver information to its destination with lightspeed. Compared to the telegraph with a similar velocity in information transmission, the use of the internet requires little expertise and is easy to operate. In the digital age, point-to-point communication can be conducted anywhere at any time with ease as long as there is internet coverage. Point-to-Multi-point communication is also boosted. The bar for someone to publish their information to the public is minimal. All information can be uploaded on the common platform of the internet for all surfers to view. Both the abilities to preserve and deliver information reach their climax.

However, the functionality of the internet does not limit to preservation and transmission. An improvement in those two aspects is merely a quantitative change that is still along the trajectory of the modern era. What makes the internet different from its information technology predecessors is digitalization. “Let there be light.” As the programmer type a few lines of code, a beam of light was shot within the screen. The internet started the age of “Neo-Genesis,” as everything in the real world can be digitalized on the internet world. The creation of virtual reality is no longer science fiction but present and future. Moreover, the digital world is an imitation of reality, yet it may be beyond reality. The computation capabilities of the internet allow it to process information beyond human capacities. The characteristics of the virtual world do not need to be a complete reappearance of the actual world as it is under the complete control of the human design. The digital world does not necessarily have to follow real-world social organization, political order, or even the law of physics, as its creation is subject to human operation and imagination. The internet world is an assemblage of information that could invite countless possibilities.

Because of the internet revolution, the interconnectivity of ideas is approaching the maximum, with all sorts of ideas connected freely in the shared space of the internet. The internet further enhances the ability of an idea to gain influence, and that enhancement applies to both state and the public. While popular ideas can be communicated with higher frequency to gain importance within society, the government can also use the internet as a medium to launch its own ideological propaganda. With the continued asymmetric distribution of real power between the state and the public, the state can control the internet to limit the information accessible to the public and, in return, intersperse their own ideologies among the mass[11]. In the contemporary world, we would continue to see a legitimation arrangement of “social contract,” wherein the state and the public compete for their sphere of influence.

While the informational legitimation mode of the real world maintains the same, the distribution of influence within the internet world may be different. The virtual world is a popular world free from real-life state system arrangements. Although the ideologies of the real world will exert influence on the virtual world, the norms within the virtual reality may be entirely in the hand of the people to decide. Free from the restraint of traditional political structure, the legitimation mode of the internet world may be popular sovereignty, in which it is for the popular mass to monopolize the influence on the ideological context. The norms developed within the internet world may also have the potential to guide the real world.