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Perhaps we simply have less to be ashamed of in an increasingly free-to-be-you-and-me era. "More and more people believe they are entitled to behave according to their own values and not the norms prevailing in society," Ben-Ze'ev says. That means there is less of a need to keep a protected private self, free from the scrutiny of strangers.

Nor do self-disclosers feel sheepish about craving the spotlight. "I've always thought of myself as being in a movie, that my world is larger than life," says Schaeffer.

Bookstores and talk shows have long trafficked in the confessions of not-necessarily-notables, but the Internet has democratized and amplified personal gut spilling. Web sites such as postsecret.com and mysecret.tv bring bathroom-wall-variety confessions, such as "I only love two of my children," "I had gay sex at church camp," and "I pee in the sink," to-and from-the masses. Meanwhile, teenagers telegraph their deep thoughts and petty observations for YouTube prowlers hungry for novelty and diversion.

Masked parties were only occasionally broken up by civil authorities

. The Weekly Journal

as a gathering of "Chamber-Maids, Cook-Maids, Foot-Men, and Apprentices" [5]

it was more likely that the event had been hosted by those of the working class rather than by the more prominent people in England's "fashionable society."

. Many opponents of the masquerade looked to the foreign influence of other European nations such as Italy and France and the Orient as the diabolical source of the "cultural epidemic" which they believed was invading both the morality and the national pride of England [7].

"foreign Diversion" was a conspiracy on the part of foreign nations to neutralize the beauty of English women by forcing them to "hide their charms with a mask" [10].

Weekly Journal another writer

"conspiracy theories"

equated attending the masquerade with the sexual act itself,

female attendance at the masquerade was viewed as a heinous, criminal offence, though not condoned, male attendance was more or less tolerated by the critics of the masked balls.

claimed that the tragedy of the Lisbon earthquake occurred as a result of the sin and corruption that had been infecting not only English culture but also the culture of the world for many years.

As a result of these public outcries, the masquerades were forbidden to take place throughout the following year [15].

In her comprehensive study on the eighteenth-century English masquerade, Masquerade and Civilization, Terry Castle explains that the discourse of the anti-masquerade movement which exposed the masquerade as "a threat to bourgeois decorum and national taxonomies" could actually help explain the cultural implications of the decline of the masquerade.

Time-biased media, such as stone and clay, are durable and heavy. Since they are difficult to move, they do not encourage territorial expansion; however, since they have a long life, they do encourage the extension of empire over time.

each medium embodies a bias in terms of the organization and control of information.

Space-biased media are light and portable; they can be transported over large distances. They are associated with secular and territorial societies; they facilitate the expansion of empire over space. Paper is such a medium; it is readily transported, but has a relatively short lifespan.

It was Innis’ conviction that stable societies were able to achieve a balance between time- and space-biased communications media.

He also believed that change came from the margins of society, since people on the margins invariably developed their own media. The new media allow those on the periphery to develop and consolidate power, and ultimately to challenge the authority of the centre.

Oral communication, speech, was considered by Innis to be time-biased because it requires the relative stability of community for face-to-face contact. Knowledge passed down orally depends on a lineage of transmission, often associated with ancestors, and ratified by human contact. In his writings, Innis is forthright in his own bias that the oral tradition is inherently more flexible and humanistic than the written tradition, which he found rigid and impersonal in contrast.

Linking unleashes involvement and interactivity at levels once thought unfashionable or impossible. It transforms reading into navigating and enlarges small actions into powerful forces. For instance, hyperlinks made it much easier to create a seamless, scrolling street map of every town. They made it easier for people to refer to those maps. And hyperlinks made it possible for almost anyone to annotate, amend, and improve any map embedded in the Web. Cartography has gone from spectator art to participatory democracy.

This impulse for participation has upended the economy and is steadily turning the sphere of social networking - smart mobs, hive minds, and collaborative action - into the main event.

In part because of the ease of creation and dissemination, online culture is the culture.

All these numbers are escalating. A simple extrapolation suggests that in the near future, everyone alive will (on average) write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program. This idea is less outrageous than the notion 150 years ago that someday everyone would write a letter or take a photograph.

prosumption. As with blogging and BitTorrent, prosumers produce and consume at once. The producers are the audience, the act of making is the act of watching, and every link is both a point of departure and a destination.

planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain.

In 10 years, the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles of fiber-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this thing.

The Web will be the only OS worth coding for.

via phone, PDA, laptop, or HDTV

The Machine is an unbounded thing that will take a billion windows to glimpse even part of. It is what you'll see on the other side of any screen.

Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea.

a machine that subsumes all other machines so that in effect there is only one Machine, which penetrates our lives to such a degree that it becomes essential to our identity - this will be full of surprises. Especially since it is only the beginning.

will one day fight for control of information

he form of value

Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold

Wittgenstein, taking up the study of language again from scratch, focuses his attention on the effects of different modes of discourse; he calls the various types of utterances he identifies along the way (a few of which I have listed) language games.

especially if it is to undergo an exteriorisation with respect to the “knower” and an alienation from its user even greater than has previously been the case

revealing that knowledge and power are simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided? In the computer age, the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government.

New legal issues will be raised, and with them the question: “who will know?”

the observable social bond is composed of language “moves.”

One can decide that the principal role of knowledge is as an indispensable element in the functioning of society, and act in accordance with that decision, only if one has already decided that society is a giant machine.

For brevity’s sake, suffice it to say that functions of regulation, and therefore of reproduction, are being and will be further withdrawn from administrators and entrusted to machines. Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made. Access to data is, and will continue to be, the prerogative of experts of all stripes. The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers. Even now it is no longer composed of the traditional political class, but of a composite layer of corporate leaders, high-level administrators, and the heads of the major professional, labor, political, and religious organisations.

This breaking up of the grand Narratives (discussed below, sections 9 and 10) leads to what some authors analyse in terms of the dissolution of the social bond and the disintegration of social aggregates into a mass of individual atoms thrown into the absurdity of Brownian motion.

It would be superficial to reduce its significance to the traditional alternative between manipulatory speech and the unilateral transmission of messages on the one hand, and free expression and dialogue on the other.

What is needed if we are to understand social relations in this manner, on whatever scale we choose, is not only a theory of communication, but a theory of games which accepts agonistics as a founding principle.

Rather, the limits are themselves the stakes and provisional results of language strategies, within the institution and without.

This, I think, is the appropriate approach to contemporary institutions of knowledge.