Civilization of the Mind in Term Paper

Total Length: 581 words ( 2 double-spaced pages)

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By "civilization of the mind" Barlow clearly means that the Internet will be and must be a free medium for the same reason that private thoughts of individuals are not appropriately subject to government control. In Barlow's view at the time, the cyber medium would be nothing more than a community of individuals sharing the product of their private and sovereign thoughts.

Practical Limitations of the Civilization of the Mind Concept

In so far as Barlow meant the freedom to communicate thoughts and the freedom of access to information, his criticisms and his expectations of what the civilization of the mind would (and should) become were accurate. Today, free societies fully recognize that their citizens have every right to communicate freely and to access information via the cyber medium.
Barlow was also accurate in his expectation that cyberspace would also provide a new social medium and in that respect, his article is especially impressive in the accuracy of that prediction.

However, Barlow obviously had a narrow appreciation for other issues, such as the fact that the cyber medium could also be used to commit serious crimes and to harass and violate the rights of individuals. Surely, he would not have objected to government regulation of cyber crime, cyber terrorism, child exploitation, and many other uses of the cyber medium that are harmful to the very citizens he hoped would benefit from the medium. Nevertheless, considering the era when Barlow was writing and the state of the Internet at the time, his article….....

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