A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

John Perry Barlow's 'Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace' narrates a world in which revolutionary politics are assumed to be immanent in the machines that structure and enable networked communication. Attention to the rhetorical strategies of the piece reveals a wealth of contradictions and misdirection: newness is rooted in history; revolution is effected by commercial transaction; and liberal democracy becomes libertarianism.

The ways in which the Declaration establishes and resolves narrative conflict promote an 'impossible future' that is blind both to the history of the underlying technologies and to the American revolutionary politics on which it claims to base itself. Barlow's project would have been served better by a more pragmatic intervention into real-world processes. Ten years after its original publication, the Declaration is both widely reprinted and increasingly mocked: its language has become commonplace and its idealism has come to seem absurd.

The development of the Net has greatly changed the way we lead our lives and will do so more as the Net expands and grows in the future. As such, it is of great importance that we understand the nature and functions in order to understand internet in a way we've been asking ourselves the question "What is the Net?" Some of us have myths, views, ideas and dreams we want to believe about the Internet. And so, two articles have been chosen to argue the very fundamental question of how we think about the net, who owns it and how do we control the net.

This essay is an analysis of two opposing view on the issue of controlling the Net. The two articles that were analyzed in regards to this essay are 'A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace' by J.P.Barlow and 'Taming the Web' by C.C.Mann. In relations to Barlow's article, he purports that the Net is uncontrollable by man.

This is clearly evident in the following quote taken from Barlow's article which states that 'I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us'. Barlow asserts so because of the nature and function of the Net.

As such, implementing legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context is futile as these are based on matter and the Net consist of non-matter. In relations to the uncontrollability of the Net due to its function, Barlow claims that the ...