I am Not Dave, and I Did Not Write This Post
Mark Poster (b. 1941)
Mark Poster is an emeritus faculty member at the University of California, Irvine. You can find his faculty page here, although he is not listed in his department’s current faculty listing.
Wikipedia has the only extensive bibliography of his I could find. His last major publication appears to be his book, What’s Wrong With the Internet (2001).
His faculty homepage trumpets an award from Lycos (seriously…).
Interestingly, his output seems to have tailed off right about the time the internet started to turn much more participatory in nature.
“Postmodern Virtualities”
Poster constructs an analysis of the then-still-emerging internet in the mid 1990s as a vehicle for exploring the dynamic nature of subjective identities and relationships that inhere to postmodern culture. He quickly narrates the development of mass media as a (mostly) one-to-many system of information distribution falling under the hegemonic control of those with the financial resources to manufacture the necessary equipment and distribution infrastructure. The “bidirectional communication systems” constituted by the internet asked for a reassessment of media consumption and production as relatively cheap means of production/distribution could be more widely disseminated to the average consumer. Read more