What are the main arguments in the two readings for this week? What version of historical change do you believe in and why?

Manuel Cartells’s article, ‘Toward a sociology of the network society’, the author starts his article with saying that sociology should be studied and used as our guideline to global success, and then finishes his first section with emphasizing on network society.
As he explains his means in Network society, there are five important paradigms;
 technological paradigm
 social change
 the enclosing of dominant cultural manifestations
 a consequence of the global networks of the economy, communication, and knowledge and information
 progress in scientific knowledge
Manuel concludes his article that new society is created and bounded with dynamic networks.

In constrast of Manuel’s five paradigms, Allison Fraiberg focuses three perspectives on post-modernity in her article, “Of Aids, Cyborgs, and Other Indiscretions: Resurfacing the Body in the Postmodern.”

We live in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. . . . today, there is a whole pornography of information. –Jean Baudrillard
There has been a mutation in the object, unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject; we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace . . . –Fredric Jameson
We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. –Donna Haraway

With these underlying perspectives, Allison explains how structural society would act in relevance to each perspective, and she exhibits how different those perspectives are in terms of the same issue. The example Allison chose is AIDS,
Jameson’s thoughts would be “the ‘general public’ can contact HIV ‘as well.”
Baudrillad’s thoughts to AIDS would be to “keep the ‘halos’ on, the ‘unclean’ out, and the private crucially ‘protcted,”
Haraway’s thoughts would be on the balance between “potent fusions” and “dangerous possibilities.”

What version of historical change do you believe in and why?

My personal believe would be more on Allison’s, because it is more realistic and it is what is happening now. I certainly do not believe all the perspectives Allison is mentioning, especially Haraway’s idea of cyborgs, But I cannot disagree to Baudrillard and Jameson, when it comes to our unsolved problem of AIDS.

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