Knowing, which requires collaborative interaction, is an exercise in power and control rather than some objective debate or discussion about what the world is like among swarming semiotic agents. According to Foucault's model of positive power:
 

	Power is exercised rather than possessed.
	Power is not primarily repressive, but productive.
	Power is analyzed as coming from the bottom up.  (Sawicki 1991: 21)

Technopoly and new disciplining technologies
Postman argues that the U.S. has become a 'technopoly', a culture whose "information immune system is inoperable....whose available theories do not offer guidance about what is acceptable information in the moral domain". A technopoly is "a twentieth-century thought-world that functions not only without a transcendent narrative to provide moral underpinnings but also without strong social institutions to control the flood of information produced by technology...Because that flood has laid waste the theories on which schools, families, political parties, religion, nationhood itself are based, American Technopoly must rely, to an obsessive extent, on technical methods to control the flow of information.

The Net is a social construct, just a bunch of wires and radio transmitters and computers if not for the human weaving of its elements into a rich tapestry of form and significance. The Net is what we experience it to be, and the language of common experience is ultimately more powerful as a design parameter than speculative cognitive science, tenuously stretched sociology, and mechanical usability testing combined.

This paper explores the Internet as a disciplining technology - or rather, as the medium for a range of human discourses which can be seen as disciplining - by examining recent threads of discourse about excessive use of the Internet, or what is usually called 'Internet Addiction' (IA).

Information as food

Food metaphors abound in our discourse about information. First, we employ a number of water metaphors. We say that we 'wade through the information', 'swim in it', 'drown in it' and 'surf its channels'. We speak of 'oceans', 'rivers', 'seas,' 'floods', 'trickles', and 'streams' of information. We 'consume' information, 'feed' it to someone or some computer, 'digest' or 'absorb' it, 'guzzle', or 'graze on' it, 'forage/hunt/fish/troll' for it, and 'browse through it'. We (and computers) can 'spit out' information and pick up 'tidbits' of it. Information can be 'half-baked' and 'raw', and computers have 'menus' to help us select what to consume. What is information food for? To 'feed our minds'. Tichi (1987) has shown how, in the modernist period of Western culture, food is often represented as fuel for the body, which is, in turn, seen as a machine. Today, the mind is seen as the machine par excellence of our times - the computer - and information is its fuel. The image schema of the container (the mind-computing machine) is fundamental here. Communication becomes the process of moving fuel from one container (someone's mind) into another (another mind) so that it can be processed.

Metaphors and human responsibility: Gluttony, bad habit, or addiction?

Shifting from the construction of behavior as 'sin' to 'bad habit' and finally to 'disease' involves an alteration in the types of disciplining technologies which are deemed appropriate for creating the disciplined selves and bodies that underlie the positive power on which social order depends. Whether or not we have 'sinned' and fall under the scrutiny of a religious expert or family member, or we are declared to be 'ill' and come under the gaze of a specialist in medical or psychological disorders, we will be offered one or more of the currently approved disciplining technologies which are thought necessary to reconstruct our personal identity such that we can be trusted to govern ourselves through the reliable use of the everyday technologies of self by which we manage our participation in the communal semiotic swarm.