2 topics kept jumping into my head as a read this. People are strange was the first thing, and the cycle of media and technological innovation was the second. “…cultural categories and concepts are substituted, on the level of meaning and/or the language, by new ones which derive from computer’s ontology, epistemology and pragmatics. New media thus acts as a forerunner of this more general process of cultural re-conceptualization.” Like we talk about in class, my computer doesn’t do anything until I tell it to – replace “computer’s” with “the user’s” in the above quote and it basically says that we use new media to change our culture to fit our needs. Great, except people are strange. Don’t get me wrong, we are all strange in our own way, it’s what is great about each of us, beautiful. The increased interaction brought on by new media creates a wider spectrum of “strangeness” in mainstream life. Now everyone can contribute to our culture – not just those of us within a standard deviation or so. How does that effect generation to come.
I look at how our culture has changed because of this and I think of twitter and Instagram (etc). Seems that the changes to our culture have changed it from people connecting in-person and wanted the connection to relate to people to just needing to update my social media. We have replaced sitting down for a meal with people with taking pictures of food and sharing them – far from the same thing. This starts to get into the second idea of the cycle of media and technology.
I started thinking about what drives this, does twitter drive the need for new phones that allow me to tweet from anywhere, or does the creation of the phone with this capability allow for the creation of twitter. Does the technology drive the creation of media, or does the want for new media drive technology. In most cases, I feel like the idea of something, then creates a need for the tool to accomplish it; but I am not sure that’s that same pattern for media. It seems that the technology needs to be there or at least mostly there, then the application of that technology is created (then maybe technology updates a bit). Does this make sense? Are we controlling our own destiny?