Week 7 Reading.

In Murphie, Andrew, and John Potts work “Culture and Technology.” I found the segment on Knowing the world differently: Poststructualist thought to be the most interesting.

What comes first the chicken or the egg? I think it’s fair to say that technology and change are much like the chicken and the egg, as the writers say “we know the world differently through different technologies, and different technologies themselves are in turn a response to knowing the world differently.” but as they point out may technology dwell closer to the very heart of whatever we call human. Technology changes as we change, with its requirement to match our needs, which in a sense also become their needs?
They bring up Posthuman, and according to wikipedia a posthuman being a hypothetical future being whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards, a completely synthetic artificial intelligence like a cyborg.

Most interestingly though, ..

They bring up technology and techniques and that ‘machines imply techniques’, and they question whether we need technique to use things and if techniques come unattached to technologies, with an attempt to answer that i bring in Raymond Williams who claims that a technical invention only becomes an available technology when one possess the knowledge and technique to do so. Therefore if techniques do not come attached to specific technologies then how would we learn the techniques, could you learn to use a pen without using a pen? learn to ride a bike without actually riding a bike? i don’t think so but saying that the ‘Folders’ on a computer stem from our already existent ability to search through folders, therefore giving us the technique without the technology.

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