Week 12 – the final lectorial for Media 1, and it was a big one. Filled with the insightful concepts of media materialism, dust (which I didn’t think would hold a whole lot of meaning, but boy was I wrong) and even the Anthropocene.

Media materialism is definitely no basic way of studying or approaching media. It can extend to ways of thinking of politics, history, the economy, the world in general basically. Aspects of media materialism include:
– technology: isn’t just a tool, includes  ideology, cultural values, economy
– technique: skills and processes that are uniquely human (includes mental processing)
– culture: identifying subgroups within populations, the world a culture, humankind and art.
‘culture in something that we do, but also something that we are’

Throughout the lectorial we also looked deep into technological determinism, social constructivism and cultural materialism. Also, was the philosophical look into dust, artificial intelligence taking over the world and other mind-boggling themes. But we were also given time to write a stream of consciousness about one of five topics. I enjoyed this initiative as it truly gave us time to reflect and write honestly about the presented themes in the lectorial. So here is that draft I managed to write before my ‘time expired’, and killed off the more interesting and insightful half of my stream of consciousness.

Stream of consciousness: ‘humanity is in charge of its own future’

Humans haven’t been around for very long on the spectrum of the existence of earth and the galaxies and the universe. We are, and will forever be a mere blimp in the billions of other blimps to ever exist, and yet still, we have been somewhat bestowed the responsibility to take control of a species’ and a planets’ future.  WE DIDN’T ASK FO’ THIS! This responsibility is like that ugly sweater Nana gave you for Christmas. You don’t want to wear it, and you don’t need to wear it because it’s summer, but you do anyway to keep everyone happy. We have to take charge in our future because it will keep the human race happy (obviously, survival is definitely a good thing) and if we don’t, there will be a lot of sad or angry Nana’s (humans) hanging about.