During the Week Eight lecture Adrian pondered the question of whether technology, namely the Internet, is neutral. This is an interesting question because in order to develop an answer for you it you have to first decide what neutral means.

Whenever I think of the word neutral I think about those psychometric tests I’ve done for different things in my life. Whether it be a job, study etc., these tests always present totally random questions that are so hard to answer that you’re forced to respond by ticking the neutral box instead of strongly agree, agree, disagree or strongly disagree. Therefore, to say you are neutral means you have no feelings about the question at all, and you somehow sit unmoved and in-affective.

I don’t think the Internet is like this. Perhaps for those people who’ve never seen a computer before, the Internet may seem a completely useless thing. However, that doesn’t mean it’s neutral. It’s not neutral because the fact that a person may not be able to navigate the Internet does not mean to say the Internet has no affect on that person. Feelings of contempt for Westernisation, lack of education or intimidation may be brought on by a person’s lack of know-how when it comes to using the Internet.

Hence, the relationships between people and the Internet are more complicated that we think. The Internet is not simply coercive to some and neutral to others, it actually has a different relationship with different people that is constantly changing according to various factors.

With this in mind it’s hard to imagine anything at all that is truly neutral. To be truly neutral would be to have never had any contact with anything else in the world, ever. To me, existing alone, with no relationship to anything else seems impossible.

By the same token, things that don’t affect other things always have a connection – effect – on something else. Everything around us is connected to something else. The Internet, the floor, the TV, the hairbrush, event dust!

Nothing exists independently. Nothing is neutral.

The Shields reading from week seven sheds some important light on the limitations that narratives and plots impose on readers of books.

Shields says, ‘the absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things’. This idea leads on from my previous post quite nicely, as it expands on the view that the contemporary media environment (the Internet), which is an unconventional and shapeless form, offers us multiple new ways of thinking about things.

Furthermore, traditional communication forms such as books and films with plots and narratives encourage people to believe that life works in the same way. Shields says, ‘conventional nonftion teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fathomable whole that concludes in neatly wrapped-up revelation’. But this is simply not the case, and therefore through understanding a new media environment that abandons plot and narrative, society may start to develop more realistic expectations of life.

Shields has hope in the fact that the Internet, with its plotless content, will lead us towards a society that thinks beyond what traditional communication formats have prescribed. He sums it up quite well when he says, ‘nonfiction, qua label, is nothing more or less than a very flexible (easily breakable) frame that allows you to pull the thing away from narrative and toward contemplation, which is all I’ve ever wanted’.

However, Shields’s view is not met with so easily. Rebecca believes that plot creates a necessary pattern, while George has picked up Shields’s vision that the reader of plotless content acts as an editor as they organise information in their own way.

Shield’s argument is an interesting one to explore as it can be linked to many new ideas and ways of thinking, kind of like the contemporary media environment.

Author control is an interesting idea when you consider that words can mean different things to different people. How can we guarantee the same words will be interpreted in the same way every time a book is read? We simply can’t.

If this is the case, it seems to be a common assumption that authors have complete control over their work, and to a certain extent this is fair. Authors can indeed pick and chose the words they use, but they can never guaratee the words will always mean the same thing.

In today’s symposium Adrian said: “A word only means something by virtue of what it isn’t”. Therefore, a word has no built-in meaning and can never be judged for what it is, because it isn’t anything. This is quite a mind-boggling idea, but Mia elaborates on this quite well. Words are given meaning and feeling by those who read them and interpret them. In this light, no author has ever had control over the messages conveyed in their writing.

In considering what’s at stake for authors whose work has entered a multi-mediated communication environment (the Internet), the idea that words are only given meaning once they’re interpreted is an important one. If authors never really had control over their writing in the first place, then nothing has changed. The only difference is that readers are able to navigate the words differently, making it possible for them to generate more meanings than traditional forms (books) have previously allowed.

I’m struggling to see the harm in this. Perhaps there is none, and maybe if we start to let go of the feeling that we’re always losing something, we might begin to understand what we can gain from embracing the contemporary media environment.

After today’s symposium, I was thinking about how we learn network literacy. Adrian mentioned that most network literate individuals are completely self-taught. If this is the case, then it’s more important than ever to make sure young people in particular, are interested enough in the internet to teach themselves the language of code.

This evening I ate spaghetti Bolognese with my 14-year-old sister, who has become a very keen blogger over the last six months. I told her I was doing a blog for uni and that I needed help understanding how to install certain widgets. I felt very old having my little sister – almost a generation younger than me – explain this. Nevertheless, her advice was excellent.

After dinner my sister got chatting to me about how she did this, that and the other with her blog, and how when she started out she had nothing but a “white page with a bit of writing on it”. She then proceeded to tell me that in order to custom her blog she had to code certain things. Say what? “Code? When did you learn to code?” I asked. She answered: “Sophie and me sat down for a whole weekend and looked it up on YouTube. We made a big document with all the code on it so we wouldn’t forget”. Well, I have to say that I was suitably impressed.

I think my little sister is quite unique – and not because I love her to pieces – because blogging is not something she was introduced to at school, and it doesn’t seem to be something many of her peers are doing, except Sophie. She taught herself some code so she could communicate her interests in the contemporary media environment, and I feel this will hold her in great stead for the future. She’s lucky that she doesn’t need school to teach her things.

Why don’t they teach blogging at school? It would be a fantastic way to teach kids network literacy, while allowing them to express their interests. Sadly however, I think Adrian was right today when he said that schools are deeply frightened of the internet and its power, which causes them to restrict students’ interaction with it.