One of this week’s readings was Culture and Technology by Murphie, Andrew and John Potts. It was quiiiiite long I must admit and I did have to skim read a few parts. Anyway, these are some ideas that stuck out to me.
Firstly I was happy to finally know what Technological Determinism meant. Not that I was dying to know but last semester in one of my classes there was a debate going on (probably about politics which I really know nothing about) when someone called out “classic technological determinism” to which the rest of the class nodded and agreed. I had no idea what that meant but I’m pretty sure I wrote it down and put an asterisk next to it, so I would google it later. Which I didn’t by the way.
So back to the reading. Technological determinism describes technology as the agent of social change. Although some theorists believe this to be the case, others such as McLuhan (not Lohan) believe that technology is rather an extension of human capabilities. So is technology neutral or not? Do we determine how technology advances or does technology determine how society advances?
Those who refute technological determinism believe that it’s the way technology is used by humans that determines whether or not it is crucial to society. The properties and components of the technology itself actually doesn’t matter.
Another aspect I found interesting was the section referring to Meyrowitz’s theories on the ‘TV age’. He argued that in modern society the lines between gender and age is blurred because children are now being exposed to adult behaviour and individual’s private lives are becoming public property. He believes television plays into our obsession with exposure and emphasises spectacle over reason. I thought his claim that we are more interested in exposing secrets than knowing the actual secrets was worth noting.
This made me think about the recent celebrity phone hacking scandal. Maybe the reason the perpetrators did it was just to prove that they can expose famous celebrities personal information rather than doing it because they wanted to see these people naked.
– Caitlin
