Candace's E-learning and Digital Cultures site

This week I‘ve been thinking about image and language. I think I’ve come to the ‘conclusion’ that medium is to message as pedagogy is to technology. You can’t say that any message is best transmitted by one single medium any more than you can say that one message can be successfully transmitted by any medium; this is not because ‘the medium is the message’ but because they enter into a mutual relationship before, during and after the transmission. The message–if we roll it back to a pre-inguistic thought or idea–must be translated into something before it can be understood by another person.

(And we wouldn’t want the alternative: Belcerebons)

I’ve also been aware that most of the media I post is ‘pop’ culture rather than…I guess, Culture Show culture. I suppose this is mostly because I’ve interpreted ‘digital cultures’ as referring to de facto culture, out of which springs artefacts rather than artefacts that attempt to ‘say something’ about culture. This is a tenuous distinction at best. And the real answer is probably that 1) I know a lot more about pop culture and 2) what I do know about culture culture is largely written down in my undergraduate notes in a box somewhere, unable to assist me in remembering who said, e.g. ‘linguistic structures enable complex thought’ and things like that.

I’ve been thinking about a couple different themes this week. One was to do with the tendency to view technology as a phenomenon independent of its human creators–and particularly, as Bell highlights, its human maintainers. This sees technology (for good or ill) as a nearly unstoppable juggernaut, an unpurposed and potent meme. It might be survival of the fittest: technology in general is good for humanity and the bad associated memes will eventually die out, or mutate into something more useful. But it also might be a capitalist Darwinism: whatever makes money will flourish regardless of its innate benefits to society.

The other theme is Sympathy for the Robot. The examples I’ve picked out (whether of tech or aliens) seem to be popular culture doing its best to get everyone to get along. Whether its ‘robots’ or ‘aliens’ are standing in for race, religion, ethnicity, etc., these and many other sci-fi offerings are pointed at getting one set of humans used to the idea that another set of humans may seem un-human, but once you get to know them, they’re just like you and me. My tone here is a bit condescending, but this has more to do with the manifestation of these lofty goals rather than the goals themselves. It is also worth considering that, while the internet holds the promise of real groups of one sort of human interacting with real groups of another sort of human, this interaction currently has little in common with the intimate relationships portrayed in Bicentennial Man and, yes, Small Wonder.

This week I’ve been reflecting on a few ideas, and while thinking about things (particularly films) that pertained to these ideas, also about what does and doesn’t qualify as ‘digital culture’.

Especially when looking at film, I was interested in the prevalence of dystopian views of technology in general, and in particular technologies that had embedded themselves into everyday life to some extent or other. As most of this week’s assigned viewing emphasised, this is particularly focussed on new technologies, real or imagined (i.e. telephones, printing presses, cars, etc. don’t take over the world) and an individual’s (or small group’s) experiences of them going wrong (a kind of micro-dystopia, which may or may not eventually spread)…with the exception of Dr Strangelove, of course. But even in stories where the humans have been taken over by machines (or via the use of machines), one person is often singled out (e.g. Capt. Mandrake in Dr Strangelove, Neo in The Matrix , Del in I, Robot or–ahem–Lewis in Meet the Robinsons fighting a very bad hat with a time machine).

This seems to connect in some way to the individual-group segmentation found in discourse about Web 2.0. The promise of ‘personalisation‘ versus the potential of groups interacting, connecting, expanding each other’s horizons… The purpose of an individual in the narratives above is perhaps not so much a statement about ‘the way things are’ in itself, but rather the way we might experience things in tech-mediated situations…