Hand’s commentary on the political dimensions of digital culture (the promise of ‘social inclusion and empowerment, interactive citizenship, and participary democracy’ (p.16) and the threat of individualism and rejection of the state) led me to link into commentaries on the recent Arab Spring movement.  The commentator I selected presented an alternative to the utopia/dystopia binary – cyberrealism – which seemed not to tell the whole story, perhaps presenting a more dystopic sense of ‘inevitability’ than the author intended.

The film review postings were a whistle stop tour of notions of digital cultures that Hand introduced, blended with ideas put forward in the Synchtube tutorial. I made connections to themes of digital culture in societal and economic spheres – sometimes bending the the themes to fit my readings of the pieces.

Finally, while watching a BBC documentary about the emergence of the railways in the industrial revolution and I was struck by the similarities in attitudes towards promise and threat of technology and in particular the view point of Carlyle. The struggle and tensions for the acceptance of technology into everyday culture seem to me to be timeless.