9/14 Readings

It's getting late and I'm sad to say that this is certainly not my best writing... I haven't been sleeping much as of late, so I'll keep my fingers crossed for some coherency.

Who Will Be in Cyberspace? - Langdon Winner

When reading Winner's take on what a society dominated by growing technology and cyberspace, I had to keep in mind that the piece was written in 1996, when much of these ideas were just beginning to see increasing use in the private homes of individuals all around the world. As a whole, I think it is important for us, even today, to realize the easily ignorable fact that much of what we encounter on "cyberspace" and in society as a whole was carefully crafted and selected by a man sitting behind a desk somewhere in the universe. There is no such thing as a simple "movement" without some influence of human forces, as Winner concludes that "deliberate choices about the relationship between people and new technology are made by someone, somehow, every day of the year" (53).

On the other hand, Winner seems unnecessarily nostalgic about a time that, given the advances made through the media and its vast possibilities for public relations and propaganda-esque control, we could really never return to. Advertising and PR have always been about building brand loyalty and persuading the consumer in any way possible, including the "tableaux vivants of modern life" that Winner mentions on page 49. Real money was not spent on these ads to project the Utopian possibilities for the perfect American life as he suggests, but rather, it was simply profit-driven marketing. Pandora's box opened long ago with the advent of the Radio Age in the 1920s, and I believe that this author is underestimating the fact that life with this sort of mass media circus will come with certain features that simply need to be dealt with.

The Cult of Information - Theodore Roszak

Roszak's "zany and extravagant" ideas presented in the reader go back another decade before Winner's research, and seem to reveal some of the overzealous expectations that many people had for the computer during the mid-1980s. I was completely lost by Roszak's attempt to grasph what exactly he viewed as the definition of the term "information", and I feel that this was one of the major growing pains for the transition of much of our lives heading online that he touches on throughout the selection. People still struggle today with how they will depict and transfer their lives on computers.

Roszak and others saw the computer as something that would "so ingeniouslly mimic human intelligence that it may significantly shake our confidence in the uses of the mind" (61). The fear harbored by many was that human capitol would forever be lost, which has turned out to be simply not true. I wonder how Roszak would respond to some of the social networking websites out there today, like Myspace and Facebook, given how active users input their lives onto the more passive computers, when it seemed as though the author feared the exact opposite happening.

History of the Information Revolution - Kevin Robins and Frank Webster

Robins and Webster touch on many of the same ideas discussed by Winner, but seem increasingly skeptical of the powers-that-be who hold in their hands the power behind the new information and communications technology being used in governmental, business, and commercial sectors. I have to disagree with their underlying argument that these powers also control all social relations for our capitalist society, however, as I would argue that these technologies have failed to completely change the face of a lot of what we, as a society, hold dear to us. The authors seem to argue that our society has placed such a priority on efficiency and speed that we have internalized a lack of control that makes us growingly susceptible to propaganda. The opposite has proven to be true in recent history, as advertisers work long and hard hours trying to find new ways to persuade growingly skeptical consumers. We have begun to understand "the drill," so to speak.