Thoughts

Peer Thoughts

I really enjoyed reading Seonaid‘s thoughts on last week’s symposium. She too agrees that no technology can really be impartial, and therefore ‘neutral’. I think we have a similar view on this. She argues that some technologies lend themselves to more uses and affordances than others, therefore making them less biased, and more neutral. She draws her point back to the idea of technological determinism which i hadn’t thought about; technologies with less affordances may appear to be more ‘determinist’, but in the end society chooses which technologies to innovate and which to rethink or reject. Alex reflects upon the Watts reading “Six Degrees” as she comes to the conclusion that networks are made to seem unnecessarily complex. A network is a multitude of threads that connect objects together, and nothing more. Neeve, unlike me, saw the hammer analogy as a real eye-opener. Technologies are much more complex than we give them credit for, and when we see a hammer, we tend to forget that it has particular affordances that are suited to us, it’s not ‘just a hammer”.

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