Tag: contemplation

Culture and Technology

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Technology

The readings gave me a lot of contemplation. Here are some of the points that surprised me the most

Technology was used sparingly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, refering [to] the study of the arts…But by 1860 its meanings began [to] shift to its modern usage; the word had come to mean the system of mechanical and industrial arts

According to Wikipedia, the term ‘technology’ was used to describe useful art, forms of  art that is manufactured and crafted, and basically the antonym of performing/fine art.

The article also cited  from another author: William Barret

“…if our civilization were to lose its techniques, all our machines and apparatus would become one vast pile of junk”

This basically applies to all of our media work right now. No matter how expensive and advance our equipment is, without the right skill and technique the content will basically be a pile of junk

It seems that ‘technique’ is not just a specific of skills towards a certain kind of machinery, but also towards the body. Marcel Mauss believes that techniques “crucial to culture and to the transmission of culture as technologies”. The way we walk, we swim is a result of techniques pass down from our ancestors. It’s effective and traditional.

As the time goes, culture is associated with the artistic or the mind. The romantics embraced culture while the industrial opposed it, labeling the two word as if in black and white, completely contrast to each other.

Culture is dynamic because,…ideas and values change, often quite quickly, over time. Older attitudes to culture may be susperseded, or they may overlap with new ideas, or the older values may re-emerge at a later time.

like culture, technology is also messy. Technology such as the internet has allowed everyone who have accessed to it to put whatever content they want, whether it might challenge other people or not.

While corporations attempted to wring new profits out of this huge entity, governments sought to impose regulations on what they saw as an ungoverned system. The latter attempt, at least was made difficult by the properties of the internet as a global network. As one of instance of the globalization process, the internet does not respect national boundaries or jurisdictions

Just to show that the internet has become a powerful entity, capable of passing the fences each country has built.

Because the reading is way too long, I couldn’t give out all the points, because it would be stagnant and boring.  Do you have any points you want to point out?

Noticing

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Zachariah.

So two days ago i just read John Mason’s “the discipline of noticing”. Of course, I didn’t try to do any of the excercise he mentioned but he taught me one thing, that to notice, we require effort. Because we are given thousands of stimulation every day, our mind would have to be selective and blurs out all the ones not necessary for us. Maybe that is what marketing student try to overcome #randomthought.

To notice is not just to experience, but also to reflect upon it. We see advertisements, we feel the heat, we hear the taxi’s engine, but we do not notice. What the text meant by noticing is by realizing that I am typing, I am looking at my screen, I have acomputer with, I am studying abroad, my carpet pattern’s is circular, and so on. When I travel to a new town, I always have this perception of unfamiliarity, that a place is new, and thus everything that I saw wasy interesting to me. But the roads that I had travelled in my hometown for the past 17 years seemed colourless and not vibrant. But when I try to change my perception, as if everything that I saw was new, I began to notice how much things had changed. Another simpler example is your growth. You seem to never notice that you were getting taller and older, until you’ve seen a photograph of yourself when you were still an infant.

To notice is to make a distinction, to create foreground and background, to distinguish some ‘thing’ from its sorroundings.

John also describes about recording. To him, recording is the desire to keep a memento of the things you notice, in the form of a note, journal, or for me, photographs.

By making a brief-but-vivid note of some incident, you both externalise it from your immediate flow of thoughts, and you give yourself access to it at later date, for further anaysis and preparation for the future.

I think this is one of the reasons why we are subjected to read this article. To make great media content we have to notice all the media sorrounding us, to be inside the group. We would use that to show people the things left behind, un-noticed. Because sometimes we try to create the most interesting and complex form of media, when we forget the simplest ones.  What I learn from this article is to notice the simplest things, and figure out the best technique to represent what I notice in the most interesting form.

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