so, one of this week’s readings, “Culture and Technology” by potts and murphie seems very familiar in the topic it is discussing. however, this familiarity does not stem from anything we’ve done in networked media so far but is pretty much a summary of everything we’ve done these last 9 weeks in the communication strand, “communication histories and technologies”.  nevertheless, it was an intersting read but i’ve yet to find the link between it and the network, other than that one reference to the internet. and i guess technologies in general because you couldn’t really have the network without technology.

what was interesting was the way the reading revealed how the word technology originated. “technology” is such a commonplace word nowadays, especially when doing a media degree, that it doesn’t feel like this word could have ever not been a part of our vocabulary (sorry for that weird double negative there, but you know what i’m saying. i hope). the fact that these new words were pretty much created to accommodate the changing ways of society in the 18th and 19th century. that and all the disputes over the exact meanings of the different words… “culture”, “technique”  and “technology”. can’t we just accept those words for what they are. they only have meaning in our society because we give them meaning.

i don’t know, i wasn’t a huge fan of this reading. it was also difficult because the pages were scanned in on the side (on i was too lazy go to downstairs to print it) so i had to do the whole reading with my laptop on its side. made it very hard to concentrate.