In Week 4’s Networked Media Reading the post-structuralist ideas of theoretical frameworks are introducted:

1)TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM: As Thorstein Veblen (1920’s) suggests the belief that technology is the agent of social change.

• linked to the idea of progress
• a new society can be formed through innovation
• ‘culture shock’ is produced from new technology
• usually the present instilled onto the future
• certain technologies can make cultural effects
• a new technolgoy forms new potentials and possibilities

2) TECHNOLOGIES OF MEDIA:

• every technology is an extension of human capacity
• medium is the message- McLuhan
• media significance is the way media alters our perception of the world
• history can be defined through technological change
• new media introduces an obsession of exposure within our society

3) BAUDRILLARD AND THE TECHNOLOGIES OF SIMULACRA: As Jean Baudrillard suggests a theory  of signs which are copies of other signs.

• medium is the model
• precession of simulacra- is when reality is overtly reproduced to result in a ‘hyperreal’ condition (more real than the real)
• reality is controlled by stimulation evoking it obscene
• ecstasy of communication- reactions to stimulations instead of the immediate environment (1988)
• signs are now consumed rather than objects
• the idea that communication is communicated for its own sake, therefore the message is eradicated.

4) CULTURAL MATERIALISM:is the foreground to the complex interplay of factors associated with cultural change.

• Williams believes it is the need to expose ‘political’ and ‘economic’ decisions behind new technologies
• supervening social necessities- Winston argues ranges of social directions that alter an innovative process
• Technology provides opportunities, it doesn’t force its audience to take part
• the way technology is consumed relies on the characteristics of its society
• GOVERNMENT REGULATION: technologies are developed or repressed
• The illness Technophobia

5) NEUTRAL TECHNOLOGY:

• Technology isn’t the result but the process
• Change is technological can either degrade or enhance
• social attitude

6) KNOWING THE WORLD DIFFERENTLY:

• everything is change
• Foucault’s theory suggests culture is the circulation of techniques

7) VIRILIO AND THE TECHNOLOGIES OF SPEED:

• we are disappearing
• taken over by machines
• we see the world as a series of interruptions like a cinema montage
• technology is accident prone and imperfect

Nakita xx