What strucked me about today’s symposium was an extract from Galloway’s reading:

A great example I would use to explain this is the banning of social media websites like Facebook and Twitter in China. (Oh and I found a whole list of websites that got blocked too, click here.) Sad to say that these websites have been blocked by the Chinese government , because Communist Party of China have apparently deem these websites to be detrimental to maintaining social peace and harmony in the country itself. Hence accessing the blocked websites by any means of hacking will be considered a violation of Chinese censorship law. With the pervasiveness of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in our internet driven lives, it’s hard to imagine a country where half a billion internet users don’t have access to these and other websites we take for granted. Yea sure they do have other alternate website such like Renren, (China’s facebook), Sina Weibo (Twitter) but such protocols undertaken by the Chinese government goes to show how culture wins technology hands down.

“Rather than eliminate social media, restrictions on foreign websites and social media have resulted in a flourishing home-grown, state-approved ecosystem in which Chinese-owned properties thrive. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are blocked in China, but their Chinese equivalents are expanding. By some measures, usage of Chinese social media is some of the most intense in the world. A Boston Consulting Group study found that Chinese Internet users are online for an average of 2.7 hours per day, considerably more than other developing countries and more on par with usage patterns in Japan and the United States (see Understand and Tap Into China’s Digital Generations).”

Instead of being oblivious to the rest of the world, China’s reasons for blocking these websites are of a unique one.

In addition, the shifts in our paradigms over the past few years has affected the way we perceive things and deal with technology. Our political, cultural, and ecological world is shifting with such speed that we can scarcely catch our breath, and the shifting can’t be stopped, technology overtime changes with us as well.  The scary truth is that we may not have time to adequately respond should any of these onslaughts escalate into catastrophic proportions. I personally believe that technology doesn’t exist independently on it’s own, but we are co-dependent instead.

Aight, I’ll leave you to a video of Brian David Johnson, futurist at the Intel Corporation. In it he explains the complex ways that technology has worked in human evolution. This symbiotic relationship with tools has influenced culture at every step.

“We build our tools and then we adapt to our tools. And that allows us to build more tools,”