Re: [-empyre-] What an appropriate discussion.

Brandon Barr <barr@mail.rochester.edu> · Wed Jun 12 23:23:01 2002

Lachlan Brown wrote:

Saul, Wake up, lad. Technology is cultural! Technology does not
'shape' society. Au contrare. Does anyone have any references for Saul
critiquing 'technological determinism'?

Jeff Sonstein wrote:

I must differ with your analysis of this issue...
for I think it simplistic to argue simply that
one "shapes" the other...
indeed I would argue that
there is a feedback loop going on
with culture and technology
shaping and altering each other

I really like your use of the term "feedback loop" to describe 
cultural/technological symbiosis.
Returning to communication technologies: all media have feedback loops of 
one shape or another.  What, perhaps, differentiates digital media (and I 
say this, as all ppl who sum things up so neatly should, prepared to be 
dead wrong) is that the feedback loop is shrunk in time and space to the 
point that it is embedded in presentation.  Phillippe Bootz has an 
interesting article in _Leonardo_ where he demonstrates this.  If, in the 
standard Shannon-Weaver conception, the feedback loop is from receiver to 
sender and creates a sort of loop, i.e. a letter to the editor, then in 
digital media that loop is pushed inward: the computer's processing 
instantly changes presentation based upon feedback.
This is, I think, part of the appeal of blogs as opposed to traditional 
media:  their frequency of updates encourages reader checkback schedules 
that can border on neurotic, and even experienced bloggers can feel a bit 
weirded out at the speed of at which their words are read: Jill, for 
instance, called it eerie when I voted on a poll right as she put it up (I 
know it was me because I refreshed the screen, and so "saw when the poll 
went up." Not *actually* the exact moment, of course--but with blogs the 
timeslices are shrinking, shrinking.
So--if blogs are transitional, perhaps it is toward a medium that will 
allow a reader to watch a writer AS THEY ARE TYPING, in realtime, and 
comment on a sentence before it is finished.
Brandon Barr
University of Rochester