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New Media and Digital Culture - Coggle Diagram
New Media and Digital Culture
The Shock Study
Timothy Wilson is a psychologist at the University of Virginia and he conducted a study where he placed people into a silent room without their phones just so they could think. He then made them describe their experience.The results were that around fifty percent of the people who were involved did not like the experience of thinking to themselves. People also gave a high ranking of boredom.
Wilson decided to take this experiment a step further by adding a button which allowed the participants to shock themselves. After the added variation, Wilson found, “even though all participants had previously stated that they would pay money to avoid being shocked with electricity, 67% of men and 25% of women chose to inflict it on themselves rather than just sit there quietly and think…”
Her. Film
The film Her, directed by Spike Jonze in 2013, is a drama and romance movie that describes and shows the reality of emotions and experiences in a futuristic setting where technology is much more advanced than it is in our lives today. The use of technology in society is huge and the things the devices can do are much more sophisticated. Throughout the movie there is character growth and the real side of how life and love can be is shown, allowing us to better understand the emotions the director is trying to portray
Technology is becoming more and more advanced everyday in our reality and Jonze was trying to give the audience an inside look on how our future may be.
The way the technology was shown and used in this movie related to the problem in today's society with social media and smartphones having negative impacts. Although the use of the device helped Theodore cope with some feelings and emotions, it also took a toll on him. It was distracting him from lifeoutside of Samantha.
Digital Socialities
In the reading Is Technology Making People Less Sociable, Keith N. Hampton tells us not to believe the hype and argues that technology is not making us less social. In his studies he has found out that the internet and people who use cell phones, and especially those who use social media, have more diverse and a larger number of close relationships.
The other side of the argument is testified by Larry Rosen, who believes that the effect of growing technology has allowed us to connect with more people in our virtual world than in the real one. He thinks the ammount of time we spend in that "world" we are missing out on real life connections.
A debate that we read about earlier in the semester that was based off the argument that the spread of mobile technology has made it easier for people to keep constant contact, therefor making us less sociable.
Technologys Minduless Project
We downloaded an app on our phone in the beginning of the semester and it tracked our usage, how many times a day we picked up our phones, and what apps you used the most. We got to reflect on this at the end of the year.
This semester we did a project called the Technology Mindfulness Project that was created on website called Medium. Every week throughout the course we were given a couple questions to answer that we posted on a blog we created. The questions were based on our phone usage that we monitored.
The Internet Debate
The third article was written by William Poundstone who thinks that we are neither getting more smart or dumb from the Internet. He believes that we are just getting meta-ignorant. We are spending more time on things that don't matter like certain Tv shows.
Nicholas Carr who wrote Does the Internet Make You Dumber, argues that when we are online we are distracted and have many interruptions therefore causing us to be more scattered when thinking. He also believes it is making us unable to have strong neural connections.
Clay Shirkey believes that “digital media links over a billion people into the same network. This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about.” Meaning that if we chose to use the internet in useful ways we can educate ourselves and others, but there is also the alternative of choosing to use the internet for the worse.
Intro to New Media
STT, short for Social Shaping of Technology, is the opposite of technological determinism. It is the belief that our society and technology work together. They are mutually consentive.
Two theories that has been particularly influential in the development of the social shaping of technology are actor-network theory (ANT) and the social construction of technology (SCOT).
We learned in the beginning of the semester about technological determinism. Karl Marx believed in this and that cultural practices and social relations revolve around the technology in a certain society or culture.