Technological
determinism as discussed in chapter 2 of Nancy Baym's book brings to light
anxieties about new media technologies changing us as individuals by shaping how we
as a society think, feel, act and operate as a whole. New media technology in
this sense is rapidly changing how we communicate with each other and can be
arguable making us "dumber". This is one of the central arguments of
technological determinism and it is a theory as old as time. These concerns can
date back all the way to ancient Greece, the example used in the book of
Socrates and his thought about the modern alphabet he states "this
discovery...will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will
not use their memories...they will appear to be omniscient and will generally
know nothing...having the show of wisdom without the reality" (pg.28). The
concern is that with the creation of a new communication technology other forms
of communication will become obsolete therefore people will lose the ability to
use them properly.
I personally argue that this is the case now with new media technologies that allow for people to be constantly connected over the internet. We are becoming so fixated on the digital realm that we lose our own sense of reality and how to communicate with the people who are actually around us. Also it is argued that media technologies are making us dumber by too much multitasking. Instead of focusing on one conversation or task we are able to multitask with multiple forms of communication over the internet and we are spreading ourselves thin which has been proven to be unhealthy to our memory. It is also argued that social media technologies are not just spreading our mental capacities thin, the "useless babble" these technologies produce are not helping either.
In relation to the article about Katherine
Pommerening, anxieties about how new media technology are changing the way
people are communicating for the worse is prevalent in the way Katherine and
her friends communicate with each other and how she communicates with the
people around her. You can see this immediately in the first few sentences of
the article
" She slides into the car, and even before
she buckles her seat belt, her phone is alight in her hands. A 13-year-old girl
after a day of eighth grade.
She says hello.
Her au pair asks, “Ready to go?”
She doesn’t respond,
her thumb on Instagram".
Immediately
we see Katherines sense of the space around her being completely lost, she is
not participating in reality even though there is a person right beside her
attempting to have a conversation with her instead she is in her virtually constructed
reality. Later on in the article it discusses how the internet is where all of
her friends are "hanging out" therefore that is where she wants to be
as well. This sentence shows how media technologies are constructing our social
and cultural norms. She does not seem the slightest bit interested in hanging
out with her friends in person, instead she feels the need to be "hanging
out" with her friends over the multiple forms of social media used by her
and the millions of other people doing the same. Anxieties about being a part
of this online social circle and not missing out on anything that is happening
over these multiple forms of communication is obvious in this article about Katherine.
I chose technological
determinism because I strongly agree with the argument that these technologies
are spreading us thin and making us dumber in a sense. I catch myself multiple
times a day switching from app to app on my phone not committing to one, having
multiple shallow conversations that have no purpose because the other person is
as well only half into the conversation and in turn am missing the world around
me. These technologies are shaping the social and cultural aspects of our lives
and until you really read deeper into it you do not realize how much social
media technologies control us and the way we interact with other people and the
world around us.
Nicole, your point about multitasking making us dumber is completely valid! If you think back to the "Noah" short film, he flips back and forth between screens so often that he cannot even carry a decent conversation with his girlfriend. In Chapter 2 of the Baym book, she mentions how Socrates thought that the alphabet would make us dumber because we would rely on writing instead of our memory. How can we connect Socrates's belief with Baym's notion of storage and replicability? Can our generation multitask so well because we do not have to rely on our memory as much?
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