Well, I am tempted to summarize the readings from this week, but I am not going to. The discussion tonight in class was quite interesting and I think we covered "The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence" by Jenkins well.
We briefly started on Leander's article, but I thought that this quote was interesting “How the features of the technology interact with the human needs, expectations, beliefs, prior practice and alternative tools far outweighs the properties of the technology itself” (Bruce & Rubin, 1993, p.215). Then Leander comments that "The reasons why technologies do not work according to the ideals of developers, or do work in radically unanticipated ways, often has little to do with the tools themselves and much more to do with the relations of technologies to what we might consider the surround (Leander, p. 35). Therefore, it would appear that it is not so much the tool that is used as much as it is the human involvement. So depending on the users and their background, the technologies may produce positive or negative experiences based on social connections.
I also found the "As We May Think" artical quite interesting. Lila gave a link to the Memex, which was cool, but I also thought that the Voder, from the 1939 World's Fair was interesting too...also go to the link about "Elektro, the most famous robot of the 1930's" (watch video):
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Jeff, Leander's excerpts that you've posted are indeed interesting. This speaks of the idea of "appropriation of the technology" by its users. The users are, especially in the Web 2.0 environment, those who decide how to use the technology in their best interest. I'm trying to think of some examples but i'm not finding any. Do you have some examples? Olivia
ReplyDeleteI guess my thoughts on this are that some would be so enamored with the technology that they would not get the benefit of the intent of the activity. So using our blogging for this course as an example, maybe someone would be too focused on the blog tool and miss the idea of writing and/or the idea of what we are doing now (discussing by posting comments) and thus loose the human involvement element.
ReplyDeleteConversely, another person, comfortable with using the technology would see this a more effective way for them to journal and discuss topics versus face-to-face discussion. Maybe, this person who was not as involved in the classroom is now quite active blogging.
Therefore, results will possibly vary (positive, negative, or unanticipated ways) from what the developer anticipated that is not a "problem" with the tool, but rather related to the human needs.