Geschichte der Kommunikation

Actively listening and thinking during and after lectures made an enormous difference this week!
Contrary to popular belief, it's my understanding that our first introduction to technology need not affect our ongoing relationship with it. I was raised, for the most part, spending more time playing dress-ups, cooking or being out-and-about with the family rather than in front of the television or on the phone. I only sat down to watch television on rare occassions with my parents and only remember speaking to my grandparents and family friends over the phone as a young 'un. This, however, bears no resemblance with my current attitude toward technology. I am constantly with [sexy red Ferrari] phone in hand, iPod headphones in ears and laptop bag slung casually over shoulder.

I, all too often, find myself organising and boosting my social life with MSN, myspace, hotmail [not so much these days] and whatever else I can get my hands on. I stay in touch with Uncles and cousins who're interstate through myspace too! I find it to be most integral to the city-slicking teenager in this day and age. This blog site, although still considered new-born, now boasts an extensive list of friends - and I was thinking about adding a 'fav song' list too - just for fun!

There are quite a number of people I speak to regularly online who I've never actually met. This may seem unusual to someone of our past, but it is becoming more and more commonplace as technology wraps is loving embrace [?] wider around our priveledged [?] culture. The question marks aren't typo's but points of debate. Is ever-evolving ever-expansive tech the pathway to a utopian dream for our civilisation? Will it bring about a sublime state for us [yes, I've been skimming ahead with the text - lol]. Hopefully we can settle these issues, at least within ourselves as we familiarise ourselves with the characteristics and history of both media and technology. One aspect of online activity I've disassociated myself from is public chatrooms whereby you cannot select who to speak to. I've found the content usually crude and immature; not in the slightest entertaining or communicative. Hmmph!

This weeks lectures focused on the key theoretical conceptions of New Communication Technology, the history of media's development, and the different focuses undertaken by different parts of the world, in understanding the affect of media on society and the individual. From the 1920s, widely accepted perception was that understanding a system helped us to control it. The rapid evolution of communication and information media thrust itself upon a society, unaccustomed to such possibilities. Many academics and researchers took this opportunity to analyze the affects of the media on its audience.Of particular interest to me, was one of the concepts explored around 1964 in the US by Marshall McLuhan. The realization that media was producing a global village held potential to have an enormous impact on the world by linking people and information in a way unique to anything prior. I was intrigued by McLuhan’s separation of media into hot and cold intensities. The idea seemed to be that media from either category had a different level of captivating the senses and whether or not it allowed the viewer/audience to separate themselves from the experience, giving the observer opportunity to pursue/decide their stance on the concept with their own minds. This way of observing such a high-speed, large scale growth tried to account for the psychological dimensions of media's influence.
This idea made me think of experiencing the altered state of consciousness after visiting the cinema, whereby such a long-term, concentrated focus leaves the viewer feeling involved in the text.It could also be said that as subjects to the text of hot intensity media, we’re persuaded to at least temporarily accept the text. This concept can be taken further to produce persuasion: An audience can be positioned and manipulated by being shown something they oppose and henceforth criticizing something they don’t have an opinion on. Thusly an opinion is transmitted and unknowingly adopted.

As Marshall McLuhan predicted, the technologies I interact with everyday often do perform as a sort of extensions of myself. My ipod [and array of accessories], laptop, mobile phone, etc., are part of my daily routine and entertainment that I've become so accustomed to that I feel without these my day lacked quite the energy and vibrance it currently holds. I can now add blogger.com to this list. I've added all the students in my tutorial and my friends in other NCT tutes to my blogroll (but haven't managed to comment all of their blogs). I've quite enjoyed the confronting way random blogs reach me when I click at random through blogger and view the insecurities, daily routine, hopes and dreams of bloggers around the world - though it can be a little unencouraging when I run into an endless swarm of Spanish blogs!

~Alessandra