On Monday, we covered chapter 6. Chapter 6 went over a few different aspects of technological determinism, which is the idea that technology drives culture. We talked about dystopianism and utopianism which are two different extreme ideologies of how technology could affect us.
The idea of whether technology drives culture or if culture drives technology is very fascinating to me. I had a conversation about this with my boss, and I have come to the conclusion that it works like a spectrum where both things influence each other equally.
The way that social media works has changed the way we interact with one another. From one perspective, it could have made us less social face to face and took a negative effect on how humans function day to day. It’s not as common to communicate to people you don’t know in public because there is not a need to, or it no longer feels as safe to do so. Social media replaces many of our day-to-day social actions in life.
If we were to look at it from another perspective, social media has positively affected our lives greatly. We are now able to connect with people we would have never had the chance to before. We are capable of connections across the world, and in turn, we have never been as social than now. We cannot imagine our lives without social media, and in turn, our culture has changed. In this situation, it appears that technology influenced culture.
However, we could have created that technology because our culture was growing. The idea that technology drives culture is true, but it can also be looked at from the other side and still make sense.
entertainment media 