COMM 203: Relating With Technology

Last night, I experienced this whole "medium is the message" thing in a very real way.

This past Christmas, I received Nirvana's Nevermind on vinyl record. Last night, it occurred to me that I had not yet listened to all the bonus tracks. So, this being the only medium on which I had those PARTICULAR versions of the songs I've heard a million times (CHECK IT OUT GUYS, in this version, he says "Pay to play" instead of "Stay away"!) I was obliged to bring out the record player. 

Of course, listening to vinyl records when you could get the same experience in a more convienent format, such as, perhaps Mp3 or YouTube or... I was sitting at a gaming PC with a high speed internet connection and I opted to go physically out of my way to listen to the music in a format that was obsolete twelve years before I was born (Also, Nevermind is two years older than me, so there's that). If that's not the medium being the message, then I don't know what is.

You beautiful sonic reproduction utility with your pops and clicks.

Of course, it's hard to imagine lugging around a record player as an extension of myself. For that, I have my MacBook. It goes with me everywhere and I use it for everything. Of course, the primary way one uses a computer as such an extension is the ability to, like, um, not... remember... hold on, gotta Google this... oh yeah, NOT REMEMBER ANYTHING OR LEARN EVER.

An excuse for me to use xkcd as part of school? Yes please. (Yay for Creative Commons!)

So, I'll admit to doing the whole internet as an extension of knowledge thing. On a certain level, it's good, but I'd hate to see how smart people are without being able to look everything up in five seconds.

I have to say, the biggest way I interact with that thing you youngins call the "information super highway network web blog pancake" is purchasing digital download games. Now, here's a little graphic I made to explain how insanely amazing and global village-y that process is.

I can communicate fast enough with the world that I have, on multiple occassions, bought products from a store based in London, had them tied to an account on a server in Seattle, and minutes later had the product downloading to my computer here in WV. 

The global village thing is also a lot of the reason that an awkward person like me has a number of friends. One of the people I'm closest to lives in Massachusetts and we can talk on Facebook almost as well as we could in person.

So, all that structuralist or determinist stuff- I think it's overwhelmingly a structuralist world, and, for the sake of arguement, I'll go back to the VCR and Betamax debate, sort of.

This article talks about Blu-ray and HDDVD, and how pornography was thought to be a big part of who was going to win, based on a similar situation that occurred in the VHS/Beta battles. Today, we know that a large part of why Blu-Ray won was, in fact, the other half of a 14 year old boy's interests, not pornography, but Playstation. 

Whether it's adult films or Duty being Called Of, this situation shows that, honestly, we all only will adopt a technology if it allows for, just, an insane advancement in entertainment. Excepting the IPad, which does nothing that a Windows XP Tablet from 2005 didn't do (consider Moore's Law where applicable to actual processing power) when it was laughed out of the market for being a useless luxury. If we have the free will to decide which technologies will win out, then the technology is not responsible for the way our society changes, we are.