I appreciate Flichy questioning why those involved in
generating the internet and those who have since chosen to integrate it in
their everyday lives chose this system that has separated themselves from the
past.
Recently while reading a book by Maury Kleins called “ The
power Makers: Steam, Electricity and the men who invented Modern America”, I
found it interesting how the author highlighted the quirks of the people that invented vital
building blocks of America. The inventors
lived by the motto of “ building the world of tomorrow” but were often criticized
for their technological hopes. In the article
by Flichy he analyzed the historical parts
that founded the social conditions brought on by the widespread of
communication technology, specifically the representations of technical systems
conveying the experiments and dreams of
the inventors and users that developed around information technology. Jill
Lepore from the New Yorker wrote an article reviewing Maury Kleins book that I think
some of you may find interesting: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/our-own-devices
Not only does this article provide a
book review but it connects the book to challenge the long theoretical
perspective of technological determinism,
reminiscing on her first encounter with a TRS-80 Micro Computer System, she states
that she couldn’t imagine the next step, most saw it as a cross between a
television and a cassette recorder. Lepore writes :
“The challenge, in this case, would be to write a history
that can explain both what we thought then and what we know now. A method that
ignores our it-looks-like-a-television response will make it seem as if the
information age were inevitable, headlong, and unstoppable (which might even be
true) but will fail to prove it.”
Similarly, Flichy wrote about two fields that are key to the
new technology in the Western society. As discussed in class, the fields are
the utopias(ideologies) and the depictions of an imaginary digital society. The
experimentation process is in the cross hairs of a utopian and imaginaries. The
inventor and the users continually work towards a utopian, there can be
different ideologies that share a common imaginary. Every social imaginary has this utopian,
Flichy asks why society disrupted tradition , Lepore, however, says that the
new era of information technology was inevitable. Through ideology and
imaginary, Flichy analyzes how what is
possible and what exists , is structured.
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