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Industrializing the Future of Interactive Communications

September 14, 2009admin 149 Comments »

Let’s explore the causes and effects of the industrial revolution, shall we? An industrial revolution occurs when people move from living and working on farms to working in factories and living in cities. When this phenomenon hit North America in the late 1800s and early 1900s it took people by storm, both negatively and positively. This made it possible for more inexpensive goods, transportation, and communication to be possible. On the other hand, industry brought pollution, child labor issues, and crowded cities. The industrial revolution launched more innovative technologies and made a lot of things possible that were never dreamed of.

What makes the internet different is the initial impact is has made on our society. I speak mostly from societal views because in the end, it is the people that matter, not necessarily the technology itself. These technological advances would not be important without the societies that integrate them into everyday life. The internet has launched a mass interaction phenomenon that has no boundaries. It connects large social groups and makes interaction much easier than it was before. As Dr. Halavais stated in his lecture, he used to have to run up and down stairs to deliver messages, as opposed to now we can send emails and have live chats through intranets and internet connectivity. This is unique in the sense that I did not know life before the internet and quite honestly can not imagine living without it! I keep in touch with my tennis from around the country because of my blackberry and the internet. Who would have thought that our phones would have internet capabilities?

Now we not only have internet, we have blogs, in which we can track our everyday thoughts and have people comment on them. There was a time when, we as a society, didn’t have the chance to have an opinion or even get to connect with others about topics that we felt were most important. We our using blogging not only to state opinions, but for educational purposes to learn more. Blogging can be considered mass communication and convergence between the internet, live streaming, and educational interaction. In this class in particular, we are using blogging to communicate and learn from each other about new thoughts and ideas brought on through different experiences. Blogging allows us to create new material, daily, and use it as a network outside of classrooms. It’s pretty neat if you look at how far we’ve come and how dependent we are on social media. As Durkheim stated, industrialization breaks down the barriers to transportation and communication that isolate local markets (or in our case, people) and extends the distribution of goods and services. Blogging allows people to get their information across in their own way and distribute to mass medias, once you blog you can never go back! Also, I found it interesting about “control” technology. Weber’s writings insisted that control can be increased not only be increasing the capability to process information, but also by decreasing the amount of information being processed. Isn’t this a “big brother” situation? I think that knowledge is power and not allowing people to have as much knowledge as possible is not only selling them short but is prohibiting them to having complete understanding. Although, Weber does later state that mass production and distribution (of goods, services and information) can’t be completely controlled without demand and consumption. For instance, if we were living in a society where the news was only partially give to us, then we wouldn’t be able to make educated guesses or draw intelligent conclusions about what is going on around us. But then again, do we always get all the news? Do news casters sometimes throw in “happy” stories in order to give people a “peace of mind” after listening to how many murders there were in the tri – state area last month? Just something to think about….

see everyone wednesday!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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