The Lost Art of Dialectics?
I really enjoyed Nancy Baym’s introductory chapter on new media. My appreciation can perhaps be summed up by her statement that “the truth, as is so often the case, lies somewhere in between.” In almost direct juxtaposition to Tapscott’s largely one-sided presentation of the issues, I enjoyed the way that she laid out both the technological determinist and social constructivist viewpoints and was able to demonstrate the merits of each while attempted ultimately to reconcile the opposing views into what she described as “social shaping.” Excuse my pretense, but the concept of a culture’s relationship with technology as a continuum in which each influences the other strikes me as quite obvious, which led me to question the prevalence of such polarized viewpoints as technological determinism and social constructionism.
I began to question how so many of the discourses in our lives are characterized by these utopia/dystopia polarizations, and how rarely it seems that individuals on either side of an issue are willing to be swayed from their entrenched viewpoints. I was reminded of a recent This American Life podcast in which an expert on climate change attempted to convince a skeptical youth of the existence of global warming; despite her best arguments, the young girl remained unconvinced. Similar examples are endless, and it occurs to me that our culture and education (and technology?) encourage this type of thinking. I’ve written countless papers whose thesis I could have blasted apart a hundred different ways, but instead strengthened to meet the established expectations for an academic essay. The sheer volume of available resources makes it possible to back up almost any argument, no matter how suspect.
Similarly, modern media allows us to find the points of view on a given topic that match our own expectations and sources of news and information that come pre-tailored to fit our entrenched point of view. In this sense the Internet and the social communities it supports can be seen as a fractured and disparate collection of ‘islands’ rather than the utopian medium of global cultural exchange some had envisioned, but is it the cause, or merely a reflection of existing social structures? In all likelihood; both. Perhaps as Baym suggests, the ‘domestication’ of the internet may eventually make the technology so pervasively embedded in our lives that it is “barely worthy of remark,” but I suspect the polarization of viewpoints will persist.
/rant