Response to Chapters 3,4, 9, 10

In the first two chapters, 3 and 4, I found myself looking for some type of bias or slant to grab onto, but remained in a continuous loop of indecisiveness. By the time I was done 3 and 4, I almost wish that I had read something by a strong proponent for either technological determinism or cultural determinism, before reading the broad overviews written by Slack and Wise, just so I could get a sense of what a stark advocate of either side would say. Overall, the sense of indecisiveness that overwhelmed me throughout the reading cemented the idea that both technology and culture are far too complex for any person to determine a set relationship between the two. I found myself further distanced from my initial impulse that it is probably technology that more strongly determines culture, and yet no closer to the conclusion that culture determines technology.  

The reading did make me think further about how different technologies play into our lives. For example, was Facebook created because people wanted a place to network and easily keep in touch with a lot of people on a fast, convenient platform? Was it created because we as a culture communicate in short bursts of contact and information? Or do we now communicate in a fast, convenient way because of Facebook? Do we communicate in short bursts of information and contact because of Facebook? Slack and Wise would agree that neither assumption could be proven, and that in all likelihood it is both factors that play into Facebook’s cultural positioning in our society. The idea of “symptomatic causality” in chapter 9 probably most closely aligned with thoughts that I had developed from chapters 3 and 4, where there is a “range of effects inherent in the technology and that there are choices that can be made within that range of options,’ but it still assumed that technology is the cause of culture. I was very relieved to find at the end of chap. 9, beginning of 10, that there is a way to look at technology and culture without simplifying the relationship to the idea of causality. Overall it seemed like the authors were trying to represent a lot of theories that could be debunked before they finally introduced the idea of articulation and assemblage.