Trucks...Tubes....and the Interwebs

In “The Stories Digital Tools Tell”, Gillespie discusses the various ideas behind the structure of technology. Many of his arguments incorporate the everlasting question “does technology control our lives or do we control the development of technology?” The main argument that stuck out in my mind was the documentation included with the web development software “Dreamweaver”. This included instructional web site was created based on a fictional coffee company. The main argument behind this software is that as users go through the documentation to create their own website they more than likely maintain the original look and feel of the sample website. The problem with this is that this particular technology eliminates the creativity of the user by giving them a pre-made website to follow the instruction of, completely forcing the absence of individualism through the creation of a website.

In “Thinking The Internet” Sterne brings up the idea of context. With this we need to study the Internet not just how it is used but also in the context it will be used. The Internet needs to be studied in many ways in which it can be used. The other term which is brought up by Sterne is called “articulation” meaning, an relationship between two previously unrelated objects. The point of this is not to develop a pure theory but to use theory to explain the phenomena. Another thought brought up by Stern is that the study of the Internet should be completely objective. We must take a completely un-biased stand when forming an opinion of the Internet. The main point of this essay, that I got, is that we need to treat the Internet like any other from of computer-mediated communication. The Internet is becoming much like any other form of communication and we should not single out the Internet and study it in a different way.