Evaluation

I really enjoyed this class as I thought I would when I registered for it. Neil Postman’s views on society and technopoly are refreshing and certainly needed. As an Ecampus student at Oregon State, all of my classes are online and so this class helped me to realize how I take computer mediated communication for granted and some of the negative consequences that come from its uses. The blog posts were understandably needed for the course but the thought of putting myself out on the internet in such a public fashion made me nervous at first. I’m a pretty private person but over time I got used to it. I did, however, enjoy the blog assignments. The letters of appreciation not only gave me an opportunity to show my gratitude to people who have influenced my life, but it also showed the differences in the meaning that a letter can have when its written by email or by hand. I also enjoyed studying how web sites can build their own virtual communities with their own language and customs. As Wood and Smith state, “people who use CMC technologies and people who study them are increasingly aware that the Internet is fostering relationships not just between two individuals, but among many, many more people” (109). I also enjoyed the discussions about computer mediated communication, as opposed to immediate communication, and how basic communication, like inflection and sarcasm, can get lost and because of this how it can easily change the tone of a conversation.

I really like reading Neil Postman’s Technopoly. While I disagreed with him at times, it is always nice to get a dissenting view of our society. Wood and Smith’s Online Communication, however, was outdated. I liked the chapters on immediacy vs. mediated communication, online addiction, and the passages about the history of the internet but a lot of the forms of computer mediated communication described in the book seemed a little archaic. Although, I suppose that’s the nature of technology in that a book written yesterday will be archaic by tomorrow. The chapter on addiction, if nothing else, presented warning signs for anyone who uses the internet. Similar to the words of wisdom our parents teach us when we turn 21 and our able (legally) to drink, it is important to have some boundaries with the internet and know what to look out for.

In general, I learned about the pervasiveness that technology has in our culture including the stranglehold that technopoly takes and what gets lost as a consequence. Technopoly is something that prior to this class I had never heard of and yet hope to study again. In fact, as I write this, Microsoft Word’s spell check marks “technopoly” as being misspelled because it doesn’t recognize it as a word. Or maybe it is all a part of some diabolical conspiracy. A kind of CMC fascism…

My Mis-(Computer Mediated)-Communication

I worked for a real estate development company recently and became accustomed to depending on the internet and email for all of my daily communication. Call me lazy, but to me, using Outlook was just easier and quicker than exerting the energy to communicate in person with someone. Instead of getting up and asking my coworker in the office next to me if they were interested in getting lunch, I would merely email them. A few minutes later, I would hear a yes or no shouted from a few feet away. My addiction to email carried over to my communication with my superiors. One day I received an email from my vice president asking a question about a project I was working on. I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to his email and fired off a quick response not thinking too much about how my email might be interpreted by him. I few minutes later I received an angry response; not only had I not given my vice president the answer he wanted but my response was interpreted to be of a negative tone. Had I just got up from my desk and walked down to his office, or even picked up the phone and called him (I cant remember if he was in the office that day), I probably would have been able to not only answer his questions completely but also do it in a respectful tone, which is ultimately what I ended up doing in order to make up for my faux pas.

I think we as a culture in general become too addicted to computer mediated communication. It becomes so much easier to text someone instead of calling them or emailing someone instead of visiting with them. We text and email because we can get the exact answer we want without having to participate in chit chat but an unfortunate consequence is our personal detachment from our friends, family, and coworkers. Postman states that the computer “has usurped powers and enforced mind-sets that a fully attentive culture might have wished to deny it” (107). 40 or 50 years ago, had you asked your parents or grandparents if they wished that they could have a machine that could handle many of our daily tasks but a consequence will be a certain level of intimate estrangement from our friends or family, would they take it? I’m not sure I would have. Although I suppose that’s how technopoly exerts its control. We slowly and quietly give up certain personal freedoms until eventually technopoly controls every aspect of our lives.