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 Wood and Smith’s Online Communication, however, was outdated.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…