Exhilarating Day 9

Ok, maybe exhilarating is a bit of an overstatement but im running out of ideas!! :)

Today we looked at how technology can give us utopia or dystopia. I really liked the quote from Jurassic Park "they were so obsessed with the fact that they could do it, they forgot to consider whether they should", ethics - there is no right or wrong. . . . hard to determine, different for everyone, however i digress from the topic :)

The lecture was split in to the first media age (centralised dissemination) where there is one main source, and only a few people contributing to the source/sending message and the second media age (decentralised interaction) like the internet, which allows everyone to become senders and receivers of messages.

We then looked at some interesting internet statistics, such as the largest growth in internet use occurs in africa and the middle east, and that Australia/Oceania only make up .5% of the worlds internet usage.

Marshall McLuhan suggests there are actually 3 media ages: oral (preliterate), written (literate) and electric (visual literacy). This makes sense to me, once again im agreeing with mr Mcluhan :)

Next was looking at the need for 'new understandings' for this electronic age, mainly the discussion of is the internet the ultimate community equaliser? in an ideal world :) We then looked at utopia and dystopia, this stems from Plato's 'the republic' which is about creating an ideal society. i like the concept of the disneyisation of the world (all hazards of life are screened out) however i know this is not reality. One persons heaven is another persons hell, which makes it hard for those trying to create a cyber world. As to have a utopian society people cannot be allowed free will, as this may disrupt someone else's peaceful existance, so where do you draw the line???

Lastly we looked at a movie called Alphaville. This was made in the 60's and was about a society that was controlled by a computer. This was a very arty film with very loud dramatic music throughout, yet sweet music during the fight scene. There were no artists, painters or musicians (generally what can be referred to as 'free thinkers'), and words such as love and hate had been removed from peoples vocabularies!! i guess this would make society more peaceful (no strong emotions) but certainly less passionate and possibly boring :)