The process of modernization, even as it exploits and torments us, brings our energies and imaginations to life, drives us to grasp and confront the world that modernization makes, and to strive to make it our own. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982) history is out of control increasing fragmentation and …
Monthly Archives: May 2008
Commodity broker
The commodification of personality; personhood; identity; self::: How do we come to know ourselves through personal technologies? Objectification. Discourse is always material; what discourses do individuals participate in, internalize? Swirling, multifaceted, contradictory cultural meanings congeal into narratives that are not necessarily coherent; technologies fragment narratives and unify them. The self is the negotiation, the movement …
Navigating technology
A particular technology is always a map, a representation, a model of the power relationships of which it is a part. Technologies are simultaneously material and ideal, practical and discursive, structural and phenomenological. Technologies are at once the tools with which people do things and the context in which things are done. Technology does not …
