Are we a moment to moment culture?

This weeks readings dealt with the discussion of technology as the medium for messages but also recognizing that they are indeed more than that.

I really enjoyed reading what Postman had to say in "Amusing ourselves to death." He had some very valid points about how we as people perceive technology. He states "for although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication." I really agreed with him because whenever new technology is created or a new culture such as at a new job is created there is a new language. If you are majoring in public relations and you go into that field there are many different ways of seeing things and describing things that you learned about in school that if someone who was not a PR professional listened in on would not understand.
This also goes for technology. HTML writing is a completely different language that takes effort to master and learn. Writing for children is also the same. There is a way in which it is done well and then a way to achieve that greatness within the culture. This is just the way it is now and he also agrees when he is at the end of the second chapter of the expert we were given. " Electronic media have decisively and irreversibly changed the character of our symbolic environment." Having technology that can transfer our thoughts and words into a way that others can digest and understand it and don't have to be in the same vicinity has so much changed the way the world and people within it operate. He also took a lot of what McLuhan stated in another reading we had and agreed with him to an extent and when reading I found myself agreeing with Postman the most about how he felt about the medium being the message. The way a message is formed affects the way we will take in the information and how we will regard it in thought.

In the article written by Scolari he talks about the concept of media ecology which I also found very interesting. He states "media ecology tries to find out what roles media force us to play, how media structure what we are seeing or thinking, and why media make us feel and act as we do." He is referring to what Postman mentioned in another one of his works about this subject. It really does give you pause to think, how exactly does media control the way we are and how we interact. One of my classmates, Paul, touched on this in our last class meeting and I found myself nodding in agreement with him. How much of our lives are controlled by media nowadays.

I end with another quote from Scolari that I believe begins to put answer to that question. "Technologies- in our case, communication technologies, from writing to digital media- create environments that affect the people who use them. In this way media is an environment in which to study and understand. Later in the same article he asks the question "do media become extinct." I agree with his answer of, no they really just lead from one to the next by way of evolution to fit the needs and desires of the environment around us which we have come to see as wanting the next best thing. It is like survival of the fittest but with technology and to me that creates a winning atmosphere for the human race because as technology is created to better suit our needs we have more capability of exploring and learning more about the world and ideas around us.