the purpose of this blog

My goal with this blog to make people think in a critical, creative, and objective way about how the is meant to be used.

However, let me back up a moment and try and explain how I came to this purpose, so much so that I felt the need to attempt to try and pull other people out away from there internet/media consuming obsessed lives, and to try and create positive thought towards the discovering the ultimate use for the internet.

It is no secret that when a new form of mass media is created, that medium replicates the existing forms of media it until it enters maturity (that is, when people figure out what it is best used for) Perhaps the most illustrative example of this phenomenon, is the fact that when television was first invented in the 1930's, broadcasters did not know how to "do the news" on television, so simply when the time came, the radio news was broadcast through the television speakers, while a picture of the flag waved until the update was over. There was no seven o'clock action news, or pretty news anchor, no flashy graphics. No one had thought of a news desk, and no one could have imagined creating news as entertainment, a la Neil Postman.

This struck me as quite interesting, as I sat in my media studies lecture, and I begin to think of this concept as applied to my own beloved internet. If history repeats itself, the internet of today is simply a regurgitation of the television, radio, and print, just dressed up and put on the internet as another way to access these mediums.

Sometime in the mid-nineties, before the Dot Com bust, the internet was hailed as an interactive revolution. It made it possible to read the newspaper online, go shopping anytime of the day, talk to our friends instantaneously, and send virtual mail, all at the click of a button! This was all good and fine, but ultimately, this is nothing new, just another refinement of the telegraph, eliminating time and space even further in our information environment. This era of the internet is the equivalent of the radio playing on the television, of archea getting in the way of our new media.


So then what is the internet? What is it supposed to do? How can we learn from the first wave of internet proliferation of what NOT to do?


One of the defining characteristics of our age is the idea of technological determinism, that the technology defines its use. This the reason for modern TV and why television has adopted such fast pace, switching images onscreen at least every 3.5 seconds, never letting out eyes rest for too long, because there is only 24 hours in programming day in a format where time is money.

So how does the internet define its use?