These past couple weeks we’ve discussed various topics from Memes and Mashups to Black Twitter, the Digital Humanities, and New Media. In the article “Do Artifacts have Politics?” Langdon Winner discusses social determination of technology and naive technological determinism. He says that the concept of the social determination of technology revolves around an invention gaining power through the social or economic system in which it is embedded. This contrasts with the idea of naive technological determinism which focuses on the idea that technology develops as the internal dynamic and then unmediated by any other force, molds society to fit its patterns. For example, Robert Moses was a city engineer who utilized overpasses as a way limiting racial minorities and the lower class from accessing certain parts of New York. He purposely designed nine foot high overpasses throughout the area to prevent buses (which were twelve feet) from entering certain areas. He catered only to those wealthy enough to afford a car and uses his creations to maintain class segregation.
The more I thought about this, the more I started to realize the conscious and unconscious ways that technology has molded human behavior. The introduction of smart phones and social media resulted in fewer face to face interactions and shorter attention spans. Suddenly waiting thirty seconds for a webpage to load becomes too long so we check our emails, Facebook, Snapchats, etc. in the meantime. Whipping out your phone and texting has evolved into an unconscious habit. Tinder has changed the way people date and reinforces the mentality that people are expendable; why should I waste my time with this person when there are more attractive options waiting to be found? A Stanford graduate took this idea to the next level and recently created a $2.1 million app called The League which is essentially Tinder for the successful and good looking. It’s ultimate goal is to create power couples share the same levels of attractiveness, professions, and salaries. It filters out the average looking and the poor (you need to earn a six figure salary and show proof in order to use this app). It’s a reflection of how shallow society has become but you can’t deny the logic behind it.
We touched upon how memes are “a unit of cultural information that replicates while still remaining whole” meaning that most things in our society are memes. From fashion to furniture, its the replication not the process that determines whether something is a meme. A mashup is the creation of a new product that samples old products. In my example I used a video that incorporates samples from 6 different country songs to create one new (yet very similar sounding song). The point of the video was to show the country “blueprint” that so many successful songs seem to follow and even though I don’t like country music, listening to this mashup is a guilty pleasure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlNgYDotMoE
Lastly we talked about Black Twitter in class and talked about the ways that it allowed black people to express themselves more freely over the Internet than Facebook. I did not understand this concept because I had never encountered it before and I also wasn’t sure how much censorship Facebook could impose on its users anyways. I checked it out after class and my world was forever changed. It is a gold mine for hilarious content. It was difficult finding a meme that was appropriate to post on this blog due to some of the language involved but I managed to find one that captured the jest.