Power to the people??

Power to the people??

A major theme I noticed running through both the readings for last week as well as the Bruns and Jacobs introduction for today is the idea that creating and participating in new technologies will transform the typical passive consumer/audience into an active producer (or produser, as Bruns and Jacobs suggest ). The implication seems to be that the average person should be able to gain social and political power by expressing/publishing their opinions on the web, by creating new social and political spaces, and by creating/designing technologies that will offer new perspectives. I agree that this kind of active participation is different than a passive acceptance of already available, static programs/technologies because we are creating our own spaces, communities, perspectives, and technologies instead of conforming to the status quo. But are we challenging or are we just conforming, once again, to changes in our society that will soon become the status quo?

I am not offering a dystopian view of technology here or suggesting that we should somehow resist new technologies. That would be unrealistic and naive. Obviously, we must evolve with our ever changing technological environment or be left behind, but as Bass and Rosenzweig point out in "Rewiring the History and Social Science Classroom," we must participate critically and without a blind acceptance to all new technologies. Some new technologies may actually produce citizens that are even more passive than before, plugging in and following directions without critically engaging with or questioning the new material. Thus, participating in new technologies does not automatically make us producers rather than consumers; rather, it is our method of engagement that results in the transformation.

Finally, I cannot help but be a little wary in terms of the actual power we can gain from participations in new technology. What kind of power will we actually gain (political, social, personal?) and what are the limits of this power when it comes to making concrete changes in our society? I guess I have my doubts that news blogs and the like (as Bruns and Jacobs seem to suggest) will ever actually replace mass media, "which produce[s] a vision of society for us to consume to relatively passive audiences" (8). Yes, we can produce our own visions of society on blogs and other web spaces, but can our visions ever actually replace or effectively challenge the more powerful vision produced by the mass media?

An interesting book that deals with some of these themes and issues is Adam J. Banks' Race, Rhetoric, and Technology.