After a brief moment of optimism, we return with this week’s readings to a darker vision of the future of modern life. Clearly, Barney and Andrejevic disagree with writers like Kelly, Trippi, Gilder, and Lurie about the effects of digital media on our lives. But what is the central reason for this disagreement: what, in other words, do the optimists “just not get” about digital media, according to Barney and Andrejevic? Do you think that the latter two writers might consider the work of the optimists to be a twenty-first century version of what the Marxists called “ideology”?
Also, a brief note: for those of you puzzled about what Andrejevic is talking about when he references the notion of “enclosure,” Wikipedia has a fairly solid and brief overview of the term.Barney, might possibly be the most annoying theorist we have read this semester. 10 pages in, I was already sick of listening to him bitch about everything and anything. The writers of last week might have been unrealistic idealists, but it was a nice change. To be followed by Prometheus Wired is just torture. To Barney, capitalism is the perfection both productivity and alienation. When we transfer these qualities into the digital age, we not only continue to further productivity, we also displace human labor. He adamantly argues that the world is suffering from a loss of jobs and that the jobs that are created are horrible. First, I just want to say that I have read research that service jobs actually suffer less volatility than traditional jobs in the manufacturing sector, just because people are less likely to change the behavior of service purchases than goods, like say in recession time. This also trumps his accusation of work that is turned into bits being invaluable and replaceable. I also don’t trust all the wonderful statistics he quotes. They are way to specific; it’s like he finds years or sectors that promote his views rather than looking at empirical studies. It annoys me. I also find it hard to call him a media critic. He’s more like a media complainer. True, there is a problem with new job mismatch and transition, but I think the idea is that these are the windfall losers in a social change that is supposed to be utilitarian at least in the fact that overall social welfare is increased. Also, I think the chance for low income individuals to work from home is not an overall bad thing. He makes a big point about the degradation of women, but overall, I think it only empowers women. Yes, they will work even more, but it gives them a very real sense of contribution that they would not be able to have if they could only work away from home. Am I saying that there are not problems associated with working from home? No, not at all. But Mr. Barney wasn’t even willing to consider that there might be positive sides, when I know that there are; to me, this discredits much of what he say. To me, this made it hard to identify how much of what he said was worth listening to (and I am sure some of it is) and what was not.
Okay, I am done complaining and ready to give a real response on Mark Andrejevic. I feel he is over pessimistic, but that is a reasonable response to the idyllic writers of last week. And yes, I think he would consider them to be consumed with optimistic ideology. A world that is self-policed through the golden rule is just never practical. Reading Mark A. as a response to last week’s writers is just much more telling than if I had read him as is. The caution he preaches is in stark contrast to the optimism. Last week, we celebrated the complete customization and individualization of computers as progress and success. Here, it is a threat, a manipulation of consumers in which they are asked to participated. I thought he has an amazing definition of the ever expanding enclosure. Overall, I thought he presented actual occurrences in ways that I doubt many people had thought of them before. For examples, how enclosure is both a transaction and a division of social classes. That being said, although I was intrigued by what he said, I do not agree. I think that consumers have made a choice to be in a transaction where convenience and entertainment are traded for information. My generation is aware of the vast amounts of information collected on us with every click of our mouse. Honestly, I don’t even mind. As long as its only used to target me with advertisements, I almost appreciate it. I like the efficiency of only watching commercials that might be relevant to me J
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