christa.rhet
unfinished thoughts
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Writing for the web
The following items are mostly for my Information Architecture and Technologies and the Future of Writing Students.
I’ve asked that you contribute to our course blogs (either here or here, depending on which class you belong to) and I understand that you may be unfamiliar with blogging practices.
I will continue to update this post with various links, ideas, advice, and tips from various colleagues and other reliable online sources. Please read!
On writing for the web. (source)
On writing less. (source)
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(+) “Tools with embedded biases.”
(+) “Our widespread inability to recognize or even acknowledge the biases of the technologies we use renders us incapable of gaining any real agency through them.”
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF
Media theorist, Author of Life Inc and Program or Be Programmed
Technologies Have Biases
People like to think of technologies and media as neutral and that only their use or content determines their impact. Guns don’t kill people, after all, people kill people. But guns are much more biased toward killing people than, say, pillows — even though many a pillow has been utilized to smother an aging relative or adulterous spouse.
Our widespread inability to recognize or even acknowledge the biases of the technologies we use renders us incapable of gaining any real agency through them. We accept our iPads, Facebook accounts and automobiles at face value — as pre-existing conditions — rather than tools with embedded biases.
Marshall McLuhan exhorted us to recognize that our media have impacts on us beyond whatever content is being transmitted through them. And while his message was itself garbled by the media through which he expressed it (the medium is the what?) it is true enough to be generalized to all technology. We are free to use any car we like to get to work — gasoline, diesel, electric, or hydrogen — and this sense of choice blinds us to the fundamental bias of the automobile towards distance, commuting, suburbs, and energy consumption.
Likewise, soft technologies from central currency to psychotherapy are biased in their construction as much as their implementation. No matter how we spend US dollars, we are nonetheless fortifying banking and the centralization of capital. Put a psychotherapist on his own couch and a patient in the chair, and the therapist will begin to exhibit treatable pathologies. It’s set up that way, just as Facebook is set up to make us think of ourselves in terms of our “likes” and an iPad is set up to make us start paying for media and stop producing it ourselves.
If the concept that technologies have biases were to become common knowledge, we would put ourselves in a position to implement them consciously and purposefully. If we don’t bring this concept into general awareness, our technologies and their effects will continue to threaten and confound us.
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