Syndicom

Culture and Technology: Who do you turn to for advice?

You’ve got a dilemma. You are faced with a challenging case. You can’t decide which instrument to use. Who do you turn to for advice? Do you choose an expert? A colleague? A peer? A friend? All of the above? You call them. Not in their office. Probably in surgery. Where do you turn now? Email? Twitter? Sermo? Facebook?

Web 2.0 technologies such as those mentioned above, extend our activity for us, generate information, and construct social knowledge. They also move us closer to the original conception of the World Wide Web as a place of sharing — a democratic, personal, DIY form of communication. Technologies such as Ning, Twitter, Facebook, Skype, and SpineConnect, also provide access to vast information resources, allow us to mediate our own experiences and provide access to support structures (for those dilemmas, challenges and quandaries we discussed earlier!). All these technologies are cultural inventions, borne of specific times, places and circumstances while simultaneously creating new ones (Escobar, 2000) and each has its uses and its strengths. This is because technological tools embody their creators, supporting people just like them. Ever tried to sit in an economy airline seat when you’re 6′4″? How about scissors when you are left handed? (I know they make ’special’ ones now)….. you get the picture. Some tools are just not made for people like us. Others we have more of an affinity with.

Making friends with new forms of technology is sometimes like traveling to a foreign land and trying to get along with the people there. Next time you are introduced to one, consider the following….

even new technologies draw on their diverse predecessors (you’ve used something like this before).
new technologies rarely replace older technologies but act to augment them (it’s about extension).
new technologies have first order effects - the practical effect of using them (usually the justification for purchasing them originally), as well as second order effects in the ways they change our ways of organizing, interacting with each other and make us pay attention to different things (which makes some of us fraidy cats).

Yes, it is the second order effects that most challenge our ability to use new forms of technology. We often have predetermined ideas about what these technologies should be doing and who they should be for. But all technologies are multivalent and carry multiple potentialities. Facebook can be a way of hooking up with high school friends, but it was originally designed for freshman at Harvard as a ‘book of faces’ so that newbies could figure out who they were talking with. Facebook can also be used to raise funds for social causes, bring groups together to communicate more dynamically and to some degree, act as a news service. The point is this - Facebook, like any other technology is limited in use only by the imagination of the user when it is in use. A whiteboard marker can be a pen when I want to write but it can also be a missile when I throw it!

Perhaps we should add another question to our list for social media and web 2.0 technology - what have you done differently with (Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, SpineConnect) lately? Check out what Syndicom has done!

Kirsten Broadfoot