Reading Due October 27th
I found the reading to be very interesting. I often look at ways in which media and technology shape society. I rarely look at ways that society shapes media or the use of technology. “…One of the ways of understanding new media, and particularly its networked form, is by considering it as the product of social relations as much as of technological capability” (Lister 215).
We have discussed before how important it is to know the many characteristics and aspects of new media in order to understand it and to receive it. Understanding the society that produced it is sometimes overlooked. I wonder whether the media is a reflection of society or whether society is a reflection of the media. This is a hard question to answer. I think that it is probably a bit of bother.
I am normally not that into statistics, but I found many of the statistics and table from this reading to be particularly interesting. I got a computer and internet access at the same time (around the time that I was in third or fourth grade). By the time that I was in sixth grade, all of my friends already had computers and internet access available at home. By seventh grade, computer classes were required. I never thought about the statistics of others. Computers seem so common now. It is hard for me not to imagine having one.
“In 1999 the US Department of Commerce reported that urban households with incomes of $75,000 and higher were more than twenty times more likely to have access to the Internet than rural households at the lowest income levels, and more than nine times as likely to have a computer at home. Whites are more likely to have access to the Internet from home than Blacks or Hispanics have from any location…For groups between the ages of 17 and 47 women are actually more likely to be Internet users than men” (Lister 199).
The differences can be broken down in ways other than ethnicity, economic status and gender. I found a website called, Digital.Leadnet. It had some information regarding the use of technology among Christians. Trends in the use or access of technology can be looked at and examined in so many different ways.
The information in the quote above is almost ten years old. I noticed that the charts from the reading went up to 2001. I wonder if the gap has been bridges somewhat now that internet access in available in more places, and the prices of computers have gone down.
