ICTs Blog Post

1. What are your thoughts about virtual environment and “life on line”? According to these week’s readings, it has triggered my thought on the landscape of the virtual environment and what are the differences compared to the real world. I agree with the idea that people will showcase varied identities to the context of different social media. For example, in the LinkedIn, people appear to be more professional; in the dating app, people will be more attractive and use more edited pictures to present themselves; while in the private social media app, people will be more authentic to their family members, close friends, lovers, etc. “Life on line” offers people more opportunities to represent themselves and it has also made the conversation spaceless and increased the proximity. From this point of view, it indicates that technology determines culture to some degree. The article Interpersonal life online mentions that people online are more likely to be brought together by shared intere...

The article “The Reader-to-Leader Framework ”elaborates on what motivates technology-mediated social participation and talks about the four successive levels of social participation: reading, contributing, collaborating, and leading. I’m more in favor of the side of soft technology-determinism. The social and cultural background play a very important role in leading the technology of social media. People maybe enticed to adopt an artifact or practice if others they know and trust are already involved (Rogers, 2003) , so there comes out the function that called “People you may know”; Interesting and relevant content is the main reason for users get motivated in reading user-generated content, so it comes out the interface that enable the users to pick up their favorable areas when first log in; People also have a desire to stand out in a crowd, so there comes out the likes of posts, rewarding contributions with money and awarding points in learning systems. As we can see, the effective...

There are two questions that I have put forward after reading the articles. 1. Do technology and social relations evolve independently of each other? From my stand point, they are mutually constituted. It is important to encode social relations into technologies and vice versa. “An advance in technology not only must be congruent with the surrounding technology but must also be compatible with the existing economic and other institutions of society.” (Heilbroner, 1967) For example the presence of expensive labor will accelerate the use of labor-saving machinery and otherwise the opposite. I read an example of low overpasses on Long island, New York. The work can be traced back to the 1920s to 1970s. This height of overpass had discouraged the presence of buses. And the poor people and blacks, who can only afford the public transit, were kept off the roads. The design of this technology overpass has reflected the social-class bias and racial prejudice. From this example, we c...