Samysj’s Weblog

Technology replacing people?

All over the world, especially in industrialised countries, people regularly spend a lot of time with different forms of media, often more time than they spend at work or school in face to face communication. Within a single generation, homes have become media-rich with multiple televisions, radios, games machines, computers, music systems and telephones – typically switching from household posessions to personal posessions – accompanying us wherever we go. In our everyday engagement with friends and family, with the community, the political system, the nation and beyond, we draw upon, and increasingly rely upon, a never-ending flood of images, ideas and information about worlds distant in space or time and those close to home.

Today (5th Oct was when I wrote this down) technology took a hold of me! If it had been a challenge for me to avoid all modern technology, I’m afraid I would have failed miserably (or had the most boring day of my life) infact I often ask my parents what the hell they did back in ‘their day’ before they had mobiles or the internet, and I will admit that my mobile phone isn’t a mobile at all, but is infact an extra limb (ok maybe a digit). I had the house to myself, I switched on the TV after relying on my mobile phone alarm to wake me up (when my actual alarm clock  is just as near). I will often receive text messages from my flatmate asking if I am in the house, even when she is in the house too and our rooms are next door to eachother! I then rang my mum (after noticing the date – on the screen of my phone) to check today was my sisters birthday, she said no and that it was tomorrow, so I then set a reminder on my phone for the next day to remind myself to text my sister and wish her a happy birthday (I had already sent a card in the post a few days earlier so I wouldn’t forget, and I only remembered this as a few days earlier I was in town walking past a card shop advertising something to do with brithdays). I then spent the next few hours on my laptop with the TV on in the background and my mobile phone next to me, in this time I checked the TV listings on the Radio Times website and also checked my online account for my mobile phone!

It’s a viscious circle of technology, where would I have been without it that day? I might have gone out and actually spoken to people! Imagine our homes without screens, our daily routines without television, our work without the internet, our friendships without shared music interests, and it is obvious how much we are all part of media audiences.

According to Abercrombie and Longhurst there are three broad phases in audience history: the simple audience, the mass audience and the diffused audience. My day avoided the ‘simple audience’ phase altogether, which consists of face to face, direct communication, in public, a theater or political meeting for example. I touched briefly on the second phase ‘the mass audience’ which is highly mediated, spatially, even globally dispersed, often in private e.g newspapers, readership or tv audience, and spent most of my day in the third phase ‘the diffused audience’ strongly dispersed and fragmented, ‘always on’ internet connection (of which I have the same type of connection at my parents house), multitasks, working from home, watching tv, shopping online, chat rooms or fan cultures.