Writer's Block: Pros and Cons

[cinema_babe]

[Error: unknown template qotd]

I don't know, why don't you ask Thag. Who's Thag? She was that woman who made the first wheel and axle to help her move an item too heavy to carry or drag. or Plink. You remember Plink, he figured out that a sharpened wedge of stone could be attached to a stick and the stick thrown to kill an animal from a distance.

Or you could ask Archemedies. Or Guttenburg. Or Eli Whitney.

I study life in the Internet Age for a living and I can say with no small amount of confidence that all technology is simply something that provides a mechanical or communicative advantage (and sometimes both), nothing more, nothing less.

It's what we choose to do with that advantage that makes the world better or worse.

(Who the hell comes up with these bullshit questions. They've never used any of mine).

Comments

[mama-hogswatch.livejournal.com]

Yours might require too much critical thought, ya know.

[mama-hogswatch.livejournal.com]

BTW, Thag has been immortalized in my Online Social Networking classes.

[grendelgongon.livejournal.com]

So how do healthcare technologies fit into the communicative or mechanical advantage scheme?

(This really is a crap question. When folks start on this nonsense, I really want to throw them out in the the deep woods to live as "noble savages" for a month or two)

[cinema-babe.livejournal.com]

Nice question!

I would probably say that healthcare technologies are either mechanical in a very broad sense. Something like stents of anesthesia? I would call them mechanical. I'd probably even put something like pills there because it made it easier to make dosing consistent.

Something like stem cell therapies or pacemakers I would probably slot them as being communicative. The both depend on chemical messages to trigger them to perform their functions.

Suffice to say I hadn't thought this one through in any depth bu t even if they constitute a third type of technological category, they still aren't good or bad. Society determines the how we will use a given technology, a given technology does not determine how society will ultimately use it.

[onecrazymother.livejournal.com]

This made me think... but wait, I love being thrown out in the woods. And then, why don't I live in the woods all the time? and then, oh, right, when I go to the woods I like there to be hot showers from time to time and three excellent meals a day served in the dining hall, and a staff of clever resourceful folks with phones, cars and first aid equipment in case anything goes wrong...