Terry Flew and his Technicolour Virtual Culture-Babble - Week 1 Reading Post-Post-Lecture

Having read a few of Terry’s contributions in the areas of Communication Design, Digital Media and Media Comm in the past (and spoken to him a couple times down the pub) I was pretty much prepared for the way he went about discussing the origins of virtual communities and their relation to the development of new media technologies. Which by way of the reading he has tried to impart an alternative way of thinking about new media technologies as 'cultural technologies', because of the broad relationships that exist between culture and technology.

I really only skimmed through this reading, only a few sections catching my attention and forcing me to look a bit closer.

A quote from one of those sections:

“…[Rheingold, Schuler and Turkle’s] descriptions of cyberspace and online environments also involved a degree of proselytising for increased engagement with these sites, and a belief that developments in the online world prefigured alternative scenarios for society more broadly”(Flew, 2004, somewhere :P).

After working out exactly what proselytising actually meant ( = to convert or be converted to a different way of thinking, thank you wikipedia!) the meaning of this quote became a lot clearer. It’s interesting to consider the effects (positive and negative) of online communities on society as a whole, as well as looking at how a participatory aspect is required when studying such online communities. More on this in a later post.

Terry continues to discuss (in a very longwinded way) the way in which the internet has changed over the last decade, and how this has had an effects our views, theories and concepts of virtual communities and new media technologies as a whole. With a little bit of discussion on modernity and post-modernity in relation to new media technologies, he rounds it up concisely in his conclusion by proposing that "...new media, and the relationship between technology and culture more generally, can be fruitfully pursued by thinking about new media as cultural technologies, where the relationships between technology and culture are seen as broad and interconnected"(Flew, 2004, p38). Not much more to expand on that, although it must be pointed out thathe is leaning of course more towards discussions on new media technologies then individual virtual cultures (seeing as the book is about all new media technologies) Other then that, he sure knows how to summarize well, and he must have also been paid by the word.