I guess the big idea / question that intrigued me in this week’s readings is whether our increasingly information / knowledge based society (however defined) is / will fundamentally change the social order, and if so, to what end. While Dyson’s “manifesto” presents an energetic and optimistic future where power will be decentralized, and human freedom enhanced, it ain’t necessarily so. As Webster states in his conclusion, “Indeed, what is most striking are the continuities of the present age with previous social and economic arrangements, informational developments being heavily influenced by familiar constraints and priorities.”
These divergent visions relate very much to my thoughts and concerns of last week about how egalitarian a nature the Internet will be able to maintain in the midst of the ever increasingly consolidated media industry. But keeping with the social construction of technology idea, I think that question will have at least as much (probably more) to do with the organization of segments of society than the technologies themselves.
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