Thinking through communication - a field of knowledge

Thinking through communication is a body of knowledge that entails the research or psychoanalysis of viewpoints coming from human interactions in a variety of cultural, group, organizational, and technical situations, as well as the study of past and present communication theories. The diversity of world cultures, technology, and situations necessitates the study of thinking via communication because it creates a greater understanding of people across time and space and improves human connections.

Thinking about technology and its importance

After considering thinking through media, thinking through language, and thinking through civic participation, I propose thinking through technology as the fourth unit of study. The increasing usage of technology warrants an investigation into technology psychoanalysis.Media’s role in shaping public opinion, information censorship, and control, and propaganda in the new wake of information transmission is worth inquiring about. It is worth establishing whether the public becomes more informed as a result of the role of new technology. This unit provides psychoanalysis on whether political discussions and open debates in general, have improved with the new revolution in communication.

Background Study Areas

To understand this unit, I suggest we revisit chapter five of Lipmann’s Approaches to the World outside, and Lasch’s The Lost Art of Argument. Whereas the former discusses the speed, words, and clearness, it is worthy to reckon that information censorship and speed of transmission also relies on the technology in place such as television, radio, all other forms of wireless information transmission technology, and internet by extension. Lippmann argues that communication revolution does not imply a more informed public opinion. These two units form the foundation to understanding the unit; thinking through technology.

Postman contends that innovation changes the part and capacity of the media. Notwithstanding, he also claims that computers and mechanical gadgets, as a rule, are just as great at finding and giving data as their representative codes and social settings allow. Postman composes that while Americans put stock in innovation as the vehicle of advance, innovation is a belief system. Innovation makes social change, changing intellectual propensities and social relations. It turns thoughts of communication, history and religion. Postman contends that we should translate the images that every innovation conveys to our way of life with the information of that innovation’s predispositions. Postman alludes to print, not innovation, as the medium most appropriate to the amassing, investigation and examination of complex information and thoughts.

Lippmann proposes that the disappointments of right political structures and the idea of the press additionally force men to follow up on biases, generalizations and developed pictures. Lippmann composes that the wellspring of the issues of agent government and the press alike is the disappointment of self-administering individuals to rise above their easygoing encounters and their preference, by making and arranging an apparatus of learning (McLuhan). Lippmann bolsters the possibility of a transformation of information driven by innovation and information. Lippmann may speak to logical strategy and innovation to change the part and capacity of the media from subjective feeling to target investigation. Lippmann requests to target information of the outside condition as a method for conquering the subjectivism of human supposition in light of the constraint of individual experience.

To start with, technological change is a trade-off. For each benefit an innovation offers, there is dependably a relating drawback. The impediment may surpass in significance the advantage, or the preferred standpoint may well be justified regardless of the cost. This is a hazardous lopsidedness, since the more prominent the miracles of an innovation, the more noteworthy will be its negative results (Postman). Automobile, which has greatly transformed the transport sector, has harmed our air. Medical technology, which brings wondrous cures, however, has assumed a huge part in reducing the diagnostic skills of doctors. It is therefore imperative to understand both pros and cons of technology.

The second thought is that the benefits and ills of new innovations are never conveyed evenly among the populace. This implies each new innovation benefits a few and damages others. There is most likely that the PC has been and will keep on being beneficial to expansive scale associations like the military or aircraft organizations or banks or duty gathering foundations. To steel specialists, vegetable store proprietors, vehicle and a large portion of the rest into whose lives the PC now interferes? (Postman)These individuals have had their private issues made more open to capable establishments. They are all the more effortlessly followed and controlled; they are subjected to more examinations, and are progressively perplexed by the choices made about them. Furthermore, now, obviously, the champs talk continually of the Age of Information, continually suggesting that the more data we have, the better we will be in taking care of critical issues—individual ones as well as substantial scale social issues, also. Since innovation supports a few people and damages others, these are questions that must dependably be inquired.

The third idea is that each innovation has a logic which is given articulation in how the innovation influences individuals to utilize their psyches, in what it influences us to do with our bodies, by the way it classifies the world, in which of our faculties it opens up, in which of our enthusiastic and scholarly propensities it ignores. Installed in each innovation there is a powerful idea, once in a while a few intense thoughts. These thoughts are frequently hidden from our view since they are of a dynamic nature. (Postman)

The fourth idea is that technological change is not additive but. Rather, it is ecological. Adopting technology as a medium does not include something; it changes everything. Industrialists are by definition individual risk takers but more explicitly, they are cultural risk takers. The most imaginative and brave of them would like to utilize new advancements in totality. As such, their practice erodes societal culture.

Conclusion

Technology is unevenly distributed among the populace and so are its impacts. The prejudice associated with technological developments may be used to advantage the users of the innovation or at their detriment. Generally, we pay a cost for innovation; the more noteworthy the innovation, the more prominent the cost. Second, that there are dependably champs and washouts of technology, and that the victors dependably attempt to convince the failures that they are truly champs. Third, that there is inserted in each awesome innovation an epistemological, political or social partiality. Some of the time that predisposition is incredibly further bolstering our good fortune. At times it is definitely not. Fourth, innovative change is not added substance; it is natural, which implies, it changes everything and is, accordingly, too essential to be in any way left altogether in the hands of an individual. Technology also tends to control a greater amount of our lives than is beneficial for us if not controlled.

Bibliography

Lasch, Christopher. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. WW Norton & Company, 1996, pp. 161-175

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg galaxy: The making of typographic man. University of Toronto Press, 2011. https://books.google.co.ke/books?hl=en&lr=&id=zFc5n4CbsbwC&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=McLuhan,+Marshall.+The+Gutenberg+galaxy:+The+making+of+typographic+man.+University+of+Toronto+Press,+2011.&ots=cAtFvgwEMR&sig=1JkLbcV_D_RiDy_fzhlF8keHReA&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=McLuhan%2C%20Marshall.%20The%20Gutenberg%20galaxy%3A%20The%20making%20of%20typographic%20man.%20University%20of%20Toronto%20Press%2C%202011.&f=false. Accessed 24 September 2017.

Postman, Neil. Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. Penguin, 2006. http://anthonycollinsfilm.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Neil-Postman-Amusing-Ourselves-To-Death.pdf. Accessed 24 September 2017.

Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. Vintage, 2011. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5a16/9826a6434167764fd7f33010d311ca6dd7cc.pdf. Accessed 24 September 2017.