Research Paper Topic Possibility

My senior year English course in high school required a research paper. My topic was radio drama and factors leading to its demise. The answer of course was the invention of television and making it available to the masses. I bring this up because I feel it relates to our discussion of technology replacing other technology just as in the printing press replacing the written word and in the process reshaping the way we view culture. It's also important to point out that cultures set preconditions that create a need for technological advances and in turn technology allows for new levels of sophistication to be reached within cultures. Following this frame of thinking, it's clear that culture and technology are related to one another.

As pointed out by Ronald J. Deibert, the concepts of culture and technology worked symbiotically. In Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Transformation, he makes a very compelling argument explaining the cosmology of the world. He asserts that communication technology, specifically the invention of the printing press, was a leading factor in breaking up the hegemony of the Church over medieval society ushering in the modern world order. Deibert points out the social conditions that gave rise to the Church as an institution of power and then the social conditions that created the need for technological innovations that lead to the brake down of the power structure of the medieval world.

Following Deibert's argument, this really got me thinking about other technological breakthroughs particularly those having to do with knowledge, communication media, and the book as we have explored it in this course. Immediately, my attention went to the introduction of the Internet and related digital media. Just like the printing press was a major contributor in changing the cosmology of the world, the Internet has already changed and continues to be changing how we look at our world today. The Church in medieval society owned and controlled communication by controlling knowledge and information in the form of the written word. In today's world, big media corporations own and control our world by controlling our access to information. Corporations like News Corp control the news and our access to it. Not only does it report what they see fit but we as a culture have to be consumers and pay to access their potentially biased information. I use the term biased because naturally such corporations are invested in preserving the dominant structures by which the world exists. Anything that would be potentially threatening to their model of power can be simply suppressed or manipulated in their favor. As pointed out by the film we viewed in class, Rip! A Remix Manifesto, a few companies own 90 percent of media holdings in America.

In my research paper, I will attempt to draw parallels between the institutions that controlled communication technology in the 16th century and in today's world. Furthermore, I will examine the cultural and social conditions that allowed for corporations to come to their position of power. Following Deibert's model, I will also examine the conditions that created the need for the invention of the Internet and other digital media. As pointed out earlier, culture and technology are directly related. Culture shapes and is constantly being shaped by technological innovations. Finally, I will point out the ways our world has been transformed and continues to change in response to the technology and its need to exist.