Making sense of the technological world

I would like to preface my blog with the fact that these readings were difficult for me to comprehend. Every sentence seemed to be exploding with elaborate words that did not make sense in my mind. I'm am not going to lie and sugar coat my blog by saying that I completely understood this material. The honest truth is that I would have to read each piece at least five times to comprehend the theories of new media that were discussed in great detail and in a week I have not the time nor the patience to do that. No matter how overwhelming the readings were for me, I did come up with some sort of underlying theme between all of them and that is the fact that they all try to make sense of the technological world that was developing in their respective time periods. All of the authors try to explain the phenomena of the new technology that was being developed in their time. I liked the readings in chronological order, my least favorite being Bush's "As we may think" and my favorite being "Elements of Diffusion." It seemed to me that the more technologically advanced the author's were, the better they were at explaining their theories. Or maybe the more diffused the media became, the more the authors wrote in more simple terms. In Rogers' "Elements of Diffusion" he explains the phenomena of the dispersion and diffusion of technology along with the stages that society goes through to adapt to new innovations. This theory has occured over and over again with each new innovation that is introduced to the world and the cycle of diffusion will continue to occur today and into tomorrow. Raymond explained the difference between technological determinism and symptomatic technology and how the two theories are viewed in his world where the television was the new medium. The other readings besides chapter one of the book were all about science and explained in depth the science of new media and I really shouldn't try to explain what I didn't understand. I hope this made sense to you at least a little more than the readings made to me. I look forward to reading your blogs and listening to discussion in class, so that I can make better sense of what each author had to say.