Kyle Kopta DTC 101

   In a time when internet access seems fundamental in contributing to society as we know it, the question of whether or not everyone can, or should, have access to information technologies has been discussed many times and been tied to many different terms. The most popular term this phenomenon has been given, the "digital divide", and its possible problems are the subject of Mark Warschauer's paper Reconceptualizing the Digital Divide . While the general consensus has been that the digital divide is simply a problem of lack of access for quite a while, the underlying issues behind this divide are more nuanced than one can see at first glance.    As programs that have given undirected access to computers and internet have shown, "minimally invasive education" have resulted in a neglect of community organization, awareness, and language. While access to a computer is easily the first step in bridging any sort of digital gap, awareness on why this technology is...

   Karen Mossberger's Redefining the Digital Divide  is a re-examination and exploration of the term "digital divide" in a way that takes into account the nuances of what unequal access to the internet really entails. With this in mind, Mossberger extends the term "digital divide" to include an access divide, skills divide, economic opportunity divide, and a democratic divide. Since the inception of the graphics-based web browser in the early 1990s, information technology such as home computers and the internet has certainly become an integral part of our everyday lives (both professionally and at home), but it is important to remember that not every group of people has had the opportunity to reap the full benefits.    The digital divide has been a large topic of conversation in my English class, Digital Diversity . A point that I found interesting in this reading that wasn't present in my English readings was the idea of information technology as a public...

   The reading for this week, excerpts from Deanna Zandt's Share This: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking , discuss an issue that has been the topic of many discussions in my English class - the digital divide. Although the internet environment is often toted as a paragon of equal access and the democratization of information, it is important to remember that the internet is an extension of the humans who created it and use it today. Thus, it is inevitable that the internet, specifically social media, will share some of the discourse and inequality that plagues our world offline as well.    Like our real world, the reading mentions the homogeneity of authoritative voices regarding social networking or technology in general. Surely, this has an inverse relationship with the ways in which digital spaces accommodate minority/disenfranchised groups (or fail to); gender, income, age, and location all play a factor into not only if one has access to the...

   This week's reading, David Garcia and Geert Lovink's The ABC of Tactical Media , introduced me to the term "tactical media". While I first understood tactical media to be synonymous with alternative media sources, it seems that it has more to do with interventionist ideals and media art activism. After gaining a further understanding of what this term means, it was easier to relate it to artists I know of, such as Eva and Franco Mattes, who use the democratization of media access to subvert and critique the dominant public media order.    Although I can understand tactical media as it is described here in terms of the 1960s counterculture or the homogenized and exclusive nature of media in the 1990s, I would argue that tactical media manifests itself in different ways now that people across the world online are being given a platform through social media. I can't help but draw similarities between tactical media and online "trolling" of larger media...

   Before this reading, I was unaware of the term "relational artifact". It surprised me that I had never run across this term before considering its relevance in media and technology today. As I continued reading, I was continuously reminded of one of my favorite movies Her , in which a man falls in love with an operating system, and the strides being taken in responsive robotics like Sophia the Robot. American artist Ken Goldberg describes robotics as the most human of all creations, and the examples in this text illustrate this point in the ways that computational objects affect us.    As robotics and android technology creeps into our everyday lives, the questions we ask of it interest me. The reading specifically mentions Furbies, which I remember being a big deal when I was a kid. However, the questions we would ask of it were much more primitive back then: Can it hear me? Can it move? Today, our inquiries on digital companions are much more profound: Is it a...

   S ö ke Dinkla's Toward the Origins of Interactive Art examines interactive art's inception and relation to early Futurist and Dadaist ideas as well as its implications in regards to art genre and theory. Like other unorthodox and non-traditional means of art, interactive art developed outside of conventional art institutions. Artists like Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, John Cage, and Allan Kaprow would go on to re-imagine the possibilities and applications of audience participation in a work.    What stood out to me in this reading was the relationship between the artist and the audience rather than the one between art and audience. It's easy to assume that the interaction of a piece has an inverse relationship with the authority of the artist in their own work, but Kaprow's Happenings illustrate that participation exists on the edge between artistic liberation and manipulation. How is the artist using the audience as a medium with which to work with?   ...