From virtual reality to the World Wide Web. Dimension of our lives, from dating to making money to health care. Each year the pace of technological change seems. Electronic culture is what we are interested in principally. ‘We return to a state of sensory grace; to a culture marked by qualities of simultaneity, indivisibility and sensory plenitude. The haptic or tactile sense again come into play…
.’ With this in mind, Marx and Smith place the various theories of technological determinism along a spectrum between the extremes of “hard” and “soft” determinism. Hard determinists assign agency — the power to effect change — to technology itself, or to some of its intrinsic developments. Soft determinists, preferring not to treat technology as the locus of historical agency, instead “locate it in a far more various and complex social, economic, political, and cultural matrix” (p. xiii).
(Although the authors don’t mention this, it should be noted that soft determinism, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to an acceptance of symptomatic technology, the idea that technology is only a symptom, or by-product, of much larger causal factors at work in societal change.
) Baudrillard theorizes that through the mirroring of reality, we lose sight of reality. But as reflected by our tastes in popular culture, we still yearn for the real, only we want to be entertained at the same time. In these cases, we mimic reality, distort it for “entertainment value”, and then provide an index of it for the public. It is the knowledge that what is seen on the screen has some basis in reality (however minuscule) that keeps the audience coming back for me.
The Essay on Hard Determinism Vs. Soft Determinism
Determinism is the idea that occurrences in our life have already been determined and are a result of another element in the universe (cause and effect) and every occurrence can be traced back to the original state of the universe therefore nothing is random. Indeterminism, is essentially the opposite of determinism, humans have the free will to do as they please therefore nothing is ...
