Shuang Li

  
  • Graduate student
  • New York University
  • Twitter: sweettownpuc

I graduated from my bachelor last year with a degree in English literature. Now I am pursuing my master degree in Media, Culture and Communication with a research interest in technology and feminism, and I learnt basic coding on myself. I'm just gonna say a little bit of my opinion on internet as new media. Print used to be the most revolutionary media, so is Internet the new print? "Medium is the message", but what's the message Internet is trying to convey? The editorial function is assigned to everyone, as assigned to editors as the emergence of print, nevertheless, it's not necessary a contribution to public sphere, since a recent study of topics analysis of twitter topics suggests that at least half of the twits are meaningless babble. What's more, the Arab Spring, which is believed to be a Twitter revolution, was the enframe of media, in that only 0.0085% of Egypt population were on Twitter and only a even smaller portion of activists are using it. The implement of the Internet makes it much easier for people to communicate, thus adapting the communication method from one-to-many as in print to many-to-many, despite that there are many invalid communications where information gets lost. The message of print is centralized and standardized while the Internets decentralization, individualism, and democratic. The message can’t be wiped off no matter what the external system is doing to it. As Heiddeger would argue, that the technology would have its own trail of development, what's more important is society's reaction to it. I'd say we should take the chance and let technology serve human.