EDP cultures group 4

*This is posted late, I am aware and will face the consequences* Chapter 1: I chose the rhetorical triangle as my artifact because it is how I learned to write persuasively in high school. I feel it symbolizes the evolution of writing and how it's come because there were many doors that writing opened. Written word cannot be fully explained through a triangle, but this shows the purpose of writing; which is a visual representation of phonetic combinations. Also writing was created to convey messages to others. It was created so many civilizations ago that we often take it for granted. We no longer appreciate writing in its simplest form because we have developed new technologies that we deem as more helpful.  Even by inventing the alphabet, societies were able to attach phonetic sounds to verbal representations. These verbal representations became essential to society and scripture. being able to convey thoughts visually was once a mysticism, and now it is a part of our daily...

From Chapter 1, I chose to focus on Hermes. Hermes really caught my eye because I grew up learning about a lot of Greek mythology. I was surprised to find a name I would see while reading in my childhood also in an academic setting. Davis’s discussion of Greek mythology, as well as the serendipity of my relation to it, really tied religion, education and the vast expanse of technology together for me. Not only was Hermes in the books I read as a child, he was also in movies like Hercules, and in informational movies I watched in my high school mythology class. These stories permeate popular culture so thoroughly even today, despite the religious undertones, oftentimes seen as less than logical. But each Hermes could not be more different. Davis describes him as wearing “a host of guises” (6). The Hermes I could understand and digest, the one described in children’s books, is so vastly different from the Disney Hermes, which differs from the Hermes I knew in high school, which differs...

https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/11SHFpqlZARMOhKcVtiVuqfgE9ZgCKg3ysBdKzjiaGWI/edit?usp=sharing

Davis begins his book, TechGnosis by looking at the beginning of technologies of information and their crossroads with the mystical and human nature’s curiosity with the unknown.  He writes about the great divide created in the west between nature and culture, characteristic of modernity, that freed the west to take technology and innovation to a new level.  He argues that because the two were not tied together for western culture, they could view them outside of each other and create technology without fully worrying about the consequences it had on culture.  Despite this supposed divide, Davis demonstrates how even early technology wired its way into the world around us and influenced the path of history and ways of thoughts in unavoidable manners.  He points out how technologies from the beginning created newer views of animism and formed liminal zones at the crossroads of innovation.  Essentially, technology allowed for more creative spaces at the price of ...

One: Hermes as the internet https://greekgodsandgoddesses.net/gods/hermes/ http://www.hermeticfellowship.org/HFHermeticism.html Hermes is the messenger of the gods, traveling between the human and god world and in Hermetica he is the messenger of the word of god. He displays the power of held by gatekeepers and how access to such information allows for innovation. He displays modern human characteristics, such as the pursuit of serving self intentions through being an inventor or trickster. Hermes is seen to exist on the mythical culture side of the great divide, where as the internet is deemed a tool existing to serve the nature side. However Davis believes the two are more related:   “Indeed, the mythic attraction of the Net turns on some of the very same qualities associated with the youth ful trickster: speed, profit, innovative interconnection, the overturning of established orders”(16). In the modern era the use of the great divide prevents us from accepting ...

Davis portrays Herme’s “trickiness” as a “technical skill” and how he uses it to his advantage in order to become more powerful in life.  He then relates this idea to how technology could be put in a similar way, where it can be used to gain insightful information that can make humans more knowledgable, or manipulate us in ways we don’t really notice.  This idea gives us attention to this Huffington Post article about Hermes, where Lovekraft says that anytime we invest a lot of our time paying close attention to technical detail about a certain subject, we are “geeking-out” with Hermes.  I find this to be pretty accurate since I feel that the reason we tend to invest a lot of time to learn more about something is basically because we want to put that information in our brain and become more knowledgeable in that subject. What we really want is to just know more information in general, just like the way Hermes lived his life.  Also, the “trickery” part of Hermes is ...

            At first, Mike Wesch’s approach to studying the online community on YouTube didn’t really seem comprehensive of how online cultures worked, portraying a happy image of online interactions. As I continued watching the first video, however, Wesch demonstrated how the good and bad parts of the websites like YouTube are simply a result of our good and bad behaviors and how we choose to act online. Wesch also developed an insightful portrayal of the power that community has on websites like YouTube. When YouTube first came out, there wasn’t an established standard for what one could or should do or publish online, so some of the first sources of content that were posted to YouTube were more experimental than the videos we would find online today. However, as more and more videos were posted to the site, a culture seemed to develop based on what people shared about their life experiences, personas and values. The online mov...