To wrap up this course--and this blog--I started thinking about some overarching themes that ran through the semester. Of course, one of the most obvious ones that came up in almost every discussion was the idea of disruption. But what I found most interesting was a quote that Professor Robinson brought up a few times in class.
We discussed Kranzberg's 1st Law that technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. There will always be unintended consequences that come along with the terrain of new technology, and these consequences are circumstantial. We can take our class's blog forum as a perfect example of this. Some technological advancement that one person sees as having extremely negative consequences can be seen by someone else in an entirely different light. We can't make any broad generalizations about any new technology. A perfect example of this is Sherry Turkle's view that cell phones are causing us to be "alone together" since we are so attached to them, but cell phones have also allowed us to be able to more easily connect to more people than ever before.
So, depending on the circumstance, the result of a technological advancement can have a certain type of consequence that it wouldn't have in a separate context, but in no context is it neutral.
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