Društvene i Humanističke Studije (Jun 2020)
Understanding Internet: How We Shape the New Media and How It Shapes Us?
Abstract
In this paper, the authors seek to critically questioning the relationship between technology and the mind, machine and man, we also try to understand the medium of the Internet, its nature and the way inwhich its integration into everyday life is changing everyday life. The For 30 years, Internet has been a technology, but also a medium of mass communication in society, but the discussions about it are mostlyreduced to either laud of technology or skepticism, which, as Silva Vaidhyanathan (2018) says, are representing those named as „‘orthodox’ media ecologists“. Therefore, in this paper, we are trying to understand the relationship between technology (media) and the mind (man), starting from the observations made by Mumford, Nietzsche, McLuhan, Freud, to the contemporary thinking of McChesney, Carr, Keene, Vaidhyanathan, Searl. We are considering the ways in which the previousmedia, including speech, letter, photography, were changing society and human needs, but also new, changed patterns of behavior in everyday life, which were partly created due to our use of the dominant technology of contemporary age. We also study the source of man’s need for new technologies, inventions, machines, his desire for the control of nature and technique, which, seemingly, is easily transformed into the control of the man himself. In this paper we do not give the final answers to the growing problems and issues of today’s networked and technologized world, but we are dealing with reflections on the development of the Internet, communication technologies and artificial intelligence.
