Final Presentation Prezi: Social Media & MBA Admissions

MSTU 4016 on Prezi

Full Circle

Quite by accident, I read Castells’ “The social implications of information communication technologies” last this week, but I am glad I did. It served as a perfect capstone for this course. Castells touched upon many of the issues that have come up all semester in this class. He started his article by stating that “technology per se does not determine social processes and institutions. It is a mediating factor in a complex matrix of interaction between social structures and actors, and their socially constructed tools, including technology” (p. 236). With this, Castells was taking a soft determinist approach towards technology. This brought me back to the Marx & Smith and Heilbroner articles we read for our first class.

When he spoke about education, I was reminded of our in-class debate about what the future of education will look like. In this particular article, Castell contradicted an assumption he made earlier. In 1989, he wrote “The space of flows”. In it, he stated “schools and universities…will hardly vanish into virtual space….in the case of universities, this is because of the quality of education is still, and will be for a long time, associated with the intensity of face-to face interaction”( p. 428). By 1999, he changed his tune when he wrote that “education itself is being deeply transformed by the information technology revolution” (pg.238). He goes on to write that ICTs may transform schools and colleges towards a new “knowledge-creation” model, and that it may also revolutionize distance learning. Our assigned readings just prior to Thanksgiving had us evaluate the educational landscape 25 years from now. Back in 1999, I don’t think Castell would have imagined just how drastically ICTs have transformed our learning landscape.

When Castell spoke of the Internet society he was quite firm when he stated that a virtual society would not substitute for “real society” (pg. 240), that “there is no virtual world independent from the physical/social world” (pg. 241). This tied back nicely to some of our earlier readings on identity online, second-life, computer-mediated communication, and social capital (think Turkle, Thomas, Walther, Ellison et al.).

One of the most interesting concepts Castell introduced was the idea of “timeless time” (pg. 243). In the History of Communication, we just learned about how the telegraph was instrumental in the adoption of a “standard time”, and now, ICTs are bringing us to a “timeless time”.

It’s no secret that I have been the loudest skeptic in the class, but even with my cautious outlook on how reliant we are becoming on our new technologies, I do think Castell ended his article a bit heavy handedly. “Follow our death wish” (pg. 244)? I wouldn’t go that far.

But how far will we go? Will holographic teachers be a part of our “ICT-pedagogy”, as Castell calls it? Who knows? Laptops and iPads are already in the classroom now. How many of us would have predicted that back in 1999? On the first day of class I titled my blog ICT Crossroads because I wasn’t sure where the future of communication was heading. I still don’t.

Back in the 90’s we used to refer to the Internet as “the information superhighway”. Now, we’re heading “to the cloud”. I guess Doc was right… “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads”.