Navigating Technomedia - Response

The article “Navigating Technomedia” (2007) by Sam Han described the onset of technomedia (media technologies) as three-fold: mechanical, electric, and broadcast. The mechanical aspect involved the print, photography, and film advancements that Marshall McLuhan named “typographic man” and positioned each of those mediums as the “storage of human experiences” (8), while the electric aspect described the telegraph, cinema and human-computer interactions up to the latter half of the 1900s. The broadcast era consisted of radio and television, and the evolving of technomedia meant understanding what its implications were.

I find that media technologies do provide an implied wealth of information and communication resources, and the article’s conclusion had me also understanding that technomedia enables people to generate and act upon ideas. What makes older generations tell the currently younger generations that it’s a “lucky time to be living in” is the encapsulation of all of the new ways of message exchange—mostly powered by the Internet—that has given users of technology more power and self-sufficiency than ever before. The other article of this week, “Personal Dynamic Media,” showcased the Dynabook personal interactive device, and I think this technomedia article brings the essence of that idea full-circle. Technomedia “challenges thought” (18), and I could not easily think of another way of describing it. I sometimes find myself taking all of the gadgets and gizmos in our lives for granted, and all this interconnectivity and networking for seamless, virtually never-ending experiences of entertainment, productivity, organization, what have you, always has me wanting to see what comes next.