DIGC202- Second Tumblr post
Perhaps the word that nicely sums up this week in Digc202 is Progressivism. Not a bad way of looking at things really. Maybe not the most helpful either. In recognising and understanding this term, it becomes difficult to find works on new media that don’t have a teleological foundation, supported by notions of progress. I’m not quite sure how to get around this concept when it’s obvious that it’s so ingrained in our learning to date, however I think the sheer fact of recognising it when we see it is a major start. I felt that Winston’s “From the Telegraph to the Internet” article followed a very predictable timeline perspective of history, valuing chronology over investigative lines of thought. Though very thorough and clearly well researched, I felt that it didn’t necessarily enhance my understanding of communication networks in the way that Wilson’s lecture pieced all the various sections together.
What I did find interesting was Wilson’s archaeology of networks and their relationship to each other. I’d never considered the spice route, slave trade, container shipping and the telegraph to have so many common elements. I’ve uploaded a world map of global shipping routes and frequency in 2006 that also follows a similar structure to the one’s presented by Wilson. It would appear by the maps that other students have uploaded that everyone is finding similar things, though in vastly different fields of networks e.g. Pierreth, Lishia.
