Robert Macdougall

Cultural Technics: Making Meaning at the Interfaces of Oral and Electronic Culture Robert Macdougall

As we move further into a new millennium often typified by the rapid dissemination of digital communication technologies, many questions arise with respect to the way these new tools potentially impact the individuals and groups who use them. Attendant to these questions is the degree to which technology users themselves might adapt such tools to their own purposes as the Internet, and all of its apparatuses, spread into the hidden space and places of the world. Deferring, for the time-being, the standing promise of digital communication systems designed to enhance productivity, multitasking abilities and cognitive flow, this investigation into media-cultural interfaces is inspired by a conception of communication as a formative mechanism, something which not only speeds the relay and transmission of information, but simultaneously constitutes (and in part determines) the structure of our symbolic reality. This book documents the establishment of an early E-mail system at a Native American community in the Northeastern United States, and interrogates the nature of the human-machine interactions that occurred there.