The Art and Architecture of Cyberspace

Shannon McConnell
Reading Response #1
January 16
In the article, The Art and Architecture of Cyberspace, Levy describes telematics as having the ability to break down barriers, provide transparency, and blend the line between transmitter and receiver in communication. A communication revolution that has taken place in the last few years has been the development and acceptance of blogs. Blogs extend to all topics including politics, fashion, music, and food, but do they really provide the transparency and the individual interpretation Levy claims they do?
I attended several state political conventions in high school. These conventions were long, dull and very bureaucratic. I often thought that the most interesting part of these meetings was the area reserved for bloggers. Aisles of bloggers on both sides would attend these meeting for no other reason than to report what was happening. This may appear like an ideal way to make the process transparent to the public. However, there were significant differences in what the republican bloggers would report versus the democratic bloggers. They often used their unrestricted word counts to make jokes, state opinions and editorialize their reporting.
The use of this telematic, blogs, shows that telematics can skew an interpretation of an event for someone who did not actually attend an event. A convention that unexpectedly nominates and underdog after hours of balloting could be interpreted as an exciting, dynamic process that represents democracy as it best operates, or the demise of a well planned campaign by a party. The unrestricted flow of information does not demand any type of unbiased, balanced, or factual reporting, and we cannot rely on the public to seek out all vie ws of an event in order to obtain a complete picture. And in this case of political ideology we can easily understand how we would only seek out interpretations that align with our already pre-formed beliefs.