Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

UBIQUITY: Do you find that students swim easily in areas like this? Or are there problems?

KELTY: It's quite hard for students to get their head around. Undergraduate students especially are dominated by a conception of the world in which information and networks require a technical mediation or a machine. It's also hard for them to think about human relationships in the same terms that we think about communication technology. I ask them to do that, not because I think all human relationships can be described in terms of communication technology, but because I think that there are a lot of metaphorical descriptions going in both directions. We describe human relationships using technical terms. We also describe our technical systems using metaphors and images from our human social world. I try to get them to think in both directions, from the technical to the social and from the social to the technical, with the assumption that they'll realize that descriptions of either technology or society are not set in stone.