My Meager Contributions

First off I ran across an article that I thought was interesting for class.  It is from the Huffington Post and it speaks of how social networking sites have proved invaluable assets for those in Japan and across the world in light of the devastating earthquake and resulting tsunami.  With this article in the back of our minds, which I found while reading various newspapers electronically at the coffee shop, and the contributions of Postman, Ewan, DeLuca, and Burgess & Green my question for class is where has the conflict of our cultural tensions led us to be as a society?

DeLuca argues that "the social world needs to be understood as the conflictual process of hegemony, where the cultural and ideological contest or negotiation among a variety of publics takes place" (p 21); and Burgess & Green appear to support this claim stating that there is an "increasingly complex relationship among producers and consumers in the creation of meaning, value, and agency" (p. 14).  So are we merely the drooling entertainment seeking drones of Postman's world, or are we the creative, innovative, and socially networked individuals capable of creating socially significant "image events" that can turn "rational" rhetorical theory on its head? With dramatic examples like that of the Hiroshi Matsuyama, who used twitter to open up his web studio survivors of the disaster, I tend to think the latter.