We took two courses in period 1, Transformation in Digital Cultures and Real Virtuality.This reflection is about how do I feel about the two courses and the topic I am interested in both of them.
The course, Transformation and Digital Cultures, talks about some digital technologies that are worth mentioning, as well as how they affect cultures and our society. First, I have to say that the whole course is well designed and I really enjoy the different topics though some of them are difficult to understand.
The topic I am really interested in is technomoral change since this topic is no longer strange and can not be ignored in our digital life. As we knew, there are not only hard impacts but also soft impacts of technology, it can be said that each technology has soft impacts that change the ethics, core value and morality of individuals and society, for example, moral and ethical issues brought by robots. I also mentioned soft impacts in my academic paper about self-tracking. According to Swierstra (2015), impacts like these are qualitative rather than quantitative, the core values at stake are unclear or contested; and the results are co-produced by the user. So technomoral change, especially its soft impacts, is a wide and flexible topic which is worthy to have further research on. In my further study, I will still focus on the technomoral change brought by new technologies and gain a deeper understanding of the soft impacts, especially on individuals.
What I am most interested in Real Virtuality is a special method, phenomenology, which is brand new for me. Not only does it studies how we live in the world, but also studies our experience in the midst of being engaged with the world ( Kamphof, 2020). It is also an important method to work on all of the philosophical concepts and theories in this course. For or our own research, we need to figure out the research question according to our observation and experience and write them in anecdotes, which is a very interesting thing. In my further study, I will continue to use phenomenology as my research method on media studies.
Reference
Kamphof I., (2020),phenomenology reader, Maastricht university press. Educational material.
Swierstra, T. (2015). Identifying the normative challenges posed by technology’s ‘soft’impacts. Etikk i praksis-Nordic Journal of Applied Ethics, (1), 5-20.
