Thoughts: First lecture
I just wrote a long and sophisticated blog, but accidentally deleted it. Not following Mary’s instructions, I thought I would ‘just do it’. Nike has let me down for the last time with that slogan. Anyway the gist of it goes a little something like this:
I feel an immense amount of ambivalence toward the internet. In other words, I can see both sides of the agency/structure argument and am having trouble coming to grips with which side of the debate I sit on. On the one hand I am a structural Marxist (social determinist), but on the other hand I am an existentialist (liberal individualist or indeterminist). Reconciling these two opposing beliefs has always been a hard for me. Yet hopefully this course will give me a good opportunity to further examine them vis-à-vis the internet and technology.
It sounds like you are leaning toward a situational interactionist perspective? Like Mary said in the lecture, it might not be one or the other, perhaps its both.