Our technologies seem to have personalities that impact us like other people or human institutions. We often speak of them as though they had "agency" and even personality; this has often been called "technological determinism."
Can we attribute concrete effects to the “Internet”? The Internet is a shell, a tool made up of connected server computers world wide that work through a series of protocols for sharing data. The World Wide Web is the software that makes the internet useful to ordinary users. People can project their messages via the Web and increasingly join together through the infrastructure of the Internet to achieve many types of purposes--but all of these originate with human users. So you might say “The Internet is as we use it.” Technological determinism may mask crucial social processes and changes in how we enact literacy as a culture.
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