Blogs are often used as a way of reflecting the self, or at least reflecting how we want other people to view us. In that way, the template and addons says something about who we are.

This view could be said to support the voluntairist view to the technological determinism; the individual choose and have control over the techonologies that they want to use, and they want to represent themselves. When entering a webpage, or a blog, you immediatly make up an perception of what type of page or blog this is and the person behind it, and as one start reading that perception could be either modified, rejected or confirmed.

On the other hand the blog as a genre with certain norms and standards, as one has to follow for it to be accepted as a blog.

 I think my choice of template would inspire me to keep focus on my studies (or that is what I wish…), and I think the appearance of my blog will effect my writing in the way that I would keep an “academic” style, rather than a personal style.

I would place Bolters essay “Writing as Technology” as an attitude of weak or soft techonogical determination. He claims that the two dimensions of writing, the cultural and the technical, are so related that they cannot be separated. Through the history, from the transition from a oral culture to a written culture, from a culture based on pen and paper to the Gutenberg’s technology of print to the digital culture we now experience, the new technologies has always been based on the previous one, and Bolter calls this shift “remediation”. I also believe that Bolters view can be said to support co-construction; which is the idea that technology and the society/culture affects each other.

Jack Goody speaks about writing as a technology of the intellect, in by which he refers to the actual skills that are required to use a pen and a paper to produce something that is meaningful to other humans. I think he criticizes the attitude of strong determinism, because he claims that technology is never nonhuman, since it is developed and used by human minds and hands (Goody, Jack: The power of the written tradition. Washington and London 2000, chapter 8 “Technologies of the Intellect: Writing and Written Word”).