Using technology/media wisely …

Bob Carlton passed on these questions for interrogating/evaluating media …
Interrogating media
via elearnspace by gsiemens on 7/21/09
When seeking to understand media, gurus/experts like to use questions as guides. Two of the more provocative media thinkers – Postman and McLuhan offer the following to interrogate media (and technology):
In his lecture Technology and Society, Neil Postman offers the following questions for consideration:
What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?
Whose problem is it?
Suppose we solve this problem decisively, what new problems might be created because we have solved the problem?
Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological innovation?
What changes in language are forced by new technologies and what is changed and forced by this new language (meanings)?
What sort of people and institutions acquire special economic and political power because of technological change?
McLuhan offered the following questions for evaluating media:
What does it extend, enhance, accelerate, intensify or enable?
When pushed beyond the limit of its potential, it will reverse what were its original characteristics; into what does it reverse?
What does it displace or obsolesce, that is, render relatively without dominant power or influence?
What does it retrieve from the past that had been formerly obsolesced?