Some notes from this week’s second reading:
- media ARE. medium is
- success of media may depend on ‘inattention’ or ‘blindness’ to the technology itself, focussing on phenomena, the content, enjoyment, what people get out of it
- broadcasts disappear, whereas inscriptions won’t (Gitelman, page 6)
” Just as science enjoys an authority by virtue of its separation from politics and the larger social sphere, media become authoritative as the social processes of their definition and dissemination are separated out or forgotten “
- context of usage changes behaviour of user, eg. telephoning – changes what people say and how
“I define media as socially realized structures ofcommunication, where structures include both technological forms and their associated protocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized collocation of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with popular ontologies of representation. As such, media are unique and complicated historical subjects” (pg. 7).
“Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999, 15) write that new media present themselves as refashioned and improved versions ofother media. Digital media can best be understood through the ways in which they honor, rival, and revise linear-perspective painting, photography, film, television, and print. No medium . . . seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces. What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (pg. 9)
– author has a problem about the syntax of above statement, how it implies media are ‘natural as they are’ with no mention of human agents
And lastly a nice photo
