bb write in response to martin in respose to mary's pointing at an article
by a Russian scholar:
I don't see how it has to be one thing OR the other -- manipulation OR decision
making.
I often annoy my wife by remarking that the good news and the bad news are the
same news. I had the same reaction to the article mary pointed us to (sorry,
it is not in my files and I have to run off to teach, so can't retrieve the
name of the writer).
Ray McDermott and John Dore (I think) wrote an article about a decade ago
called something like, "The necessity of collusion." A major point of the
article was that all communication requires some form of collusion to
interact which is not. cannot, be made entirely explicity. All coordination
involves control, which is probably in principle never uniformly equal,
but rather, varies in its power/control features, at best, around an average
which we might call "equal."
We are not going to rid the world of interactive media, any more than we
are going to rid it of films or print or writing or language. But being
conscious of the tradeoffs and the power games they afford and being
up front about the values which guide our choices is probably not an
inhumane way to deal with the inhumanity of the human condition.
Gotta go work for a living.
mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Dec 01 2001 - 01:01:02 PST