RE: digital media

From: Eugene Matusov (ematusov@udel.edu)
Date: Wed Dec 03 2003 - 11:35:52 PST


Dear Jay-

Can you elaborate on
> We don't really
> know what terms like virtual, digital, interactive, online, etc. mean in
> relation to some larger framework. (Espen Aarseth is particularly good at
> dissolving the pretensions of these terms to academic legitimacy.)

Thanks,

Eugene

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jay Lemke [mailto:jaylemke@umich.edu]
> Sent: Monday, December 01, 2003 11:39 PM
> To: XMCA LISTGROUP
> Subject: digital media
>
>
> As the term winds down a bit and I extricate myself more from too readily
> volunteered commitments, I've finally been able to read back through the
> last month or so of messages.
>
> I was particularly interested in the discussions of digital media. This is
> an area of special interest for me and I am preparing to do some new
> research around it. As people noted, it's complicated by our not having a
> ready vocabulary for sorting out the different senses of "media" -- as
> technologies, as affordances, as genres, as semiotic modalities/resources
> and combinations thereof, as persistent and consultable records we write,
> as automatic indexical records or traces of activity, etc etc.
>
> The vocabulary we do have has grown up out of informal practice and
> commercial and technical ready-reference terms. It is not generally
> informed by any very comprehensive or sophisticated theory. We don't
really
> know what terms like virtual, digital, interactive, online, etc. mean in
> relation to some larger framework. (Espen Aarseth is particularly good at
> dissolving the pretensions of these terms to academic legitimacy.) But
> nonetheless we know that something important is going on and something
> important is different. We're just at a very early stage of figuring out
> what, in part because we're just at a very early stage of making use of
the
> affordances of these new media and it isn't yet historically determined
> just which of these affordances will in fact turn out to be socially and
> culturally significant.
>
> It might be exact reproducibility, but I doubt it. (Walter Benjamin and
his
> successors have described somewhat convincingly the cultural impact of
that
> aspect of earlier technologies.) It might be editing-everywhere, but that
> seems just a part of something bigger. It probably will have something to
> do with the fact that one can approximately digitize most other media, and
> therefore make it easier to use many media in combination with one
another,
> and to innovate new multimedia genres and perhaps to think and act in new
> ways with these. I would hope that it has something to do with
> interactivity, in the special sense that while we can respond to many
> media, most older media do not respond back to us. And this is also
somehow
> related to the sense of presence, or immersion: that we can act in a
> virtual media world and experience the consequences, the feedback of our
> actions. We are no longer just observers, we can move around, touch
things,
> gain a corporeality that may help us shed the ghostly view-from-nowhere
> observer-epistemology that has made our science so boring and our
> technologies so Faustian. (Yes, I think our older media have played a role
> in making us think of observer-descriptions as the paradigm of knowledge,
> and so fostered a dichotomy whose other pole is an obsession with causal
> control.)
>
> The great power of media is not cognitive. Much as we have learned about
> how symbolic technologies can mediate rational action, rationality is a
> very limiting mode of feeling, a restrictive affective quality of
activity.
> The great power of media is to combine affect and meaning in a variety of
> ways, even if western masculine middle-class commercial-rational culture
> feels uncomfortable about acknowledging this. My guess is that digital
> media is going to have its greatest impact in re-opening our options for
> combining a wide range of feelings with the whole range of meanings.
> Imagine what might happen when interactive-immersive-presence combines
with
> multimodal semiotic resources to allow us to engage in affect-rich
> activities in worlds we co-create with others, and with Others. Not just
as
> escapes from the ordinary lifeworld (though most specialized
> information-centric activity is that already, whether artistic, academic,
> or commercial), but as a ubiquitous passage-point through which we pass
> coming and going among the many activities and attentional spaces in which
> we act, mean, and feel.
>
> It will not matter whether such media are forever realized through digital
> technologies or not, so long as they have these human and cultural
> affordances. History may simply record that such media were first devised,
> and their uses first elaborated, in the time of digital-code machines.
>
> Who knows where our cultures will go with such media as tools, but at
least
> we can anticipate having a lot more fun getting there.
>
> JAY.
>
> PS. The paradigm of digital media today is not the edocument, or the
> webpage, but the digital computer game. The dynamic-interactive websites
of
> commercial videogames, especially those linked to special-effects films
> (e.g. Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, X-men) point toward the ways in which
> old and new multimedia are starting to cross-contextualize one another ...
> struggling to spawn something not quite realized, yet.
>
>
>
> Jay Lemke
> Professor
> University of Michigan
> School of Education
> 610 East University
> Ann Arbor, MI 48104
>
> Tel. 734-763-9276
> Email. JayLemke@UMich.edu
> Website. www.umich.edu/~jaylemke



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