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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