Quoting "Denise N. Rall" <denrall@yahoo.com>:
Thanks Christopher for stating the obvious. The internet IS the infrastructure and other things happen on it. The packet could care less. Its 'purpose in life' is to get from point A to point B, preferably without colliding with any other packet (if it does, ethernet constraints tell it what to do). It carries data not messages. The messages, etc. are coded at one end and decoded at the other end. The internet is not a media! although I can see how it carries that burden today. People are still confounding the internet with the WWW. The web has expressive elements, the internet does not.
Er ... the internet had no "expressive elements" before the advent of the graphical browser? I know a few MUDders and ADVENT players who might disagree. I understand that from a technological standpoint, it's easy (not to mention efficient) to make statements like "X is a medium, Y is not a medium." But from the perspective of remediation ("the content of a medium is always another medium"), isn't it much harder to defend such hard-and-fast definitions? I'd counter that a medium is that which is culturally and commercially recognized as such; whose identity is forged largely through the promulgation of formal behaviors in relation to / distinct from those of the media surrounding it; and whose "essence" is therefore continually open to redefinition. Bob --------------------------------------- Bob Rehak Department of Communication and Culture Mottier Hall, 1790 East Tenth St. Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405-9700 Associate Editor, North America Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal will be published by Sage starting 2006. Subscribe now for a free online subscription! www.sagepub.co.uk/animation