Quoting "Denise N. Rall" <denrall@yahoo.com>:
In my book the packet doesn't care what it is carrying. Carrying a bit of binary code or a text message is all the same. Doesn't make the packet a container of expressive content. That content appears to the reader on the other end.
Denise: I agree -- by all means, let's not start a war (I've seen my share of the online variety recently.) I appreciate the spirit of your response.
It's like saying a printing press includes expressive elements. It's just the messenger. The byproduct appears to the reader as content. The printing press is not a medium, it is not even the producer (that's the author, right?). It's just a piece of the infrastructure.
We also agree on this -- for the most part. I would only ask, under your definition, does *any* medium have expressive content in and of itself? Media are what "come between," allowing for the transmission of content at one end to expression at another. If it's the case that neither the origination nor the destination (points of encoding/decoding) constitute the medium, fine -- but then we're dealing with a very Shannon-Weaveresque model, which, frankly, may be interesting from an information theory standpoint, but does not encompass the rich variety of meanings and experiences that most people mean when they invoke "medium." The medium of the movies surely includes more than the optical apparatus that captures light, inscribes it chemically or optically onto film, and reconstructs it at the other end in a darkened theater. For me at least, it includes the lovely grain of the image, the shock of the jump cut, and the dreamy no-time of the closeup. It's all very well to say that the internet is simply an elaborate snarl of interconnections with no inherent aesthetics or poetry of its own; it's quite another to relax with a martini in a hot tub created entirely by lines of text in a telnet window. (Or, for that matter, to engage in a debate via discussion list.) I submit that it's hard to say where the infrastructure of the medium "ends" and where the infrastructure of emotion, imagination, and affect "begins."
But you're right in that meanings for the internet have been confounded by semantics over the time. I hear people say all kinds of stuff about 'the internet' today that would suprise those of us working in computing centers in the 1980s. At the packet level, none of this matters much. It's just getting the bits out.
I suppose -- but then Richard Dawkins would argue that, at the "gene level," little of what we concern ourselves with in life matters. Surely there is some insight to be gained by thinking on the macro as well as the micro level? Best wishes, Bob