elw@stderr.org wrote:
anybody else got a paradigm in mind that they think relates this stuff?
Joshua Meyrowitz in "Multiple Media Literacies" (Journal of Communication, 48(1),[Winter 1998] pp. 96-109) suggests at least three ways of conceiving of a medium of mass communication, advocating a model, based on the work of McLuhan and Ong, which includes the technology, the communicators as human subjects, and the culture in which they live. This rather expansive definition creates an understanding that the technology is just one component of a much larger system, or in Meyrowitz's terms, "an environment." One certainly interacts with others differently in the environment of web surfing than in the environment of IMing, for example. There are different expectations, different assumptions, and different effects. -- Mark D. Johns, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Communication Studies Luther College, Decorah, Iowa http://academic.luther.edu/~johnsmar/ ----------------------------------------------- "Get the facts first. You can distort them later." ---Mark Twain