Misgivings about the implied magical transparency of communication technologies aside... There's a nice quote from John Durham Peters that resonates with me in terms of what I see happening a lot on the web at the moment: the breakdown of distinctions between private/intimate and public communication. I see this happening through the articulation of individual social networking with personal narrative and public or networked portfolios of creative content. I think of the desires expressed in this way as a "becoming real" to the network: The quote - "If success in communication was once the art of reaching across the intervening bodies to touch another’s spirit, in the age of electronic media it has become the art of reaching across the intervening spirits to touch another body. Not the ghost in the machine, but the body in the medium is the central dilemma of modern communications." (1999, pp. 224-225) Cheers Jean Burgess http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~burgess Researcher and PhD Candidate Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology Australia On 14/03/2006, at 2:25 AM, Alex Halavais wrote:
Ulla:
A fifth meaning for the word "medium" is "person who can talk to ghosts and otherwise dead people." This meaning doesn't really pertain to what most of us are studying...
In "Speaking into the Air," John Durham Peters takes this idea--angelic communication and communion with the dead--as the starting point for thinking about what we do when we (fail to) communicate. If "real" communication is between embodied individuals, it seems that most of us study ghosts in some form.
But I'm pretty sure that's not what your students mean :). _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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