Quoting Alex Halavais <halavais@gmail.com>:
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.
There's also Jeff Sconce's "Haunted Media," exploring the essentially uncanny nature of electronic communication's aura of presentness and simultaneity. His first chapter, in fact, is titled "Mediums and Media" and discusses just this semantic overlap and its implications. --------------------------------------- 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