Re: [Air-l] Internet as medium with different sub-media or channels?
To state the obvious, whether considering "'real' communication between embodied individuals," or the ostensible communication between embodied and non-embodied beings, or even oil paint as medium of expression, the key commonality is the "between," specifically, that which (or s/he who) mediates. Granted the term "mediate" is itself open to varying interpretations, but it emphasizes process. In this sense, to the degree that each of the different applications mediates in different ways, enables and constrains different aspects of communication, you should consider them different media, as Anders suggests. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the internet taken broadly shouldn't be considered as a medium at all, but a domain or infrastructure for various media. But as Anders also suggests, since "media" and "medium" are already invested with other meanings it might be most practical to use another term altogether, genre, mode, even application.
From another perspective, whether medium or mediate, the more I think about it the more the terms imply a conceptualization of communication as something that can be more or less direct--a sort of sender-receiver model, with communication somehow changed, for better or worse, depending on mode and amount of mediation. This makes sense, but at the same time, what does it really mean, if the level or amount of mediation doesn't correspond necessarily to degree of ambiguity--physical touch, as relatively direct communication can be more ambiguous than a TV message or a web page; a television message can mislead, but so can the spoken word. All communication seems mediated through the intersection of physical perception, culture and psychology . . . ? I'm not quite sure where this line of reasoning leads, but in any case, these latter reflections are probably of no im-mediate help to you, Michaël!
Christopher J Richter, PhD Assoc. Prof. & Chair, Communication Studies Hollins University P.O. Box 9652 Roanoke, VA 24020 Tel. 5403626358 Fax 5403626286 e-mail crichter@hollins.edu www.hollins.edu -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Alex Halavais Sent: Monday, March 13, 2006 11:26 AM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-l] Internet as medium with different sub-media or channels? 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 Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
--- "Christopher J. Richter" <crichter@hollins.edu> wrote:
media, as Anders suggests. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the internet taken broadly shouldn't be considered as a medium at all, but a domain or infrastructure for various media. But as
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. A losing battle here, but that's me on record as a former IT technologist. Cheers, Denise Denise N. Rall, Ph.D. submitted, School of Environ. Science, Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA Tuesdays: Room T2.12, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 or Mobile 0438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/index.html Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html
On Mar 13, 2006, at 4:24 PM, Denise N. Rall wrote:
People are still confounding the internet with the WWW.
Last term all of my freshmen bar one (a techie) thought the Internet and the web were the same thing. I thought they were supposed to be a wired generation, raised on gaming consoles and with cell phones and such. I had a difficult time explaining it since it caught me off-guard. Perhaps if "web browser" is a medium (with a BS in math/computer science, I disagree with myself there), and since they do so much through web browsers (but not all), they confound everything. Really I think this is interesting, but moot: it just depends on your definition. ^_^ ndp... On Mar 13, 2006, at 4:24 PM, Denise N. Rall wrote:
--- "Christopher J. Richter" <crichter@hollins.edu> wrote:
media, as Anders suggests. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the internet taken broadly shouldn't be considered as a medium at all, but a domain or infrastructure for various media. But as
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.
A losing battle here, but that's me on record as a former IT technologist.
Cheers, Denise
Denise N. Rall, Ph.D. submitted, School of Environ. Science, Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA Tuesdays: Room T2.12, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 or Mobile 0438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/index.html Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html _______________________________________________ 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
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
--------------------------------------------- Nathaniel Poor, Ph.D. www.umich.edu/~natpoor Visiting Assistant Professor Communication Studies Dept. Albion College http://www.albion.edu/commstudies
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
media, as Anders suggests. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the internet taken broadly shouldn't be considered as a medium at all, but a domain or infrastructure for various media. But as
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.
there are certainly a lot of layers to this. some packets [s/packets/communicative acts] are, by their very existence, messages. (e.g., ping packets or ICMP packets or syn/ack packets...) is an IM "presence" indicator a message? the jabber folks sure think so... from the technorhetorician/jargonaut end of things, some packets are more data-oriented than others. e.g., streaming protocols, etc. but even those have session setup/teardown 'messages' that are sent - often in just a packet or two. intuitively connected frames I'm thinking of: Shannon/Weaver Peirce Stanley Fish (reader-response theory...) McLuhan anybody else got a paradigm in mind that they think relates this stuff? I might argue that even saying that the "web" has expressive elements that the "internet" does not is a little bogus. What sort of "web" experience are we talking about, and what technologies are fundamental to being "web" enabled? (i.e., what if there's no html? what if the whole thing is a Flash .swf file that just happened to be transmitted over HTTP? What if I've tunneled HTTP through DNS packets, or an SSH tunnel, or some other geek stunt? Is that still the web? Or is it something other, something that we have to think about the boundaries and parameters of? What if I use the same technologies for something COMPLETELY unlike what we 'typically' use the w3 for now? Am I "web", or am I just an anachronistic transmission of data blobs from port to port? what delineates 'web' from 'internet' from 'intarnetwebcom' (in my brother's jargon)? this is becoming a Hard conversation :) --elijah
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
Quoting "Mark D. Johns" <johnsmar@luther.edu>:
elw@stderr.org wrote:
anybody else got a paradigm in mind that they think relates this stuff?
Siegfried Kracauer has one I'm fond of, if only for its brevity: "Each medium has a specific nature which invites certain kinds of communications while obstructing others." Nice if only because it suggests that mediums conceal and confuse as much as they transmit and make available; that mediums develop certain formal tendencies based on their material & organizational substrate; that it's possible to apprehend and enjoy a medium's operations in and of themselves, quite apart from the content they carry. --------------------------------------- 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
Sorry more responses from Denise. Per Mark Johns it's useful to look for metaphors. A metaphor I quite enjoyed: Pffafenberger, B. (1992). Social anthropology of technology. Annual Review of Anthropology. 21: 491-516. Sure it's dated, but he explicates a brilliant metaphor called the 'technological drama' "A technological drama is a discourse of of technological "statements" and "counterstatements" om which there are three recognizable processes: technolgical regularization, technological adjustment, and technological reconstitution." p.505 The drama starts "when a design constituency creates, appropriates, or modifies a technological production process, artifact, user activity, or systme in such a way that some of it's technological fetures embody a political aim -- that is, an intention to alter the allocation of power, prestige or wealth. (etc.) But I also liked this earlier statement even better (p.504) ". . . one can argue that the dimention of an artifact identified by archeologists, historians and collectors as "style" once formed part of a now lost ritual system, and for that reason now stands out oddly and mysteriously against the artifacts' supposed "function." (see Hodder, 1985). Ok, this reflects my interest in function. I think with the focus exclusively on MEDIUM we leave out very interesting discussions about the functions of technology in other venues - STS, anthropology, philosophy etc. Cheers, Denise Denise N. Rall, Ph.D. submitted, School of Environ. Science, Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA Tuesdays: Room T2.12, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 or Mobile 0438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/index.html Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html
Thanks Elijah for taking the discussion to a much smarter level. Here's a citation for those curious about the differences between internet-based and web-based networks by the eminent physicist M.E.J. Newman: Newman, M. E. J. (2003). "The structure and function of complex networks." Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics Review 45(2): 167-256. Especially important for those who want to know what scale-free networks are and their relationship to networks that obey the power laws. Lots of math but great reading. I also should have noted that technologies and their infrastructures have HUGE impacts on human society, as in my printing press example. Eisenstein, E. L. (1977). The printing revolution in early modern Europe. London, Cambridge University Press. But here I see the book and/or print as the medium and the press as the delivery device or infrastructure, not a medium. It's still important, it has impacts, but I regard it as unexpressive - a functional device. UH yeah good point. There's function & function - packets can be re-directed to serve different purposes or modalities according to their internal components. I still don't see them as a medium but subsumed in their function without expression per se. BUT I'm happy to note that the discussion is far more important than a yes/no answer. And I still concede that today's students will see the internet as a medium rather than a technological infrastructure - nothing I can do about that! Cheers, Denise (attempting to engage brain before starting keyboard) Denise N. Rall, Ph.D. submitted, School of Environ. Science, Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA Tuesdays: Room T2.12, +61 (0)2 6620 3577 or Mobile 0438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/rsm/staff/pages/drall/index.html Virtual member, Cybermetrics Group, University of Wolverhampton, UK http://cybermetrics.wlv.ac.uk/index.html
elw@stderr.org wrote:
there are certainly a lot of layers to this.
some packets [s/packets/communicative acts] are, by their very existence, messages. (e.g., ping packets or ICMP packets or syn/ack packets...)
Quite literally! The computer scientists conceive the whole internet as a layered entity (the physical layer, data link layer, network layer, transportation layer, etc.). Is it possible that we in internet research need to likewise formulate a layered conception of "medium?" In a sense, there are many who only see the hardware, not differentiating between, for example, web surfing or IMing -- it's all just "stuff on the computer." For others, finer distinctions become important. Etc. Perhaps our difficulty in determining where the "medium" exists is our confusion over which layer of the thing on which we ought to focus??? -- 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
Just to add another element to this interesting discussion thread--Langdon Winner's "Do Artifacts have Politics?" talks about how the pure "function" model of technology supports the argument that hardware/infrastructure is "just a tool --or 'just a delivery system'--and it is only in the uses to which it's put--or content/messages that are created--that we can discern social or political impact." His discussion of technological systems that embody in their design power and authority that favor certain interests and modes of social order is enlightening. Sarah Stein Associate Professor, Dept of Communication Chair, Teaching, Learning & Technology Roundtable (TLTR) N.C. State University Raleigh, NC 27695-8104
elw@stderr.org wrote:
there are certainly a lot of layers to this.
some packets [s/packets/communicative acts] are, by their very existence, messages. (e.g., ping packets or ICMP packets or syn/ack packets...)
Quite literally! The computer scientists conceive the whole internet as a layered entity (the physical layer, data link layer, network layer, transportation layer, etc.). Is it possible that we in internet research need to likewise formulate a layered conception of "medium?"
In a sense, there are many who only see the hardware, not differentiating between, for example, web surfing or IMing -- it's all just "stuff on the computer." For others, finer distinctions become important. Etc. Perhaps our difficulty in determining where the "medium" exists is our confusion over which layer of the thing on which we ought to focus??? -- 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 _______________________________________________ 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
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- Sarah Stein, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Dept of Communication Chair, Teaching, Learning & Technology Roundtable (TLTR) Box 8104, N.C. State University Raleigh, NC 27695-8104 Ph: 919-515-9740; Fax 919-515-9456
Quoting Sarah Stein <sstein@unity.ncsu.edu>:
Just to add another element to this interesting discussion thread--Langdon Winner's "Do Artifacts have Politics?" talks about how the pure "function" model of technology supports the argument that hardware/infrastructure is "just a tool --or 'just a delivery system'--and it is only in the uses to which it's put--or content/messages that are created--that we can discern social or political impact." His discussion of technological systems that embody in their design power and authority that favor certain interests and modes of social order is enlightening.
elw@stderr.org wrote:
there are certainly a lot of layers to this.
some packets [s/packets/communicative acts] are, by their very existence, messages. (e.g., ping packets or ICMP packets or syn/ack packets...)
Quite literally! The computer scientists conceive the whole internet as a layered entity (the physical layer, data link layer, network layer, transportation layer, etc.). Is it possible that we in internet research need to likewise formulate a layered conception of "medium?"
In a sense, there are many who only see the hardware, not differentiating between, for example, web surfing or IMing -- it's all just "stuff on the computer." For others, finer distinctions become important. Etc. Perhaps our difficulty in determining where the "medium" exists is our confusion over which layer of the thing on which we ought to focus???
Sorry to embed all the above quotations, but I keep rejoining the conversation midstream. I'm enjoying the dialogue as well, and wanted to switch gears a bit from my earlier, non- or anti-technical contributions. This question is based on my (admittedly limited) understanding of network protocols, which I delved into for a recent project on first-person shooters and graphic engines. Apologies in advance for any mishandling of the concepts involved -- I come humbly seeking clarification. My understanding is that in the world of data transmission protocols there is such a thing as TCP, which is great for reliably shipping data from one place to another, confirming their receipt, verifying integrity & completeness of message, etc. The problem is that TCP' reliability comes at the cost of speed, so it makes an ungainly platform for the fast-paced exchanges of realtime networked computer gaming (e.g. deathmatch or MMO activity). Basically, with TCP you get lag, which interrupts the game and violates the various layers of immersion and disbelief (not the mention players' ability to target or dodge) necessary to the experience. Hence the UDP, or User Datagram Protocol, which sends quanta of information more quickly but without the confirming codes and waiting for old packets that slow down TCP. Most networked games, as I understand it, make use of UDP. My question, then, is this: if packet transmission methods are specialized according to different end needs, then doesn't this argue for the presence of the internet as a medium, in the sense that its protocols are made to serve specific expressive functions? If all packets are not created equal, then we can't reduce the model to "the packet doesn't care what data it carries." To return to the analogy of the printing press, perhaps the press *is* just a tool for replicating content -- but if its design includes the ability to handle different fonts, colors of ink, sizes and types of paper, etc., then the "hardware" is materially implicated in the medium's expressive activity. Best, Bob P.S. Hi Sarah Stein! I think our paths have crossed at more than one conference. --------------------------------------- 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
participants (7)
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Bob Rehak -
Christopher J. Richter -
Denise N. Rall -
elw＠stderr.org -
Mark D. Johns -
Nathaniel Poor -
Sarah Stein