Week 3 summary

This week I‘ve been thinking about image and language. I think I’ve come to the ‘conclusion’ that medium is to message as pedagogy is to technology. You can’t say that any message is best transmitted by one single medium any more than you can say that one message can be successfully transmitted by any medium; this is not because ‘the medium is the message’ but because they enter into a mutual relationship before, during and after the transmission. The message–if we roll it back to a pre-inguistic thought or idea–must be translated into something before it can be understood by another person.

(And we wouldn’t want the alternative: Belcerebons)

I’ve also been aware that most of the media I post is ‘pop’ culture rather than…I guess, Culture Show culture. I suppose this is mostly because I’ve interpreted ‘digital cultures’ as referring to de facto culture, out of which springs artefacts rather than artefacts that attempt to ‘say something’ about culture. This is a tenuous distinction at best. And the real answer is probably that 1) I know a lot more about pop culture and 2) what I do know about culture culture is largely written down in my undergraduate notes in a box somewhere, unable to assist me in remembering who said, e.g. ‘linguistic structures enable complex thought’ and things like that.

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