Tuesday, April 13, 2010

"A close reading of the computer as medium, though revels that there is no multi-media in a virtual space, only one medium, which basically calculates different sounds images, words, sounds indifferently, since its able to emulate all other media"

The passage above struck me when I first read it, I had been definitely under the spell of the computer as a multi-media instrument. On further analysis of the passage, I realized how that confusion was fit perhaps an inherent quality of the computer, it appears that a sort of mimetic faculty within the medium itself is working to ensure I confuse the one, highly variable medium with an actual multi-media device.

On a completely different note, although I really liked the argument in the piece, I am weary of statements that imply the internet has stopped disciplinary modes of access through constant flux, although this is certainly a phenomenon, I think to truly interrogate the social and cultural implications of digital media the persistence of closed databanks which are "sealed off" in the internet.

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