Starting With…

We began class with another aesthetic experience: wishing our professor a happy birthday. You can take a look below at the video I recorded during the celebration process to get a more nuanced look at how graduate classes at IU are actually experienced.

Words of Deep Concern from Bolter and Grusin

So we engaged in the writing of Bolter and Grusin. These writers help to engage in what a medium is and how we can interact with it. For these writers, a medium is the physical materials and dissemination of content. In our studies, we are in a convergence of where these two aspects of a medium come together. We need to be able to talk eloquently and critically about both, and the experience resulting from this confluence.

To many people, the word medium strikes at the content aspect of a medium. Most think about the ability of a medium to contain content, but the formal studies of media takes an opposite stance. The medium also has another quality: the content and its form cannot be separated from each other. These are integral parts of what a medium is – removing one is impossible without removing the other.

So we all have heard of the famous Marshall McCluin dictum: the medium is the message. There is a slightly weaker stance from our standpoint as a class and from the reading – the medium affects the message. For example, a novel may work better at revealing the interiority of the characters, but it may be lacking in pure visceral power of imagery. A movie, on the other hand, especially in the horror genre, may have great visceral power in its imagery, but may be lacking in showing the interiority of the characters.

An example of this debate can be found within machcinima, with the series of Red Versus Blue. This can be found here. The point of this example is that series of movies like these are inherently about the game and everything surrounding the game, which goes to the argument about affecting the message. What is your opinion?

While discussing this, we also came up with playing mad libs with the word media. One topic we touched on was media literacy – can one be literate in a medium. This is touchy, as it all depends on how we operationalize the word literate. If we restrict to just technical knowledge, then the answer is quite simple. Then we looked at many different uses of the word medium for our technical vocabulary. First, there’s immediacy, which is the cognitive effect of looking through the medium and seeing what is there. Then there is hypermediacy, where the medium calls attention to itself. There are other terms mentioned in the link below which also utilize the word medium in a mad lib type of manner.

Looking deeper into these concepts, and we also found that there is never a message without a medium. The message needs a medium in order to become a message, which is perceived by our human cognition. Because of this, it is inherently subjective, but we may also try to use our own objective means to try to interpret it, but even so, this process is subjective. Media are also always changing, but each, and its messages are situated in time or place. For example, it is really hard to define what a novel is, without tying the definition to a time period. With this in mind, it is truly hard to have something as universal. In addition, media also have the aspect that they cannibalize other media; there can’t be new media without old media being consumed or utilized in the process.

Media also have an intertexuality to them you can look at how one works, and one can see the other histories leading to that medium. Normally this is reserved for physical media like books, but this also applies to media as well. These allow us as designers to innovate – we can then decompose the super-complex stuff to much more handleable stuff that we can learn about and find meaning in each of the parts. We also need to remember that when we are making a new artifact (or medium for that matter), we are changing the cultural practices centered around whatever we create.

The Next Mad Lib – Remediation

Remediation is representing one media from another (synopsis from the link below). There are four aspects of this trait:

*social – this aspect examines the continuation and transformation of social practices as we move from medium to another (e.g. cinema)
*technical – this aspect looks at the continuation and transformation of technology (e.g. cameras)
*material – this aspect looks at the continuation and transformation of the material level of something (e.g. madden, genre)
*economic – this aspect looks at the continuation and transformation of economic practices related to something (e.g. monetization of music)

Take-Away Items

As we are designing, we need to keep in mind these aspects of remediation, and we cannot change one of these aspects without affecting how the other aspects work. We also need to keep in mind the debate as to whether or not the new medium we create is superior to the older ones out there. Is it? Lastly, sometimes when a new medium is created, it ends up taking over some of our beliefs – for example a movie may help us to say someone’s name or impress upon us what the characters look like (called “multicultural gandalfism”, in class). Then we will refer to the new medium, instead of focusing on the one we originally dealt with.

And For More Action…

We get to bring this paper, the interface criticism paper, and our Technology as Experience book with us to class next time, as we get to perform an opportunity that will allow us to become engaged in this material and terminology.

FYI

For those struggling or wanting to know more about the many different words we have been using which contain the word ‘media’ in them, you can look here, and this site will help to explain the nuances between them all.

More Fun

Here’s some timeless moments you may have missed while being here at the Informatics department (or viewing from the web)

There is a handy HCI crocodile hanging out in the West Building – can you spot him (assuming gender) now?

It still is snowing – Indiana weather sure is weird.