questions about media and immediacy
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this course, and am grateful that at the end, it has left me with more questions than I started with.
Some questions that have persisted for me throughout the course came from this quote from Bolter (highlighting added):
“What all media and media forms have in common for our culture is the promise of immediacy. Transparent media promise to disappear and leave us in contact with the unmediated world, although it is a promise that they can never entirely fulfill. Hypermediated media give up the attempt to present a world beyond themselves; instead, they offer themselves as immediate experiences. When one medium sets out to remediate another, it does so by claiming to do a better job.”
Claims of immediacy are tied to visions of what is natural for humans, and our view of what is natural can reveal our biases. It also seems contradictory to me that media can promise immediacy. I have questions about determinism, and whether societal changes drive or are driven by changes in technology.
Besides our course readings, there are a number of contributions from our class that have helped me think about ideas of immediacy.
In Exploring Socialbook, Julia, Parm and Haneefa showed how Socialbook is a tool that “facilitates interaction, sharing and discussions within the reading environment”, and so promises to increase the immediacy of our discussions about Bolter’s book. We can see from the “Readers’ Thoughts on Socialbook” which were compiled in Exploring Socialbook that the results were mixed, with some enjoying the experience and others feeling that it interfered with their direct interaction with the book.
I question whether a desire for increased immediacy drives our adoption of technologies. The importance placed on solutions to the problem of information overload seems to argue against a desire for greater immediacy. Tools such as social bookmarking, which Brendan explored in Social Bookmarking, Literacy and the Information Explosion, filter information before it reaches us, and mediate our direct experience with too much information.
Social media offer a space that offers an expanded view of self and identity, as Bryan discussed in From Media to Mind, and so offers a more immediate way to define one’s self and determine one’s identity. His presentation also showed how a fragmented style can more effectively support the presentation of the argument which is an example of hypermedia offering greater immediacy.
Candelaria offered an example of a hypermediated experience in her 3D Virtual Museum which converts the time-line of the course into a three dimensional, visual space with links to multimedia content. This visual presentation of the organization of the course may have greater immediacy than the 2D representation on the page or screen.
Lynn showed how visual signs are used to improve the immediacy of communication in a global context in her blog post Global Communication Through the Visual. Images offer greater immediacy than written descriptions.
In his multimedia production, Hyper-Collaborative Learning, Daniel looked at how hypermedia allows students to have more immediacy in online collaboration, using tools such as word processors, multi-media and social media.
There were more, but I can’t locate them on the blog right now.
So, where do I go from here? I expect to return to some of the questions about technology and the mind raised for me by this course, but there are also other areas of interest. I’m interested in exploring non-linear forms of fiction, starting with some of the ones mentioned in The Electronic Labyrinth, and experimental forms of fiction such as the one jkdaina shared in From Processing to Remixing Text.
Thanks, all, and have a great rest-of-the-summer.
Janice