INFO I502 - Class Notes for 14 Feb 2008

INFO I502 - Class Notes for 14 Feb 2008
- Will's Tie Update
  - Black Necktie
  - Not Clip-on
  - Charcoal Pinstripes
- Remediation
  - McLuhan
    - Media critic active in the 1960s and 1970s
    - Media Content
      - We tend to think of any medium as a container that stores content
        Content is separate from the container in which it is contained.
        MCLUHAN DISAGREES WITH THIS NOTION
      - "The medium is the message."
        There is no way to separate the content from the medium in which it is stored
        McLuhan's argument is the same as phenomenologist's critique of mind/body dualism
      - "The 'content' of any medium is always another medium"
      - EXAMPLE:
        The cinema
        It is not just the narrative that gets "pulled along"
        Techniques, actors, etc. are also incorporated
  - Bolter & Grusin
    - "A medium is that which remediates."
      - Definition of Remediation
        "It is [1] that which appropriates the techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and [2] attempts to fival or refashion to rival or refrashion them in the name of the real."
        [1] When you remediate something, it pulls everything into its content
        [2] When you remediate something, you claim that it is something better than it was before.
        Extension of McLuhan
        Not only do media "contain" other media, but there are new relationships identified
      - "The remediation of material practice is inseparable from the remediation of social arrangements."
        When a new medium supplants an old medium, not only does it transform the content but also ...
        The modes of production
    - Four Dimensions of every medium
      - THE DIMENSIONS
        Technical
        Social
        Economic
        Material
      - Changes in any of these forces affects the others
      - If a medium has a geneology extending from other media (film to games), then the new media also inherit the four dimensions of the previous medium
        This inheritance is "messy"
        EXAMPLE: Problems with the digital divide (as evident in HCI and computing) is inherited to gaming.
        Sometimes, changes in a new media can have a ripple effect to parent media.
    - Immediacy & Hypermediacy
      - Deals with the relationship between the medium and the real
      - Immediacy
        Refers to the experience of transparency
        The idea of the medium trying to make something as real as possible
        EXAMPLE: Photojournalism
        Something that you look through and see reality
      - Hypermediacy
        Refers to the experience that the medium is staging the content in artificial ways.
  - Walter Benjamin
    - Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
      - Going to mechanical reproduction, completely transforms every domain involved
        EXAMPLE: Stage vs. Film
        Film breaks space and time
        Film distorts the way in which people view action