BigShinyThing

A few things we should set straight around here, just for the record. There seems to be some confusion in the back rows of the classroom about exactly what’s going on with all this social media/emergent media talk. So, boys at the back, stop picking your noses, and Smithson, I saw you scribbling banner ads at the top of your exercise book. Just stop it. Now.

Pay attention.

1. This is not a digital revolution. It’s social. Your Freeview box is digital. Your computer is digital. Everything else is people.
2. Second Life isn’t the start of something. Email was the start of it. Or the telegraph. Most likely, it started with the written word — Socrates was always suspicious that there was something big going on with this ‘writing’ thing. Your set text for this week is Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. You will be examined on this.
3. What started with the written word only hit its tipping point with email. Suddenly realtime, mutable. We’re still living in the shockwave of the social change this enables (we don’t get to choose the timescale of the histories in which we live).
4. Before that tipping point, we spent centuries wrestling with the idea of communication, a tricky, elusive thing. Realtime social media is about something else — it enables a different way of being, not [only] a new way of saying or representing. The kids get it, some of the rest of us get some of it:
   

   For sake of argument, we need a working model of the self. Let’s posit the one proposed by Clifford Geertz who described the Western concept of the person as a

   bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background.

   Wave goodbye. That was you before you bought a computer and signed up for an email account. Those were the good old days, when people could still complain about anomie, of being locked in the lonely confines of their selfhood…because they still had a selfhood, something relatively impermeable that kept the world out and the precious self in.

For the rest of this semester, we’re going to explore the idea of post-communication media. There will be more reading assigned, and some exercises. Do your homework.