[Air-l] not wishing to start a war . . .

[Bob Rehak]

Quoting "Denise N. Rall" <denrall at yahoo.com>:

> In my book the packet doesn't care what it is
> carrying. Carrying a bit of binary code or a text
> message is all the same. Doesn't make the packet a
> container of expressive content.  That content appears
> to the reader on the other end.

Denise: I agree -- by all means, let's not start a war (I've seen my 
share of the online variety recently.) I appreciate the spirit of your 
response.

> It's like saying a printing press includes expressive
> elements. It's just the messenger. The byproduct
> appears to the reader as content. The printing press
> is not a medium, it is not even the producer (that's
> the author, right?). It's just a piece of the
> infrastructure.

We also agree on this -- for the most part. I would only ask, under 
your definition, does *any* medium have expressive content in and of 
itself? Media are what "come between," allowing for the transmission of 
content at one end to expression at another. If it's the case that 
neither the origination nor the destination (points of 
encoding/decoding) constitute the medium, fine -- but then we're 
dealing with a very Shannon-Weaveresque model, which, frankly, may be 
interesting from an information theory standpoint, but does not 
encompass the rich variety of meanings and experiences that most people 
mean when they invoke "medium."

The medium of the movies surely includes more than the optical 
apparatus that captures light, inscribes it chemically or optically 
onto film, and reconstructs it at the other end in a darkened theater. 
For me at least, it includes the lovely grain of the image, the shock 
of the jump cut, and the dreamy no-time of the closeup.

It's all very well to say that the internet is simply an elaborate 
snarl of interconnections with no inherent aesthetics or poetry of its 
own; it's quite another to relax with a martini in a hot tub created 
entirely by lines of text in a telnet window. (Or, for that matter, to 
engage in a debate via discussion list.) I submit that it's hard to say 
where the infrastructure of the medium "ends" and where the 
infrastructure of emotion, imagination, and affect "begins."

> But you're right in that meanings for the internet
> have been confounded by semantics over the time. I
> hear people say all kinds of stuff about 'the
> internet' today that would suprise those of us working
> in computing centers in the 1980s. At the packet
> level, none of this matters much. It's just getting
> the bits out.

I suppose -- but then Richard Dawkins would argue that, at the "gene 
level," little of what we concern ourselves with in life matters. 
Surely there is some insight to be gained by thinking on the macro as 
well as the micro level?

Best wishes,
Bob