[Air-l] Angels, Ghosts, Mediums

[Jean Burgess]

Misgivings about the implied magical transparency of communication  
technologies aside...

There's a nice quote from John Durham Peters that resonates with me  
in terms of what I see happening a lot on the web at the moment: the  
breakdown of distinctions between private/intimate and public  
communication.  I see this happening through the articulation of  
individual social networking with personal narrative and public or  
networked portfolios of creative content.  I think of the desires  
expressed in this way as a  "becoming real" to the network:

The quote -
"If success in communication was once the art of reaching across the
intervening bodies to touch another’s spirit, in the age of  
electronic media it
has become the art of reaching across the intervening spirits to  
touch another
body. Not the ghost in the machine, but the body in the medium is the  
central
dilemma of modern communications." (1999, pp. 224-225)

Cheers
Jean Burgess

http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~burgess

Researcher and PhD Candidate
Creative Industries Faculty
Queensland University of Technology
Australia


On 14/03/2006, at 2:25 AM, Alex Halavais wrote:

> Ulla:
>> A fifth meaning for the word "medium" is "person who can talk to  
>> ghosts and otherwise
>> dead people." This meaning doesn't really pertain to what most of  
>> us are studying...
>
> In "Speaking into the Air," John Durham Peters takes this
> idea--angelic communication and communion with the dead--as the
> starting point for thinking about what we do when we (fail to)
> communicate. If "real" communication is between embodied individuals,
> it seems that most of us study ghosts in some form.
>
> But I'm pretty sure that's not what your students mean :).
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