[Air-l] Internet as medium with different sub-media or channels?

[Bob Rehak]

Quoting Alex Halavais <halavais at gmail.com>:

> 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.


There's also Jeff Sconce's "Haunted Media," exploring the essentially 
uncanny nature of electronic communication's aura of presentness and 
simultaneity. His first chapter, in fact, is titled "Mediums and Media" 
and discusses just this semantic overlap and its implications.

---------------------------------------

Bob Rehak

Department of Communication and Culture
Mottier Hall, 1790 East Tenth St.
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN  47405-9700

Associate Editor, North America
Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal

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