[Air-L] polymedia

[Daniel]

Ok, given the responses I am going to hazard one last argument for polymedia
and then I promise I will desist from posting more. Mirca and I were well
aware of terms such as media ecology which is what I used to use in the
past. But such a term implies a communication landscape whose niches are
occupied by various media according to their constraints and affordances,
and which I guess may also mesh or otherwise. But the units are specific
types of media and their relationship to each other. 

 

By contrast what Mirca and I noticed from our Philippine study, which led us
to coin a new word, and then seems paralleled in Gershon's study is
something else. For the Filipinos it has just as much to do with changes in
price as technology and is very recent.  What we noticed is that different
people see the same media in very different ways. As my examples were
intended to show, one person see texting as ideal for affection, another
sees it as cold. But each person creates their own sense of that media in
relation to this new set of affordable other possibilities. The effect of
this is not so much a change in media but a kind of re-socialising of media,
so that the choice is now seen as significant in itself, i.e. as a major
form of communication in its own right. Often with sender and receiver
reading quite different things into that choice. So the term polymedia does
not privilege the media as the units, but rather acknowledges a new
situation in which media in general are viewed as less issues of technology
and price and more issues of social and moral determination.

 

Having said that, people are obviously free to use whatever terms they are
comfortable with, no one has authority here. In fact that the one thing you
can bet with academics, is that whether or not we get polymedia, we will
always find poly-semantics !

 

Danny