[Air-L] polymedia

[Denise N. Rall]

Daniel (Prof Miller) -

I found this a very interesting concept. 'multimedia' is so yesterday.

I had a slight twitch with polymedia - and apologies if other Australians have already responded -

As you may be aware, Australians are fond of the odd abbreviation, and we often use the word 'pollie' to mean politicians. 

Polymedia smacked to me of what we have been delivered, via multiple platforms on the latest Australian election! Which went into a hung parliament and was even more excruciating than usual ;-)

I am actually fond of the word, 'omnimedia' - if only Martha Stewart hadn't claimed it first!

For me, it means not only omnipresent, but also omnipotent, which rbings another element into the picture. The omnipotence of what people hear on the media was part of my recent paper about the sudden bee deaths. Even though there is no evidence per Einstein scholars, people persist in attributing to Einstein the quote about about "I know not what WWIII will be fought with, but WWIV will be fought with sticks and stones." He never said it. But try to erase something like that quote from 'internet memory' - it will never happen!

Cheers, Denise



Denise N. Rall, PhD. Special Projects, Faculty of Arts & Science  
Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW AUSTRALIA Mobile +(61)(0)438 233344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/esm/staff/pages/drall/
Popular Culture Association of Australia & New Zealand
POPCAANZ Conf. Auckland, New Zealand July 2011


--- On Wed, 15/9/10, Daniel <d.miller at ucl.ac.uk> wrote:

> From: Daniel <d.miller at ucl.ac.uk>
> Subject: [Air-L] polymedia
> To: Air-L at listserv.aoir.org
> Received: Wednesday, 15 September, 2010, 6:59 AM
> 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
> 
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