the capacity of communicative technologies to constitute rather than mediate realities and to constitute relatively bounded spheres of interaction

four hours of reading later...i'm pretty much all caught up. in fact, i'll probably read ahead a bit today just so i dont have to try to play catch up again next week.
the more i read these books the more i come to realize what a fragmented and naive society we have developped for ourselves.
the one downside to being a student of communication is constant self analysis when you use any form of technology in a social setting.
lately i've been toying with the thought of how msn messenger is a supplement to real life interaction, but that it's also a series of conversations that never actually end. you can sign out, but if you save your chat logs, then you are effectively engaged in a discourse that is never fully terminated, you have an entire record of your conversation in front of you.
when i took my second year theories class we had a lecture based around the theory that communication media can be either time based or space based. i never liked that theory because of the existence of the internet. from a purely hardware point of view, i suppose that the space theory works best; you save your media on your harddrive. it's saved in a visible place. media can either be one or the other, it cant exist in both time and space.
i never liked it because how do you take into account something like a person who uploads a file to a website. in essence, from their perspective you send a representation of an actual media document through some ethereal object meant to represent a storage space for a certain amount of time.
so it exists in a point in time in a space you cant see. dual storage.
my prof never really explained that, but then again, i hadn't thought of that when i took the class...
another thing i thought up is, are communicated messages 2 dimensional or 3 dimensional? that is to say, is the message more potent from the content that you see, or the way in which it's presented to you?
and the last little communication geek rant for today (i promise) is about blogs and online diaries. when i was in ottawa, simon, alana, beth and i got in to a discusion about blogging over some nice pho. there was an obvious split. two of us thought that blogging was a good idea, and two thought it was irresponsible in a way. this was interesting because this issue rarely comes up in any class i've taken. a divide within a technologically submissive culture about living and existing partially through an electronic experience. why post your life online if people like their privacy? the most basic assumption is that human nature drives us to express ourselves in a manner that we deem appropriate for the most attention sent in our direction. comparatively, i find that i can have a wider grasp on self identity both online and in real life by living in tandem with an online personality. while people who spend much timeonline can use that opportunity to idealize themselves, i think that posting your life in the online community is simply another way of accessing the social and cultural experiences that would otherwise take us years to gather.
living in this parallel world of online and real life essentially gives you leave to exist in two places at once, two societies with unique cultural and socio demographic experiences that can be applied to the opposing one to better adapt to the demands it presents you with.

...and i'm spent...

this is what happens when i actually get off my ass, do readings, and reflect on what i have learned.

now i'm going to go put on some CCR and do the dishes.

current mood: "Just Can't Get Enough" by Depeche Mode

the capacity of communicative technologies to constitute rather than mediate realities and to constitute relatively bounded spheres of interaction