Practical

Rotate books. Obs! Two new ones.
Course blogosphere (Waqar's aggregator).
Remember your name on the blog header.
Limits of the concept 'interaction'?

Medium & Media

Etymology: medium
Analogue: Medi-Terranean sea = "sea between lands"

Singular and plural

• Medium (singular)
Something that carries or contains content in the middle or between.
• Media (plural)
=> What's wrong?
• "Mass media is dead."
• "Interactive medias are cool."

Physical and technical media

Carrier or container (of information, messages, data). optical disc, hard disk, paper, magnetic tape etc.

Analog media

• Analog media
Quantity represents expression.

Digital media

• Digital media
• Digital technology
Everything breaken to expressions with 1s and 02.
Digital world model: Everything being translated to digital expression.
BUT also the core coding of the neural system is digital: Axon's either fire or don't fire!

• Axon

Media as means and systems

• radio
• television
• press
• Internet
• speech
...
• "The media have created this figure."

Humans as media

• "We the media" (Gilmor 2004)
• Spritual medium, "person who conveys spiritual [God's] messages"

Broadened senses

• technology
• extensions of man
• environments of mediation

Mass media

• radio
• television
• press
• Internet 1.0
• Relation of art and mass media;
• Walter Benjamin (1936) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
=> Set the tune of modern media discourse and grounds the concept of new media
• Discourses

Multimedia

• Multimedia
Hypertextual media combining text, images, audio and video. (Not necessarily social or community aspects Web 2.0).

New media

• New media
Avantgarde: New at any given moment
Relates often to media arts.
Postmodern interpretation: Something new after "modern" media.

Hypertext

• Definitions of hypertext
Direct linking to source or deepening knowledge by clicking, the defining characteristic of the Internet.
• History of the Internet (video 8 min)
• Memex (Vannevar Bush)
Analogue betwee academic reference culture and hypertext.
• Hypercard

Internet (Web 1.0)

• Internet

Interactive media

• Interactive media
What sense of interaction is referred to (last time)?
OUR sense: Media with actual two-way systemic interaction, complex system interaction.

Social Internet (2.0)

Web 1.0 enhanced with:
• social,
• community,
• collaborative, and
• participatory
...functions.
Real interactive media (see earlier discussion).

Medium and message

Dichotomy between medium and message questioned by McLuhan: "Medium is the message" :
The form of the medium is more significant than its contents.
The medium itself carries meanings.
=> Media art
=> More holistic understanding instead of the mechanistic and dualistic view.
• Medium is the massage(?!)
Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist => See literature list

To mediate

• To assume a position between
• To interact between

Mediate what?

• Message
• Content
• Meaning
• Ontology
• Understanding
• Identity

Local and global media

• Local media
• Globalization of media with the Internet

Assignment for next time

• Joint report of local observations

Goals

Pay attention to the relation of local vs. global.
Get a taste of distance collaboration with Skype and synchronous writing.

Preparations

• Team up (2-4 persons)
Set up a Google doc (text) document to which all team members have access.
• Secure Skype connections
• Fix a distance meeting time during the weekend

Tasks

In SYNCRONOUS COLLABORATION using Skype conference call and your common Google Docs Document:
1) Fix a theme related to observations of local environments, neighbors, accessibility, aesthetics, security, cleanness, peace, nature, history, scenery, furniture etc.
2) Discuss and write (simultaneously) observations at each team member's environment, perhaps at the very moment. Add photos and maps.
3) Discuss and conclude on the text: The meaningfulness of local issues.
Make it a web page.
4) On YOUR OWN COURSE BLOG: Link to the web page, and describe your experience of distance collaboration without describing the content. Ideas or implications to the practice, design or technology?