All this talk about Hypermediation draws questions for me. I understand the drive to offer as much information as possible that people might want to read. I like being able to log onto AoL in the morning before class or before work to read up on the current news. Whether it's the murder of a Yale student, or to read the report of a bridge in China being covered in butter to keep people from using it to commit suicide. It's fascinating to read all of this information coming from every area of the world at any given moment.
At the same time, do we really need all of this information? Do I really need a page that will give me today's current news about everything local, something having to do with third world countries that probably can't even read this information for themselves, my stock quotes, and the precise tempterature in Hawaii? I get weary of checking my email and having fifteen offers to make my private areas larger, or that some long lost uncle that I never knew about died and left me three million dollars in Nigeria. Mixed in with all of this is information that I actually want to read. I would like to know how my friend is doing, answers to questions I've emailed to instructors, and a confirmation from Amazon that my books finally shipped.
Are we drifting from interested individuals to technology driven vampires? I have to wonder how much of this is actual information and people wanting to know more, and how much is media trying to offer and throw as much information at us in the hopes of something might stick. If it's the media, then do they really think we need to know these things, or are we just walls waiting for the spaghetti?
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Hmmm...my interpretation of hypermediacy doesn't have so much to do with an overabundance of media. I understood immediacy to be a medium in which the medium itself seems to disappear so that we focus on the thing it represents, and that hypermediacy calls attention to the medium itself. If I have a photo of a flower, and the photo is so richly detailed that I forget I'm looking at a photo and not the real thing--that's immediacy. If I'm looking at a generated image of a flower--like maybe somebody made an image of a flower with graphic software and they used certain effects that wouldn't naturally occur in the flower and it draws attention to the fact that this is a representation of a flower and not the real thing--that's hypermediacy. I think. Or else I'm reading way too much into things!
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ReplyDeleteWhether an overabundance of information or a medium that may or may not disappear when we consider the information, I believe corralling information has its pros and cons. It could be that media conglomerates just want to throw a bunch of social networking sites at us in hopes of one or more sticking (as you mention, Kim). Some users are satisfied with being connected, and whether or not what they're looking at is a true representation isn't such a big deal. Like, okay...here's this beautiful flower - I get a general sense of it not, but not a specific sense and specifics don't matter to me so seeing it via online is good enough.
ReplyDeleteLike a lot of "things" in life, there are goods and bads. My worry is that the young and the ignorant are being convinced of all this need. I don't know that we need to be so connected all the time, and from last Tuesday's class, it was evident that some must "check in" regularly.