I just finished watching Michael Wesch’s presentation to the Library of Congress (embedded above) on June 23rd 2008 and am still processing the implications of much of what he discussed. The presentation is fascinating on so many different levels I suspect I’ll be watching it more than once, but for the moment there’s one aspect of the 55 minute video in particular that has really enveloped me.
Between 11:48 and 12:48 in the clip he discusses the nature of what media is to an anthropologist, saying:
At the center of the mediascape is us….Media is not content. Media are not just tools of communication. Media mediate human relationships. When media change, human relationships change.
This is an incredibly profound statement to me and highlights the issue of why a view of the internet as just a virtual space is inherently shallow and unconsidered.
Wesch argues that media is also not merely a means of communicating. To pass off media, such as the internet, as just a means of communication is to focus on an empty framework and ignore the message: the dynamic and organic connections that link humanity with itself and form the web of interconnected networks; networks of people, networks of concepts, ideas or information, networks of experiences.
Far from comprising just communicative channels, media map the connections; they map the people, their experiences, their past and present, what is known, and what could be known. It maps relationships and interrelationships; realities and fiction; spoken and unspoken communication; objectives, desires, knowledge, assumptions, prejudices, seeking and ignoring and a myriad other characteristics and activities.
Communication is but a single activity within a much wider picture. It reveals only a glimpse of the networks that lay beneath; only a sliver of reality.
When media change, human relationships change.
Media determines what aspects of the human dynamic is visible and can therefore be enacted or engaged with. Visual media favor certain connections, audio or text-based media favors others; and face-to-face media others still. The critical significance though, is the notion that the affordances of a particular media – or lack thereof – extend far beyond the activities you can engage with. They affect the nature and extent of the relationships that can develop.
I too have been struck by that message. But it is incredibly difficult to explain to others. We continue to hear technology viewed as a tool. I really liked Ulises Mejias’ article Teaching Social Software with Social Software – he quotes Suter, Alexander and Kaplan’s definition of social software as three things: a tool for augmenting human ability, a medium for facilitating connections, and an ecology for enabling a “system of people, practices, values, and technologies”. This definition acknowledges technology as a tool, but also as so much more.
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