Still talking / thinking about New Media

If B&G add to MM the social, political, and gendered constraints and affordances of new media, and LM adds the truly digital components, as well as the centrality of database (a searchable and usable archive?), but all of them are still more or less grounded in hot and cool, what we get is a 40+ year history that has been reasonably consistent and constant even thought it keeps changing its terminology. We also get a history that is making some progress, although progress primarily means "filling in the picture." Is this an argument worth making? A picture worth painting? I think I prefer painting pictures to making arguments.

What does happen to Barthes, Derrida, Ulmer, others in my other narrative?

Ulmer looks more and more like MM to me: the same kinds of projects (making the humanities relevant, acknowledging that the environment has changed, encouraging creativity in balance with logos). He is actually more pedagogically focused, and does in deed think of the classroom as the space of experiment and invention. Duh. Teletheory, in particular, seems like McLuhan revisited: the Bacon connection, the oultine of projects, etc.

Does all of this add up to an intellectual history of new media studies and practices? Within English studies, have we chosen the tech comm / usability of new media over the creative / inventive new media? Probably not, but a lot of that action seems to come out of Art, only some out of English. Is English still all about the Blog?

Fog settles in...

Talking about NM: Are we getting anywhere?

I am always thinking about this:

hot and cool (and dry?)
immediacy and hypermediacy: what do B&G add: social, political, gender. See their article.
film and database: an unironic terminology, a use-based terminology, nice literal and metaphorical dimensions. Front and back: out of database comes film. Out of hypermediacy comes immediacy. Out of abstractness comes concreteness.

only McClould gives us the third term:

resemblance, iconicity, abstractness.
Although he is missing a fourth term: concreteness, which starts to look more like hot and cool, with resemeblance and iconicity being styles of achieving. But it ain't quite that simple yet.

Hypermediacy doesn't assume iconicity (although there is certainly a lot of it there.

We are probably getting somewhere, but we need to do a better job of building on existing scholarship.
We might need to get out of binaries.
And we might benefit from trinities that are not dialectical: no third term.

Is this where the Wysocki articles gets hung up?

What we might need next is symplexity, reversed.