:)

So, yeah, about this death of media stuff

Hi everybody. Sorry I've not been able to post more. Much, much to say about this weekend, but I guesss that'll be more approoriate for class.

Anyway, I'm sitting here reading some of the pieces that have been posted, and I can'[t get over the fact that we're reading copies of actual books in a digital form. Were we to print them, we'd be printing out not copies of actual pages, but instead digital photographs of book pages.

This strikes me as freakishly odd for some reason. Of course, this kind of thing is about to blow up, what with digital libraries and whatnot. Also, with the ability to search .pdf's, these digital copies become far more convienient that hard copies.

But I can't get over the idea that something's being lost in the transition. This would be the introduction of the impurity of perception, if I'm reading all this right.

Ok, so, if a tree fall in the forest, it makes a sound. The sound waves are created, etc. etc. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but what Bergson's saying is that the sound only takes on the meaning of "tree falling" if we hear it and assign it that meaning. However, in doing so, we lose out on what the actual sound itself embodies, that being the unmediated moment of the creation of the actual sound. Or the unmediated moment of the tree falling. Or something. I think my brain just melted.

Back to the digital book page. So, we've got the 010011010 version of the page, which is not an actual copy of the page, but instead a photograph of the page, and a digital one at that. So, like, a representation of a representation and on and on and on. Does this mean that the digital copies takes on the properties of a photograph, with all that that entails, or that it remains a page? Would Bergson say that we percieve it as a page, when instead we should be looking at it as a photograph? Or a string of code?

So what does turning something into a .pdf do to it, and does it matter?

What do you guys think?

posted by Sue @ 1:53 PM