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It is by and through a phenomenon called media seepage
that print and digital culture mutually reinforce and re-form
one another. I borrow the term "media seepage"
from Steven Johnson
(editor of Feed Magazine, co-founder of Plastic).
In his book Interface Culture, he describes the historical
pattern of media forms struggling against their own boundaries,
failing to properly convey their content while hinting at
an impending shift in new technologies of communication--think
of the 1940s radio
drama as a precursor to the television show or photomontage
as an early glimpse into cinema. This street is two-way,
to be sure--consider how the aesthetic of web design has
found its way onto the television
screen or the comic
strip. Emergent media jumpstart old media, comfortable
in their heretofore stable hegemonic positions, into a worried
phase of adaptation--a kind of lead, follow, or get out
of the way scenario.
It is important that we think about digital culture as
something which extends beyond just the Internet and the
World Wide Web, because digital enhancements and technological
developments are constantly re-figuring how we produce texts
in older legacy media: film,
television, radio,
and even print.
This collision of media not only changes the end results
of these various media events (the movie, the talk show,
the magazine), but also how we approach their construction
in the first instance, leading to the creation of previously
unimagined genres and forms.
My research involves the investigation of various historical
periods which have involved collisions of media: Classical
Greece (the shift from an oral to a literate culture), Early
Modern Western culture (from manuscript to print culture),
and the late 20th century (print to digital culture). Accompanying
such shifts in media culture have been parallel shifts in
philosophical theories of subjectivity (What is this being
which thinks/speaks/writes?), as well as rhetorical theory
(How ought that thinking/speaking/writing be done for best
persuasive effect?). My interests lie in figuring out how
these various histories fit together, how they help make
sense of one another.
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