Mediated
Hello Hello
I have been very busy for a few days, catching up with many chums from other times and shores - and my lovely family too! And that brings me to today's subject. I ordered a book from a high quality 'ish' ex-broadsheet newspaper a few weeks ago. It came on Saturday and I was so excited that I immediately started reading. The book is called Mediated by Thomas De Zengotita - and it seems to argue that increasingly all of our experiences come to us mediated - which in turn is influencing how we represent ourselves and how self-aware of ourselves as representations we are WHICH seemed kind of reasonable to me (because I want everyone to think of me as a reasonable person of course).
ANYWAY, I forgot all about this because my lovely sister and nephew arrived on Sunday for some fun by the sea. BUT it rained, so instead we had fun on the computer while Martin and Tony (lovely brother in law) watched Lance strut his stuff in yellow. I am getting to my point now.
Here is Jack, my lovely nephew learning to use the laptop
I have been very busy for a few days, catching up with many chums from other times and shores - and my lovely family too! And that brings me to today's subject. I ordered a book from a high quality 'ish' ex-broadsheet newspaper a few weeks ago. It came on Saturday and I was so excited that I immediately started reading. The book is called Mediated by Thomas De Zengotita - and it seems to argue that increasingly all of our experiences come to us mediated - which in turn is influencing how we represent ourselves and how self-aware of ourselves as representations we are WHICH seemed kind of reasonable to me (because I want everyone to think of me as a reasonable person of course).
ANYWAY, I forgot all about this because my lovely sister and nephew arrived on Sunday for some fun by the sea. BUT it rained, so instead we had fun on the computer while Martin and Tony (lovely brother in law) watched Lance strut his stuff in yellow. I am getting to my point now.
Here is Jack, my lovely nephew learning to use the laptop
Can you see his little fingers going for the integral mouse???
Anyway, nothing would come between Jack and the CBeebies site except one thing: me taking his photo. Jack was more interested to see how he looked on the digi camera's screen than the Tweenies!!!! De Zengotita you are my fabulous person of the week. Thank you.
posted by Clare at 9:33 PM
3 Comments:
Hmm, the book looks interesting but I worry about some aspects .. the notion of people as sponges:
We are products of immense, often inchoate, media indoctrination.
Or this bit:
if I am a sponge, an assemblage of images, sounds and influences, always looking out for my 15 minutes of fame, always rehearsing what I'll say if a camera pokes its head round my doorway or a producer from reality television comes knocking with a contract, then where is the real me, the inner core, not the outer show?
Also some bits borrow from Bakhtin, the idea of double voicing:
'mediated memory to draw on'.
I think this seems to be about the way we use discourses of others etc,.
It does look interesting I think, but for me it would be because I would have to argue with it I imagine ..
Hello Dr Joolz and thank you for your ideas. I have to confess that I am not well-read (yet) in terms of Bakhtin and 'double voicing' (a quest for the long heady days of August), BUT still love some of the central ideas in the book. Chapter 3 deals with teenagers and power - and how some girls are 'impresarios of an evolving social art': their art of representing themselves and negotiating and performing their identities reflexively. He talks about how some teenagers use the word 'like' as in " He's like, so cool" to perform communications, turning their sentiments into performances that are uttered by actors.
I am sure that these aren't particularly new observations - but the whole idea of an increasingly mediated existence influencing how we perform our identities just gets me.
I also like how he keeps returning to the idea that our existence is so mediated, with so many options available that as adults, we behave less self-consciously as habitual performance takes over. I am going to think about this in relation to habitus (PB yippee) in particular, and see how far I get!
Anyway, must go to Sainsbury's.
That sounds really fascinating and on your recommendation yesterday have ordered the book ... I think I was in a really picky mood yesterday as even my blog post was hyper-critical... but overall you did sell the bbook to me.
I am not well read either but trot out the same old stuff all the time; I came across the Bakhtin idea via linguistics, where someone else was taklking about double voicing. Bakhtin's concept is really about the way we take on the voices of others through our own, like ventriloquism.
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