Final thoughts on the irony of the pre-digital age

Now, I don’t mean to criticize, simply to observe on the ironic nature of digital media in the form of it’s reliance on previous forms of media system, specifically those epitomized in the form of this course. Has anyone noticed the irony, for instance, that we are encouraged to conduct lively and academic discussion through the form of this blog, but that in order to glean any marks for it we have to turn in a hard copy. Or that we are encouraged to discuss academic concepts, but the rigid and correct academic voice is abandoned in favour of looser colloquialism. Don’t these things only work to undermine the very strengths endowed upon this form of communication (i.e. first it is stripped of it’s existence as a merely electronic entity and then of it’s authoritative academic tone.).

Then we come to the irony of the course itself. Lectured face-to-face. We are encouraged to discuss digital identity while being stripped of the opportunity to adopt one. Our essays return to us marked by hand. We discuss concepts as a group more effectively verbally than by electronic means. Everywhere in this study of the digital medium the spectre of the corporeal and the analogue sits in judgement, and indeed the controlling factor of this course is by and large not facilitated by the digital medium. Hand-outs, course readers, even Manovich’s work comes to us in published, printed form.

Now, I reiterate, I comment on this not to criticize, because I see the logic to all of this, I merely mention the ironic nature of this approach even to the academic understanding of the digital to highlight that we are approaching it from a very mutable and mixed angle and that our understanding of the digital medium is still firmly fixed in pre-digital modes.

(P.S. Thanks for the recaps Wednesday Luke, they’ve been a huge help planning study)