The written world: On the theory and practice of computer conferencing
| Type of publication: | Inbook |
| Citation: | 535 |
| Booktitle: | Mindweave: communication, computers and distance education |
| Year: | 1989 |
| Pages: | 22--39 |
| Publisher: | Pergamon Press |
| Address: | Oxford |
| Note: | Feenberg 1989 - The written world file:///FeenbergWritten%20World.mht js, 13.05.2007 |
| Abstract: | In our culture the face-to-face encounter is the ideal paradigm of the meeting of minds. Communication seems most complete and successful where the person is physically present 'in' the message. This physical presence is supposed to be the guarantor of authenticity: you can look your interlocutor in the eye and search for tacit signs of truthfulness or falsehood, where context and tone permit a subtler interpretation of the spoken word. Plato initiated our traditional negative view of the written word. He argued that writing was no more than an imitation of speech, while speech itself was an imitation of thought. Thus writing would be an imitation of an imitation and low indeed in the Platonic hierarchy of being, based on the superiority of the original over the copy. For Plato, writing detaches the message from its author and transforms it into a dead thing, a text. Such a text, however, can cross time (written records) and space (mail), acquire objectivity and permanence, even while losing authenticity (Derrida, l972a). That we still share Plato's thinking about writing can be shown in how differently we respond to face-to-face, written, typed and printed forms of communication. These form a continuum, ranging from the most personal to the most public. The new phenomenon of computer mediated communication (CMC) appears to represent a dramatic step toward total impersonality. For example, authorship seems drastically reduced when messages entered into the computer's memory ... |
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| Added by: | [ADM] |
| Total mark: | 0 |
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