the presentations that we had last class were really great. but what makes video or audio a media artifact? i find it hard to call something an artifact that is not tangible. what makes something an artifact? is it only something that remains from a previous life?
Merrium-Webster defines an artifact as:
1 a: something created by humans usually for a practical purpose; especially : an object remaining from a particular period
b: something characteristic of or resulting from a particular human institution, period, trend, or individual
so, it appears that audio and video does count. it just feels wrong. in a thousand years what is going to remain of our culture? i think that if we keep putting so much of ourselves and our culture into the virtual we will lose ourselves. if electricity can make angles of us all, i suspect that eventually it will make ghosts of us all as well.
Comments (1)
This is something I had not thought about: tangible vs intangible. Web-related things are intangible until we print them out. But then when you think about old films, with their huge reels, those seem tangible even though when watching them they are not. In looking at things from an environmental perspective, more electricity, but much less paper is being used as a result of the web. So it doesn't seem like such a bad thing, plus, most intangible things out there today aren't worth the test of time. One detrimental aspect though relates to a story I heard the other day. In Britain, three discs had been lost containing information about 300 witness protection program participants (their, ahem, new identities) and thousands of other people's social assistance information. Apparently authorities have been scavaging dumpsters for days. Oh the digital age, how advanced and dignified.
Posted by staylor | December 6, 2007 4:41 PM
Posted on December 6, 2007 16:41