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Imagologies - Media PhilosophyMark Taylor (Humanities, USA) and Esa Saarinen (Philosophy, Finland) hit upon a bright idea way back in 1991. Why not link groups of students in Helsinki and Massachusetts by satellite for joint seminars and by E-mail for collaborative writing exchanges? This book offers a record of their struggles to set up and run these tele-seminars, and at the same time they incorporate into the jointly produced text their reflections on the philosophy of Media. It is for these cryptic and often flatulent bits of 'thinking' that the book was so badly received when it first appeared.
Statements like these queue up with each other to join the columns of Pseuds' Corner. And yet the book has a number of positive qualities buried under a lot of modish typography and silly layout. The sections dealing with the financing and organisation of the project will interest many as these things become the norm in academic life today. There are also some interesting reflections on the unstable nature of texts created in collective enterprises, especially those using hypertext links and the Internet. Like many people writing conventional printed books about the development of electronic communication, Taylor and Saarinen are aware of the essential contradiction in this practice. However, their 'solution' of argument-fragmentation and the absence of page numbering and an index do not imitate the conditions of electronic writing as they seem to imagine. As their excitement of teaching via E-mail and entering the cyberspace of the Net grow through 1991 and 1992, it is interesting to note how impatient they become with the constraints of academic life. Scholarly journals come in for some timely criticism as an almost redundant form - though this point could have been taken a lot further. It would have been interesting to have more details of the seminars (and maybe their results) rather than gnomic pontifications on DNA, Derrida (of course) and the philosophy of Virtual Reality. This book doesn't have the truly imaginative panache of Jay David Bolter's Writing Space, but there are just enough interesting ideas on writing and electronic communication set in motion to make it worthwhile. Read it in a strong light: some of the text is set in eight point Arial. © Roy Johnson 1995 [more articles on IT and society] Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen, Imagologies: Media Philosophy London: Routledge, 1994, ISBN 0415103371 |
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