Thursday, March 10, 2005

Going out to Uni today

Heading out to Uni today. There is a seminar series on that I am interested in attending on cultural diversity. I've been enjoying Postphenomenology but I think the essay "Image Technologies and Traditional Culture" was flawed and superficial. There is a vast amount of media theories that develop, interpret and critique these technologies in terms of machines that reconfigure the ways that a culture constructs space and time. Early semiotic readings combined with the psychoanalytic interpretations facilitate an understanding of how meaning is contstructed through the cinematic apparatus. Ihde does not refer to any of these insights or builds on them. The specific elements of the cinematic or televisual apparatus that Ihde chooses to foreground, that is, the irreal/real dialectic and the "effects" of cinematographic technologies including flattening, constructing space and time through techniques such as time reversals, flashbacks, special effects and discontinuities are mentioned but not contextualised or explicated in terms of how they create cultural meaning. Just as importantly, seeing the rise of fundamentalism as a reaction to the pluriculture that is becoming of a culture of image-mediation just doesn't gel, or at the very least, it doesn't help me to understand the cultural and historical specificity of the role of fundamentalism in the world today.

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