What does it mean to be mediated? I'm spending this semester trying to figure that out for a class I'm taking called... Mediate Culture, of course! My professor, Dr. Wesch, has talked about the idea that we are all mediated by the kinds of media we use. Whether that be the internet, television, telephones, texting, social networks, blogs, sites like YouTube, and even things as basic to our lives as language. So in a sense, we are each changed and filtered through the media we consume and create every day... we are mediated.
You might say that I'm not a very "plugged in" person... but that's precisely why I'm creating this blog. In order to understand how we as a society are mediated, I need to be actively participating in the world of media. It's participant-observation... a term you here in anthropology all the time; a research technique where the researcher not only observes the culture & society he's working in, he participates in it and therefore comes to a deeper understanding of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment