Saturday, October 23, 2010

Pre verbal thinking and the web


Growing out of a discussion on critical thinking which has been taking place on #PLENK2010 I found my self considering preverbal thinking at a GradCAM seminar on Maurice Merleau-Ponty this afternoon.
Pre-verbal thinking is the first layer through which perception travels before it receives our attention, but it may also be involved in an artists interaction with their medium and it is also a way of thinking about an audiences interaction with a performance, when it has gone beyond just watching and is totally engaged.
Communicating over the web lends itself to verbal modalities and logical analysis, but the web has the potential to be a much richer medium. Academic analysis is historically biased towards the text and the spoken word.  As the medium gets richer, are we moving beyond the affordances of our conventional academic analysis?
In this richer medium what do we do with the precept that you have not mastered a medium unless you can create in it?

4 comments:

  1. Yes, we are moving beyond verbal affordances. And this is not only because of multimedía richness of the web, but already because of the much greater and closer context.

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  2. Thanks Matthias. The context of the web is tricky, because the medium filters the interaction. There is an intimacy which is implied by the lack of a visible audience which can be deceptive. Is this what you menat by "a closer context?"

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  3. There are several kinds of closer contexts in an online environment, see also chapters 2 and 4 in e-resonance: Closer than books or paper letter exchanges, simply because of quicker reactions. And once e-resonance is growing, it "is ‘located’ closer to the recipient’s mind than to the communication channel". But you are quite right, this is tricky, and it is still kind of a riddle.

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  4. Thanks, I've been reading the e-Resonance link, and its an interesting concept. I think there is probably a continuum running from good design up through the e-Resonance concept and up into the flow state that game designers see as the holy grail.

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