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Web of Ideas: Is the Web a Medium?

with David Weinberger

 Is the Web a Medium?

At one level, the Web is a medium through which messages are passed from A to B. But if we acknowledge that the medium affects the messages or even that the medium is the message, the very idea that it's a medium obscures much of importance about the Web. (This is true not only of the Web.) For example, a medium succeeds if messages arrive intact, but language succeeds in a much wider and deeper variety of ways. Messages are discrete while language depends on being ambiguous. More important, the view of the Web as a medium obscures the persistence of interdependent meaning that makes the Web into a world, not just a medium...Or does it?

Past Event
Jan 12, 2005
Time
6:00 PM - 7:30 PM