Sunday, January 9, 2011

conTEXTual

I think we need to be more adept in how we understand the various media/mediums we are hoping to use in the classroom.  Spelling is just as important as ever to me, because it conveys a meaning, but does my 13 year old student, who is texting whenever possible, even care about it?  Is "texting" even a word? 

It will be intriguing to think about the phrase "the medium is the message".  Isn't the context of what we are saying and doing important?  Does the medium influence what and how we say something?  Courtney Love has to go to court on defamation charges because of her use of "Twitter"/tweets to post disparaging comments.  "You are what you email" is the headline of a Montreal Gazette article posted on December 26, 2010.

Is the context affected by the medium?

5 comments:

  1. Wouldn't the medium be part of the context of the message? So then the answer to your question would be yes.

    I have a friend in Kelowna which, depending on the occasion and the purpose, I have either phoned, emailed, or written a letter. You can see how each medium can create a different context for the same message.

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  2. Do you think your message is different depending on the context?

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  3. I once heard that you should never put something on your facebook/twitter/myspace etc that you wouldn't want on the front page of the newspaper.
    Just thought it was an interesting thought.

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  4. Is "texting" actually a word yet? This computer's spell check does not seem to think so. Spell check - another wonderful technology!

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  5. The message is different depending on the context; this we've always known. The question was whether or not the message is different depending on the medium, which I consider to be part of the context. The medium, however, is powerful enough to not only change how the message is received, but to become the message itself.

    I pick out a funny card, send it to my friend in town through the mail with the message, "come to my house". Or, I phone him and say the same thing. In one instance, he may chuckle at the card, ignore the request because it is not urgent (what comes in the mail that is urgent these days) - the medium gives him a different message than the one in the card.

    But if all he heard on the phone was my message before I hung up, he would get a totally different message, even if there was no urgency in my voice when I gave it to him. And how unnerving is a phone call with no message at all!

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