On Feb 10, 2011, at 4:39 PM, Shane Mage wrote:
> Neither of these profound thinkers seem to realize that, *in the past ten
years*, hundreds of millions (and soon billions) of people have become
instantly interconnected via electronic media.
Thanks Shane! I didn't realize that. I must keep up. All along, I thought we'd been communicating by smoke signals.
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I think after several posts I'm finally getting to what I think is core here. "The Media" (social or otherwise) do not exist; they exist only as embedded in social relations, and have no existence in abstraction from that context. They aren't even relations (mediations), they are tools as I said before. But since, even or especially in abstraction, they have not independent existence, there is nothing to understand.
Carrol