Technology, media and mediation

• "technologies organize, select and focus the environment through transformational structures" (Ihde, 1979)
• technological selectivity extends the powers of perception by reducing complexity and diversity of experience.
• what is selected becomes institutionalized in society, what is not tends to be inhibited.
• embedded in every media tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct t he world as one thing rather than as another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another (Postman, 1993)
• to study mediation, need to see what’s not there (figure/ground; exclusion; Derrida’s ‘absent presence’)
• using a media, we tend to forget what’s not there, and begin to accommodate our purposes to what now appears "realistically" possible: reverse adaptation: "the adjustment of human ends to match the character of available means", (Winner, 1977).
• "bricoleur" as actively shaping media, recognizing and using their mediating limitations.
• each medium has a resonance.