Fiona writes: > Would it make sense to say that first-order discourse is the actual > process by which the medium is produced and consumed? And that second- > order discourse is the collective set of "maps" through which we build > our understanding of the medium? Are there two levels here, or am I > just imagining it? Well, I suppose that you *could* separate it into different levels, but there would still be a lot of inter-level influence. Let's look at television (as opposed to film) for a quick example. There are two major differences between television and film on the physical level that I'd like to look at here. First is the nature of who foots the bills. Film is what I would like to term a first-order product. (Yes, I know it's kind of a klugey term. I am open to other suggestions.) That is, film is sold directly to the consumer and the consumer is the one that pays for it (at the box office). On the other hand, because of its physical nature (being broadcast), television cannot be so financed. The television programs are a third-order product. The television programs attract viewers, who are also consumers, and who are the true product of television. The television station interrupts the program briefly at intervals to display advertisements for first-order products which the consumers are to consume. In this case the first-order consumers themselves are the second-order product of television, and they are sold to the advertiser! (I bet you never thought of yourself as a product before. :-)) Second, film is a non-interrupted medium. That is, when you go to see a film it is not, except under extraordinary circumstances (e.g., projector breaks, the film is many hours long, etc.), interrupted. Television, on the other hand, is an interruptable medium, and we have come to expect it to be an interupted medium. This is because a) we have control over the hardware ourselves, and can flip channels or turn it on and off, and b) the difference in who is paying for the programming that I noted above. So now we actually *expect* interuptions when watching television, even though they are not *physically* necessary, because of certain social factors in our society (i.e., we are capitalist). It turns out that the lower levels of discourse, our direct dealings with the hardware, are inextricably linked to our higher levels of discourse, the kind of economic system we choose to live under. > Each individual has her own unique set of discursive resources. > That seems obvious. Why did it need to be said? Because we're > going to turn discourse analysis on its head, and figure out what > society is like, from the patterning of available discursive > resources? It can be done, to a degree. It takes resources to communicate, and those resources have to come from somewhere. As the case of film and television shows, our media can be very different depending on a) how our society pays for things that consume resources and b) how the nature of the medium affects society's ability to use the prefered methods for distributing the cost of that communication. > Uh oh...my brain's freezing up now. All that discourse--flowing > all together into the great cosmic web of Information itself--kinda > makes me feel ethereal--I lose my grip on what this is all about. Get used it it. You can't examine communication from outside itself. It's fascinating, but following all the implications can make your head hurt. > So what do we *get*, philosophically speaking, from this concept > of discourse? Or is that question too naive for this list? I don't think that's a naive question at all. As a matter of fact, I think it's a very important question. To my mind, discourse implies a semiotic viewpoint toward communication. Rather than viewing communication as a sender taking a meaning and giving it to a receiver, who passively accepts it, it looks at it as a sender who attempts to encode a meaning in symbolic form, and gives that symbolic form to the receiver (though a medium, which may change it). The reciever then becomes an *active* part of the communication because she has to decode the symbols to get a meaning (which may not necessarially be the original meaning). So discourse looks at communication as an *active* relationship between the sender, the medium and the receiver. So there's my two (well, probably seven or eight :-)) bits worth. I hope it was moderately understandable. I suspect that one of the people out there who are better versed in communications theory than I am can probably explain this a lot better, though. cjs -- | "It is actually a feature of UUCP that the map of [log in to unmask] | all systems in the network is not known anywhere." [log in to unmask] | --Berkeley Mail Reference Manual (Kurt Schoens)