Hi folks... A short time back there was some discussion on this list about "what Carolyn Marvin thought" about something or other. So, I sent her (at least some of) the relevant messages, and here's her response.... (Her address is: [log in to unmask]) Michael UMass/Amherst [log in to unmask] ======================================================================= ======================================================================= Message id: RFC-822 To: Personal name: michael morgan Organization unit: saturn Organization name: ucc Private domain: umass Administrative domain: umassmail Country: us From: RFC-822: [log in to unmask] Organization name: SATURN-GW Private domain: UMASS Administrative domain: UMASSMAIL Country: US ------------ Letter Body Part 1 - Text ------------ RFC-822-HEADERS: Return-Path: <[log in to unmask]> ------------ Letter Body Part 2 - Text ------------ michael, thanks for relaying the invitation from "lance" to comment on what's the relationship between interactive media and familiar notions of text and truth, which, coming into the middle of the discussion, is what i take it to be about. if that's wrong, let me know. i'm not persuaded that "media" forms have inherent physical attributes that structure "epistemic changes" in any simple sense. elizabeth eisenstein argues that printing saved enough cultural energy to launch the quattrocento renaissance, and she's persuasive, but she also argues, epistemically speaking, that printing both "fixed" minds and "opened" them. it opened the minds of printers who received multiple texts at their shops and were aware of the variety and competition of texts in the world, it fixed dogmatically the thinking of those followers of potestestantism who took the translations to which they had access to be revealed truth. the epistemic descendants of both these tribes are with us today and flourish. from the point of view of those to whom writing was a communications innovation in about the 12th century in england (when the government began to conduct aspects of its business in writing), that is, people who for centuries had worked out useful and practical means of "fixing" oral information, writing looked ephemeral and unfixable and untrustworthy. in fact, it was, since it would take several centuries to learn to manage and preserve information in ways that would outdo the familiar and useful ways of preserving oral information reliably. what people couldn't do with oral information, they hadn't learned to need, anyway. read michael clanchy on this in FROM MEMORY TO WRITTEN RECORD (harvard, 1979). by the same token, even when some important information becomes "cheaper" to produce or access, additional information is always made scarce. artificial scarcities are introduced where real ones don't exist--the symbolic production of status, this. information about markets is a classic--as soon as it becomes possible to distribute such information more cheaply, more people can play, but just as quickly, new hierarchies of scarce market secrets are created. the stock market runs on such hierarchies. whatever is cheap is no longer as useful for achieving advantage, so new non-cheap means of achieving advantage in information are created. the content of secrets may shift, so that information that once conferred advantage by its scarcity no longer does and is no longer scarce, but stratified information seems to be a continuing feature of social structures. best wishes, carolyn (i'd love to see any responses. saw yr friend sut jhally made it into the nyt saturday...) ** END OF MESSAGE **