Material-immaterial Duality of Digitaized Media

Journal: Arts Studies and Criticism DOI: 10.32629/asc.v3i3.933

Zilu Cai

Guangzhou Broadcasting Network, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

Abstract

Media, as the physical embodiment for texts, has gone through drastic changes since the invention of printing press that allows for fast reproduction of physically identical copies. We have been endowed with a symbolizing system that is tuned to allographically separate the mind and the matter conveyed through media. However, with digitalization, the materiality of media has been diminished. The digitalized media are so highly manipulable and easily changeable that it deprives most of physical properties away. The “content”, the immaterial seems to be the only definitive characteristic for a digitalized media. Would this implies that the materiality is now determined by the immateriality and the end now justifies the means? In this essay, we put the dialectical relation that supports material-immaterial duality of digitalized media under examination. We believe that before any digitalized media can transcend beyond the physical world, its materiality must be fully recognized.

Keywords

media, digitalization, material-immaterial

References

[1] Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Leitch et al. 1830-76.
[2] Hansen, Mark B. N. New Philosophy for New Media. London: MIT Press, 2006.
[3] Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. London: MIT Press, 2008.
[4] Bolter, David, and Richard A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. London: MIT Press, 1999.
[5] Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1991.
[6] Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
[7] Zizek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.
[8] Heidegger, Martin. The Origin of the Work of Art. Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. London: Routledge, 1993. 139-212.
[9] Clark, Timothy. Martin Heidegger. London: Routledge, 2002.
[10] Rene Descartes. Meditation on first Philosophy. Hackett publishing Company, 1993.
[11] Poster, Mark. Derrida and Electronic Writing:The Subject of the Computer from The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 99-128.

Copyright © 2022 Zilu Cai

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License