Beyond The Beyond
*Digital media aren’t “media” in the sense that, say, semaphore flags were a medium. They’re skeuomorphic formats imposed on a polymorphic stream of ones and zeros. Modern young people dislike email because of the ritual activities needed to deal with it — time-consuming etiquette from an era of analog paper. They dislike email for many of the same instinctive reasons they dislike newspapers – it’s a clumsy hassle that doesn’t get to the point.But to what extent are the "ritual activities"--the context--a vital part of the communications process? Can all information, news, promotion, bad news, &c. be tweeted? No, because communications is not just information. Communications is fundamentally about maintaining relationships with other people.
