another week, another reading. another 5 hours down the drain. i’m not saying it’s a waste of time (well, not explicitly saying it’s a waste of time) but its the extra 4.5 hours that it took me to read it that felt like a waste of time. it shouldn’t take anyone so long to read so little. i can read entire books in that amount of time. the problem that i’m reading, just not absorbing. i can get to the end of the paragraph and realise i didn’t take in a single word. and that’s on the 6th try. and so by the end of the article i feel so emotionally drained, i can barely remember any of it anyhow. let alone enough to make a cohesive blog entry about it.

with that out of the way, lets get into the reading itself.  despite all the crazy foreign words like “Lageröffentlichkeit”, “plebeian Öffentlichkeit” and  “Gegenöffentlichkeit”, there was some interesting stuff in here. i liked most the discussion about the progression of the film/tv medium over the decades, starting with the earliest and very inaccessible film medium and ending with the highly accessible World Wide Web (WWW). Sørenssen discussed Astruc’s foretelling of the evolution of the various mediums that they would become more accessible, widespread and interactive. But it was interesting to read how this progression moved slowly through the 1900’s as film gradually found its way onto television yet was still not accessible to those without buckets of cash, and then to see how quickly it did evolve once we hit the 21st century and the internet made everything available, accessible and editable as the world moved from analogue to digital. it’s insane to think the amount of things that we can do with the tiny phones in our pockets compared to what people had to spend, do and use just to make a film 100 years ago. and insane to think how it’s going to be in 20-50 years from now. will everything interact or will we just have one big, new overarching medium that will be used for everything? guess we’ll have to wait and see.