‘The relationship between the parts, is more important than the parts themselves’

The particular part of week one’s lecture that has stuck with me is the idea that ‘the relationship between the parts, is more important than the parts themselves’.

This concept applies especially well to the Networked Media course, because essentially ‘networking’ is creating these relationships/connections/links. Week one’s reading also looked at this idea in regards to how blogging, in particular, helps people to create these connections. Hypertext in blogs allows one to interlink their blogs to other posts, blogs, webpages, images, audio and videos which helps to extend and connect the online community (or ‘blogosphere’).

All in all, for me the most powerful example of this idea was the analogy of editing film. You can take two different clips of film, and yes, separately they have meaning instilled within them; however when joint together, their juxtaposition creates a new meaning. It is this relationship between the two shots that becomes more important (in terms of meaning) than the shots themselves. Sergei Eisenstein, a Soviet filmmaker in the 1920s was particularly interested in this idea of juxtaposition or ‘montage’ (rather than classical Hollywood style continuity editing). In his film October he played with this connection between shots, placing a clip of a mechanical peacock (pictured below), ‘next to’ a clip of a government leader (a character named Kerensky, pictured at bottom). In doing this Eisenstein prompts the audience to compare the two figures, insinuating the pomposity of Kerensky. This is a perfect illustration to show that it is not the things themselves, but their relationship that is most significant.

'Mechnical Peacock'

Kerensky

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