“Our lives are, to a more extensive degree than we care to think, infused with a process of inscription, producing printed or written traces or working from them. The omnipresence of these documentary or textual processes is now being entered by the technology of computers”

Dorothy Smith, “Texts, Facts, and Femininity” (1990)

Although this quote Brian included in this morning’s lectorial is older than I am, it’s never been more true than it is today. Living in a developed country in the 21st century means living in a modern, media saturated world, and the exercise at the end of today’s session is a clear demonstration of that. We were asked to get into small groups and to record all mediated interactions/communications we encounter with a certain area of the city. My group and I were sent to Bourke street mall and struggled to document all of them, but here’s just a few:

 

Signs on shops

Advertisements on trams

Brand names on buildings and construction sites

Advertisements on screens and billboards

Shopfront windows

And far too many more to mention here.

This exercise was a clear demonstration of how many times we come interact with media on a daily basis, whether we are aware of it or not. And that’s not even taking into account phones, the internet or television.

There are some who may argue that pre-modern society offered a more authentic experience of reality, as people were could only learn of the outside world through interactions with others. Those who lived in remote communities only knew what was in their small part of the world, or relied on outsiders to share their experiences. And this still happens today, it’s just become a little easier. When we see parts of the world we have not experienced ourselves through media such as Facebook, we are seeing a representation of that place, just would have a representation if someone were to tell us about it in person. In modern society, we still have opportunities to experience the world authentically with our own eyes as well as through representations. The major difference is that these representations are now all around us, and therefore much harder to ignore.