User:Lidia.Pereira/Trimesters/RWRM/EMLN

"For YoHa technical objects have a directive side which encourages us to alter our minds, behaviours and bodies in order to better use them."

First I will apologize for the vagueness of my notes, but not having read the book there were a lot of concepts that were a bit abstract. I will mostly write down the thoughts and questions that rose from the information I was able to gather. But enough excuses, here's what I gathered from the lecture:

According to Matthew Fuller, the opposed relationship between natural and formalised language provides the opportunity for evil to arise. Media ambiguity and indeterminacy provide the perfect conditions to power maintenance. Grey media are these ubiquitous objects that are now so deeply intertwined with our daily life that we don't question anymore what part they play in mantaining power structures, shaping our environment and the way we connect with the world. Their vagueness and ambiguity can be compared to that of sophistry by pretending not to question the why, making up for one big strategy instead of a desinterested and constant search for the truth. Strategies of ambiguation seem to only add more ambiguity, and things that are said to improve people's capacities (for example, the Prozac) - the ostensive power of the good, as Matthew Fuller called it - are nothing but different layers of the Evil contained in grey media. Graham Harwood emphasizes: How do media objects participate in us and vice-versa? How does power circulate "mediated" by these seemingly inconspicuous stratagems? The greyness and ambiguity of these media is nothing but operational - function links form to the perpetuating of a certain socio-political and economical system.

Objects are never created, nor do they ever exist in isolation. Being a part of a certain system and being their means of production controlled by the dominant class, one can guess they help sustain the economic infrastructure by embodying the dominant ideologies, in so much as they are systemically informed and therefore contain in themselves the cunning and ambiguous strategies Fuller associates with grey media.

The question for me is how can we subvert the traditional usage of these media, then? Can all of them be subverted or are there cases in which their function embodies the systemic premises so perfecty, that is, form is function, that it becomes difficult to dissociate them? It is important to mention, though, that Fuller does NOT intend this book to have a redemptive function. Deconstruct these strategies, become aware of them and play with their potential.

(Note to self: Victor Papanek and Vilém Flusser)