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Date: October 12, 2005 12:05:02 PM PDT
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From: "Brigid McLeer" <bmcleer@barbican.org.uk>
Date: October 12, 2005 12:01:02 PM PDT
To: <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Cc: <mcleer.bridge@virgin.net>
Subject: translation
hi
i was interested in what i would loosely describe as issues of
'translation' that were coming up in the last bunch of posts (not
todays particularly but yesterdays). And in the implied questions
of the reader and the reading experience (Barrie mentions in
relation to reading a screen as opposed to a book) - but also how
these things are played out in cultural terms and that seems to be
arising in the discussion too - questions of meaning not only in
relation to 'new' modes of communication/writing but also across
cultural differences.
This question of translation particularly interested me because of
much of the language being used in various posts to describe
digital entities and 'phenomena' - some of which i understand or
can work out - or is being explained - and some of which i would
really need a dictionary of digital terms in order to decipher it.
(Incidentally is there such a thing - if not, perhaps it would be
fun for this list to begin to compile a glossary of terms - in the
spirit of mediating writing about writing about the digital!)
Obviously a new technology and cultural mediator will require new
kinds of vocabularies to describe it and enable its operations in
the world and it strikes me that one of the key changes that occurs
to writing, or to the 'written language' in digital culture is the
huge range of invented words, grammars, sytactical structures, not
to mention modes and forms of code. In this sense i think there is
a very big change to not only what we think of as writing in
digital media but also to the actual writing itself - even at its
most familiar. This i think is also very closely related to what
barrie was talking about in terms of the experience of reading off
the screen - in the sense that it is more difficult (for most
people from what i've gathered over the years) to read long tracts
of text on screen, so what seems to happen is that reading occurs
much more literally in an active state, while writing or playing
(if in a game context) or 'navigating' or 'chatting' etc. This
presumably makes for a more dynamic, adapted, truncated, redevised
etc. kind of writing. A writing altered not only by the nature of
the technology but also by the nature of the experience of using
that technology. The experience, as it were, of typing, sitting
upright, gazing into a light filled frame and all that. Again I
think it's also a writing that is often much more closely affected
by the principles and temporal proximity (even if this is illusory)
of speech. Which i guess in turn has implications for some
reconsideration of theories around the differentiation of writing
from speech, from Plato to Ong (speech lovers) to Barthes, Derrida
and others (writing lovers). This is further emphasised by the
compromised materiality of writing in digital media/space - its
reinsertion (if I can describe it as such) into a weirder and much
more complicated kind of transparency. Maybe??
I'm also interested in relation to the question of cultural
exchange, what do those of you for whom english is not your 'first'
langauge make of the predominance of english in cyberculture - is
it just the same as the globalising use of english that we see in
other aspects of contemporary life, or is its adapted qualities
something that makes it potentially more maleable and therefore
more open to reuse/abuse, interaction/interference from other
vocabularies, languages, cultural traditions?
bests
Brigid
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