Old Terms, New Concepts

“When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavour of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” (Marshall McLuhan, p.74-75)

Looking to the future through the rear-view mirror ultimately leads to misconceptions. We use outdated terms and concepts to describe something that cannot be described and considered in those terms. Such as a blog for example; it is considered to be an online diary, or discussion forum or a political soapbox, whereas in fact it is actually none of those things, yet it can take elements of each. Blogs, hypertext fiction, YouTube and Flickr are just a few examples of the new creative elements available online that are often described with old terms and therefore the unique nuance of each one is denied by this misguided description. New words, with the new concepts, take time to develop and living in this age of constant change we are not giving ourselves the chance to catch up and name everything. We are not giving ourselves breathing space.

Weight has introduced a new term for us to consider our relationship with our apparatus. “Were we to describe the apparatus as engaging in dialogue, we would anthropomorphicize its behaviour and capacity. Better, then, to introduce a new term, the trilogue, so we can acknowledge the communicative status of the apparatus without claiming too much for its conscious abilities” (Jenny Weight, p.415) The apparatus is something we can speak through, it aids our speech, but does not actively return the ideas, the dialogue. It passes it on to the receiver.

Placing the apparatus in this central position within human dialogue does seem unusual but Weight explains that although the machine is not conscious it “originates signs for someone else to interpret … It also reacts to (not the same thing as interprets) the signs originated by human interlocutors. It operates within the ‘intersubjective motivational context’ in which social interaction takes place.” (Weight, p.415) The apparatus lives within the sphere of social interaction, aids that social interaction yet is not an individual player within that sphere. It cannot exist without the human element manipulating it.