Nothing ever ends… except when it does

I think it’s rather inauspicious that I begin this blog as one of my recent favorite blogs decides to go dark.

At a superficial glance, The College of Mythic Cartography can seem a bit outside the scope of a blog focused on new media. Indeed, a fair amount of its subject matter can seem decisively analog.

But from the work I’ve done so far, it seems to me that one of the great struggles for anyone who works with new media (be it games, web, code, or something else) is to determine to what extent mythology- or any other pre-built solution- factors into the work.

Mythology is a framework. A cultural mythology- Celtic, Norse, Hellenic, etc.- can be likened to an API. It’s a pre-built solution that saves you the trouble of starting completely from scratch. It’s a shared vocabulary.

Yet, to a certain degree, a great deal of work in new media (and intermedia, I suppose) is done expressly to forge a new framework, a new vocabulary. We can write our own libraries, thankyouverymuch.

Of course, if you take this too far, you end up with something outside the experience scope of many people beyond a privileged few (namely other new media scholars, and even that may be a stretch if it’s sufficiently obtuse). Few people end up relating to your work- they just can’t grok it. Which I suppose is fine, if you’re only doing research or making art or writing software for your own benefit. If you’re trying to reach out to other people, on the other hand- if you’re trying to offer some insight and make an intellectual connection with others, it behooves you as a scholar/artist/software developer/what-have-you to draw on certain pre-built solutions in an effort to relate to your audience (users?).

It’s a balancing act, of course. And new media producers struggle constantly with it, I would imagine. (Though in the case of game developers, it would seem they’ve already placed their bets.)

But one thing is clear- when we work, when we create, intention is everything. When we draw from influential source material to contextualize our work- whether the Poetic Edda or Understanding Media- we must fully understand what we’re saying and why. And if we cast aside the chains of convention, we must also do so intentionally, lest we be labelled amateurs and bomb-throwers (and even then, there’s something to be said for actually learning the rules before you go out and break them).

Incidentally, one of the more recent articles from the aforementioned blog makes some interesting observations about social interaction and Dunbar’s number, which I think can lead into some pretty spirited discussion of the social web.

In fact, let’s get that ball rolling. Dunbar’s concept of ’social grooming’ and Facebook. Do wall posts and SuperPokes qualify as intimacy for Dunbar’s purposes?

Go!

~ by James Patrick Gordon on December 20, 2008.