Allow me, early on, to embark on a slight digression (or is it?) in the interest of directing the attention that confusion over my use of the word "mediation" may elicit. One of my editors, an interested and insightful reader of this text (under the heading of "nitpicking typo thingys"), asked me this question: "Is that meditation or mediation? I was unsure?" His question is warranted, I believe, because my usage in this instance is a somewhat idiosyncratic one.
Insert digression here
One afternoon, while working in the office we share, Michelle
Glaros (her "Being
In Pictures" is included in this issue of Kairos) and
I began stewing over the terminology that accompanies the kind of
work we are attempting to teach our students to produce. What
might we call this digital, multi-media, video/electronic/text
equivalent of "writing"? Suffice to say (for the time being)
that after some discussion we each nominated our own candidate
for
this office. Glaros proposed the term "screening," and I
opted for "mediation." Reinflecting either or both of these
terms to work for us in the frontier stages of this discipline
ought to be fruitful. For now I will ask that you see mediation
as a noun that gestures toward a new kind of object made
sensible, made intelligible, made readable via the new (multiple)
media.
End digression
We hope, in the coming months, to produce for public consumption a collaborative discussion of the relative merits of thinking about this question of "naming" what we "do." Our working title? S/M(?) of course.