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The aim of
mediology is to elucidate the mysteries and paradoxes of cultural transmission.
We try to understand how a break in our methods of transmission and transportation
provokes a change in mentalities and behaviours, as well as, inversely,
how a cultural tradition provokes, assimilates or modifies a technical
innovation. Generally, the perspective includes technical and
cultural interactions, at the intersection of what have been termed
superior forms
of social life (religion, art, politics) and the most humble aspects
of
material life (the usual, banal or trivial).
Mediology is neither a doctrine nor a moral science, and even less a "new
science". Mainly, it is a method of analysis, to understand
the transfer in duration of a piece of information (transmission).
Not a special field of knowledge (as is the sociology of the medias) but,
in a larger sense, an original mode of coming to knowledge, consisting
in relaying an historical phenomenon to the mediations, both from those
formal learning and practical aspects which have made it possible.
One is acting as a mediologist each time one brings to light correlations
unifying a symbolic corpus (a religion, a doctrine, an artistic genre,
a discipline, etc
), a form of collective organization ( a church,
a party, a school, an academy) and a technical system of communication
(recording, storage and trace circulation). Or, more simply, when one
writes down someones words, the way it was said and who wishes
to repeat it.
The question, still obscure, of symbolic effectiveness lies at the heart
of this inter-discipline. This was its launch pad. Karl Marx
said: "an idea becomes a material force when it takes over the masses".
Which mediations (= paths and means) make a word, an image or a text become
motion, mentality, movement and action? How does a Word become Flesh?
Bringing light onto symbolic effectiveness (= power of speech, power of
words, influence of the image, etc
) leads to a close examination
of the technical variables of message diffusion (logosphere, graphosphere,
videosphere, current "hypersphere"), themselves linked to the
different modes of transportation through space, as well as the strategies
of collective organization which authorize this or that equipment.
The medio in mediology therefore designates a whole set
of devices which serve to vehicle a sign, its means (material) and its
agents (social) of circulation (intermediary bodies and formal learning
supports).
Numerous and multinational are the trailblazers and precursors of the
large field of mediology understood as the exploration of the symbolic
world by logistical means: Victor Hugo ("this will kill that"),
Walter Benjamin, Valéry, McLuhan, Walter Ong, etc
Mediology
attempts to make coherent, intelligible and to extend the intuitions
of
great pioneers, to contribute to what may one day appear as an ecology
of culture.
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