november 13 mxg
❤️ First things first: shout out to my buddy MG, who made me aware I didn't publish this before passing out last night.
✍🏽 Second things second: I've been working on an essay for The Rocker Step that isn't about basketball or sports as much as it's about media.
As I mentioned in early September, I've been making my way through Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture, by Jessica Helfand. I am reading more books like this these days because my brain came back online a few years ago after a quarter century of drinking too much (I quit in 2020) and slowly but surely, I'm getting my palate back. And, because I am, I'm back on some old bullshit.
--
In the late 20th century (I mean 1997 but I wanted to feel both grand and old, not unlike ) I was deeply interested in media and cultural theory for reasons I couldn't explain but inherently understood. I was nurturing that interest at McGill but before too long I got it in my head that if I wanted to be a writer, I had to do a literature degree to like, ground me in history and tradition. There's a good essay in that story, but it not the one I'm working on for the basketblog.
Today, at 48, I am relatively sure that my interest in media theory and cultural theory stemmed from a fascination with in semiotics. I didn't use the word semiotics to describe this fascination when I was a kid for reasons including but not limited to that they don't tell you about words like this until you are old enough to drink.
When you're a kid you don't know what semiotics are, but you understand, on some level, that you are surrounded by signs, signifiers, symbols, and codes all the livelong day. This fascination grabbed me young, or maybe I grabbed it when I was young, but regardless, something about it stuck, and then persisted, until I couldn't ignore it anymore. I know there were codes that underpinned the world, and I wanted to find them and stick them under a microscope.
I was too young and inexperienced at life and at living (because those are two separate things) to know that what I was doing was mapping and cataloguing normal and normative behavioural codes, and there are reasons for that, but I can't get into them now. Apparently this is another essay I'll have to write another day.
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Annnnnyyyyyyway if you have known me for any length of time you've probably heard me rant about how people don't understand the internet despite being on the internet all day every day. I have a similar belief about media, which is to say that I don't think people really understand media despite being saturated in it all day long and all night strong. Or, rather, it's because people are so oversaturated in media that they don't understand it.
The TL;DR is that media is largely presented as something to passively consume and not understand, explore, or dissect, and because of this, people don't understand, explore, or dissect it.
This is by design.
This is by design.
This is by design.
This is by design.
This is by design.
This is by design.
This is by design.
This is by design.
This is by design.
This is by design.
This is by design.
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch finish
🌳 grass that
🌷 now essay
PS: I'm rebooting DMail (or something like it). If you want to be part of history, drop your email address here: combatdavey.substack.com
Be good to yourself.
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