Review of: Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, Terence W. Deacon (2011)
New York: Norton, 624 pp.,
ISBN 978-0-39334-390-8, h/bk, $24.13, p/bk, $19.95, Kindle $9.99
This book explores the nature of technology-participatory media in particularand its effects on our friendships and our fundamental sense of togetherness.Situating the notion of friendship in the modern era, the author examines the possibilities and challenges of technology on our friendships. Taking a media ecology approach to interpersonal communication, she looks at issues around phenomenology, recognition of friends as unique, hermeneutics in a digital world and mediated communication, social dimensions of time and space, and communication ethics.Examining friendship as a communicative phenomenon and exploring the ways in which it is created, sustained, managed, produced, and reproduced, this book will be relevant to scholars and students of interpersonal communication, mediated communication, communication theory and philosophy, and media ecology.
This article is a commentary on Walter Ong’s scholarship on time consciousness, investigating the human consciousness of time as it relates to knowledge, orality and literacy. Time consciousness in the age of electronically mediated communication is both embodied and synchronic, yet vestiges of older ontologies persist rhetorically. This article outlines the clash between these ontologies and the problems that have arisen in the current age. The goal is to open the text to scholars and readers for heuristic value to prompt further investigation.
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