There is a moment when I check my e-mail. Something happens. Something, other than, of course, the relay of information between me and the screen; and between me and the other people who fill my inbox with images and text.
The moment I am talking about is when human experience becomes media and when media becomes a representation of human experience. This is a middle moment, and it’s fascinating. It is between intake and response, between thought and action, and between these very moments themselves and the “mediatization” of these moments.
This happens when I open my inbox and immediately close my laptop. I’m attempting to make checking my e-mail an enriching, rather than overwhelming, experience.
It is what’s happening every time an image gets posted as a Facebook representation of a human being, a phone call gets made or an image gets taken.
There is this middle ““ something standing in the way ““ the medium: your Facebook profile, your camera, your phone ““ anything standing between you and your direct experience.
The term media comes from Latin, for “middle” or “separation.” Even in physics, a “middle moment” is a shift or a change. This middle moment is the exchange between me and the medium, the computers standing between people, turning experience into record.
Just as a phone allows me to, in some senses of the word, be in two places at once, this middle moment is about the phone itself but also about the division, the separation and the reflection these media create and the ways in which these separations can actually bring people and experiences together. In this way the human experience is transformed, though sometimes lessened or weakened compared to the original experience.
Though very prevalent in a digital culture, this is not actually new since the advent of digital technology. These types of moments occurred when the first photographs were taken over 100 years ago. These middle moments are just happening a lot more often the more digital we become.
This desire to create media often takes away from the experience itself. When I was traveling in Europe this summer, I would think to myself “that is a beautiful building!” and immediately look down, rummage around in my purse, change camera settings and finally digitally immortalize the same exposure my eyesight had to the building.
When I want to capture an image, it comes from the want to turn what I see, feel and think into messages, pictures and other communications, even if I just throw them away later.
I have images of my Europe trip. But I have rarely shown them to anyone ““ what is satisfying is the act of taking the picture; it’s the process of taking that moment and turning it into a saved digital file. Why save voice messages when we delete them when our voice mailbox gets full without even listening to them ? It’s the mediatization we desire.
I only understand the implications of media in the context of my daily life; I haven’t researched how they affect other people’s lives, other than my own and those of my close friends. I hope to one day understand these concepts in more contexts.
I have discovered, however, my own relationship with the many forms of media I encounter in one day. I have learned that they can either make my day overwhelming or run smoothly depending on how I choose to use these media.
It is a mirror with an ever-changing view. We have the opportunity to examine the ways in which these media enrich our lives and to choose to participate in forms of media in constructive ways, and even to make new adaptations of these ways we mediatize our human experience.
These moments are questions about humanity, about what we see through the transformational mirror of digital technologies. We are able to construct a different type of experience and get perspectives into new forms of understanding through use of media. These middle moments are what can separate us but also bring us together through creating a middle ground that spans time and space.
E-mail Rood at drood@media.ucla.edu.