Models and Frameworks

Narrative and Anti-narrative; linear and non-linear; author and audience--all these dualities seem to clearly define positions in advance of our consideration, and the questions these positions all appear to raise about audience and artwork and interaction have already been asked and various answers have been found--all of which are readily available as the "common knowledge" of so many of our collective assumptions about media and how media do/should act.

The underlying problem we have is that these models and the questions they generate are all already old, heavily discussed and well-known. There is little challenge made to the idea that "aura" is diminished by "reproduction." It is an established fact, to question it is to suggest a heresy. That this situation obtains means that these models are thoroughly academic in nature, and the history they support (or supports them) is no longer open to question.

Simply put, then, is the problem: we need new models that are independent of these assumptions, and specifically question the established frameworks themselves, rejecting them as appropriate.

Why does "participation" really matter--and how is it different from "interaction"? My feeling is that this may be the site where things can begin, but only if we start by rejecting the intellectual-ideological baggage of established theories and be willing to question (if not entirely reject) what has been previously accepted. To participate is very different than to interact. Participation implies a high degree of equal, peer to peer engagement where all the agents are involved in the creation of the parameters (constraints) of the work.