i've been reading...

"structuralism and semiotics" by Terance Hawkes. It's about structuralism and semiotics. I'm reading it so i can get a better understanding of semiotics and understand what Roland Barthes is going on about in "Mythologies", which i've also started reading. I found this quote which seems applicable to the effect of digital media on communication even though it discusses written forms of communication (books and "administrative machinery").

"...In this respect it is, rather than modern societies that should be defined in negative terms. Our relations with one another are now only occasionally and fragmentarily based upon global experience, the concrete 'apprehension' of one person by another. They are largely the result of a process of indirect reconstruction, through written documents. We are no longer linked to our past by an oral tradition which implies direct contact with others (storytellers, priests, wise men, or elders), but by books ammassed in libaries, books from which we endeavour - with extreme difficulty - to form a picture of their authors. And we communicate with the immense majority of our contemparies by all kinds of intermediaries - written documents or administrative machinery - which undoubtedly vastly extend our contacts but at the same time make those contact somewhat 'unauthentic'.
...We would like to avoid describing negatively the tremendous revolution brought about by the invention of writing, while it confered vast benifits on humanity, did in fact deprive it of something fundamental." - (Claude Levi-Strauss, 1972)

It's all so interesting. (btw i'm a geek)