Thinking of Media as Epistemology
Direct and Indirect Ways of Knowing
Your best friend just tested positive for COVID – You’ve been exposed. How do you know if you got it? There’s at least two ways. The first one is waiting to feel any symptoms. The second is to get yourself tested and wait for the result. In the first way, the knowledge you seek is revealed directly in your experience through feeling. In the second way, it is revealed by a laboratory after running a test procedure, a combination of technical methods and artifacts that indicate presence of the virus in your sample. One is direct, the other is ‘mediated’. This is a fundamental distinction that can help you make sense of epistemology and the issues it explores.
Media: Knowing Indirectly
There are many aspects of Reality that we cannot know directly, where we need a mediator to know. Consider how the news travel across the globe practically overnight. You may not live in Paris or New York but you can get a sense of what’s happening there if you open your news app or tv channel. Journalism is the compilation of first-hand accounts of an event or situation into a coherent story that is then published or broadcast through technological means. Consider also the recent photos published by NASA from the new James Webb telescope, it’s a technological mediator between humankind and faraway stars.
One of the issues we gloss over when it comes to mediated forms of knowing is that they change how things feel like. In mediation there is of necessity a distortion on how you should feel about whatever it is you’re getting to know. In cooking, for example, when you pierce meats with a thermometer, you can see how hot they are without feeling any hotness yourself. There's a 'distortion' in the knowledge because it feels different to read 70°C or 160°F on a screen than feeling the heat directly on your finger.
Consider also how two people get to know each other through a dating app like Tinder and Bumble. Your dating app profile is an indirect means to get an impression of you because what you fill it up with says something about you. When people examine and evaluate a dating profile they look for 'redeeming qualities' or 'things to like' — Is this someone I'd meet in person? If the liking is mutual, the dating app first moves people to written conversation, a second round of exploration — What's going on here? What is this conversation about? And again... Is this someone I'd meet in person? And still, no dating profile or written conversation will ever feel like meeting them in person.
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