... and I can't be there. it's a shame, really. so here is the question I asked him in a comment 2 minutes ago:
"as I sympathize with your argumentation in general, in a theoretical perspective I'm not too happy with the "conversation" label. it sounds too much like "folks like you and me, down to earth, no fuzz, without all these complexities of the media world we live in". (not you, I know, but popular in the web community.) what about concepts like "semiosis" (Eco/Peirce), foucault-ish "enonces", Lotman's "semiosphere", and Wittgenstein's good old language game?"
the same goes for the wrong idea, that knowledge is located in people's minds. it is encoded in language. but "language" is not a grammatical system, but a semiotic process, structured and chaotic at once. "language is a virus", as Burroughs used to say. i guess this is part of what weinberger's "conversation" means. but the term is only pretending to make these notoriously unclear things clearer.
Posted by martin at September 2, 2005 9:57 AM | TrackBack