What is "the material"?
What is "a materiality"?
What is "material culture"?
What's the difference between an object, a thing, and stuff?
What aspects of people's interactions with and uses of material objects are communicative?
How do the sensory and semiotic dimensions of people's interactions with material objects interrelate?
How do people use material objects to communicate to others?
How do people know what objects/things/stuff communicate?
Bill Brown (2009) argues, "We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us." (140) Discuss. If "all media are mixed media" (Mitchell), maybe all objects are "mixed objects" in terms of their sensory, semiotic, and praxis ratios. What part of any medium or object is visual? material? linguistic? performative?
How do practices of material communication work in this cultural moment vs. other moments and cultures?

review:
From Mitchell: "The notion of 'medium specificity' then, is never derived from a singular, elemental essence. It is more like the specificity associated with recipes in cooking: many ingredients, combined in a specific order in specific proportions, mixed in particular ways and cooked at specific temperatures for a specific amount of time" while it is cooked within a specific device (pan, pot, griddle, etc.), using a specific heat source (oven, stove, grill, microwave, etc), and presented in/on a specific container (plate, bowl, etc.), eaten by hand or with a specific implement (fork, spoon, chopsticks, etc.) within a specific place and a specific social and cultural context. (260-261)

 

key terms from Breen, Scott, & McLean:

big stories vs small stories
"stuff"
tour method
online/offline self/identity curation
McAdams model: actor, agent, author (299)