Mediologie regis debray biography children

Please wait a few moments while we process your request. Is this a new discipline that has emerged in academic circles or simply the whimsy of a philosopher? Not widely discussed in either francophone or Anglo-Saxon milieus, mediology remains fairly unknown and little taught. This aim concerns not only media or a medium as we might suppose although these are part of the equation , but rather the processes of mediation involved in transmission.

Mediology focuses on phenomena of transmission. The transmission of what? Of the one thing important enough to transmit to future generations: knowledge and traditions in other words, culture. In contrast to the short, immediate time frames of communication, which, paradoxically, cause news events to be quickly forgotten, transmission is founded on the long, mediate time frame of traces and memory.

For example, the short time frame of the life of a sect has been transformed, particularly through books and writing, into the long time frame of Christianity; the material object of mediation here the Bible , the organized matter as mediology calls it, is transformed into an institution and into materialized organization. The interplay of the two temporalities occurs through media, technological instruments for recording the present that are gradually shifting toward their noble role as memory and archiving tools.

Early in his introduction, Debray presents libraries as an excellent medium for transmission.

The aim of mediology is to elucidate the mysteries and paradoxes of cultural transmission.

Not only is a library a warehouse for memory incarnate, materialized within books, but it is also the "matrix of a well-read community" possessing its rituals exegesis, translation, compilation, etc. The transmission is active and does not concern only the passive supply of books and archives on the shelves of our libraries. There are readers in our libraries and they in return write.

Libraries are always "royal, caliphate, pontifical," 3 whether created by a congress, senate, president's office or foundation. Within this institutional genealogy is the essential part of transmission, of which libraries are the medium but not the driving force.