1) In differentiating between “information” and “knowledge,” Brown and Duguid (B&D)  establish that people are essential to knowledge-making because “knowledge usually entails a knower” (119). Focusing on people enables us to see that information on its own is useless; we need people to “assimilate, understand, and make sense of [information]” (121). This process of knowledge-making is embedded in and reliant upon communities and networks of practice. Once an individual “[b]ecome[s] a member of a community” and “engage[s] in its practices,” s/he “can acquire and make use of its knowledge and information” (126). Thus, being apprenticed in a community of practice is a process of gaining literacy in that community’s Discourses and media. In B&D’s example of the Xerox field techs, we see the important role discourse plays in a community of practice. While each tech had a pre-fabricated body of information that supposedly would provide any and all solutions to copier malfunctions, that database proved lackluster. It was through the techs’ multiple meetings over coffee that they created a discourse of cooperative solutions, helping one another to effectively repair machines. As B&D note, the techs’ vernacular discourse was eventually collected into a second database by Xerox for more effective repair solutions. The techs serve to establish the necessity of individuals in knowledge making, including an adaptation of discourse by a wider discursive community, in this case, the Xerox corporation.

 

2) Literacy is recursive. If we understand writing as a recursive process, then it also makes sense to think of literacy as recursive. As we stated above, when individuals enter and move between communities of practice, they are gaining literacy in that community’s Discourses, literacies that can also be deployed in other communities of practice. Moreover, B&G’s insistence that “there is nothing prior to mediation” also serves to show that we must have literacy of the media with which we engage (56). Because “[m]edia are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other,” our literacies of these media must also constantly be (re)forming. Just as knowledge is not easily detachable from its knower, media technologies are inseparable from their cultural contexts: media “emerge from within cultural contexts, and they refashion other media, which are embedded in the same or similar contexts” (19). Thus, each time we encounter remediation, we depend upon our literacies of the repurposed media to construct our understanding of / make familiar this unfamiliar instance. B&G present multiple examples of this experience with remediation in Part II of their text, but perhaps the most illustrative is their example of the Disney franchise, which operates under the assumption that amusement park attendees will already be familiar with the films, many of which remediate fairytales. An individual’s experience with the films depends upon their familiarity with the fairytales these films remediated, just as their experience in the mediated space of the theme park relies upon their engagement with other Disney products.

 

3) We are always mediated. As Erin and I established, humans are a necessary component of knowledge making. However, since most of humanity has yet to realize their telepathic capabilities, we find ourselves tied to some channel of communication through which we send, receive, and make knowledge, a medium of some sort. B&G seem to present remediation in a manner that implies the ubiquity of media, like mediation is something we are inundated with, it is something we can’t escape. Much in the way we are born into discourse, we are always already mediated. Now, it seems possible that language/discourse itself is a medium, but let’s not go there in this post. Rather, let’s take hypermediacy as an example. The platforms on which we can share information and make knowledge increases at what feels an exponential rate. B&G’s “imperative” for hypermediacy makes it sound as if we need to have more platforms to communicate, and the proliferation of those platforms exemplifies that. Tugging on the hypermedia thread requires us to address immediacy as well. While we need to have as many media as possible, we also want those media to disappear from our consciousness, providing us with an illusion of media being mimetic of reality. It is this illusion of mimesis that facilitate knowledge making; we trust our media to re-create reality, thus allowing us to make the most “accurate/real” knowledge we can. Anywhere knowledge or meaning is made, there is a medium. We are always mediated.