| The high level of confusion too readily made here between form and content reminds me of another interesting battle fought between the advocate of 'the medium is the message' - Marshall McLuhan in his article The Medium is the Message, and the semiotist Umberto Eco, where Eco writes as a response on McLuhan's 'medium=message theory' that McLuhan is simply collapsing form and content too much. I found Eco's critique to be quite powerful, which does not mean that the form matters partly for the overall content, or rather for the overall interpretation of any text; but that is simply because the form is related to various discourses, and therefore to various other texts in a society. Also Bolter and Grusin point out in Remediation that the theory of technologies, as posed by McLuhan, tends to fall in the trap of technological determinism where the medium has been abstracted from its social context. However, they argue that McLuhan's theory could also be viewed as a precessor to Donna Haraway's concept of the cyborg which proved to be very useful in deconstructing binary oppositions for feminist theory. |