T.V.

So, sans hobby, I’ve been considering my remarks on Carpenter and television.

Although I stick to my claim that televisions are not squarely input technologies in the way that various forms of the stylus are input technologies, televisions do indeed transmit massive amounts of data to an individual, as does film. On a workaday basis, however, we do not construct data with either television or film, whereas we do with either a pen or a computer. An interesting difference, certainly, that turns on the point (the ballpoint, say) of agency articulated to control. I suppose you could say that the stylus, the typewriter, and the computer are all active input technologies, i.e., these are tools that recall homo faber, tools that mediate the assertive activity of structuralization. Foucault roll over, but the situations in which we use such tools are processual sites of power management, sites that themselves construct a vastly, variously peopled world of agency.