Matthew Elliot’s Reviews > For an Ecology of Images > Status Update

Woo! Half way there, this book is fantastic but definitely not for everyone. Definitely for me, though.

There's lots of anthropological words that not everyone is going to understand so it's not a book for everyone. Thankfully, I grew up reading these sort of books and even though I don't use them myself, reading them comes naturally. But not everyone has the ability to understand what they're reading without having to look it up. I feel like quite a few people would give up and leave it unread. Just a thought, really.

Remind me to read Pliny. This guy was a thinker.

Oooh. So the format of the image (JPEG, GIF etc) decides how sharable it is and how it circulates like the secret ideas and patterns etc in a picture and the story it tells, hence the history of the story about the man who was always chasing his shadow and how it changes through history.

The discussion of shadows and Peter Schlemihl is really interesting, it started with a talk about Pliny saying that the first painting (of the new world, rather than in prehistory) was that of a traced shadow of a lover. And it made me think of Peter Pan and I wonder if that's where the idea came from, it's not exactly a common idea back then.

Finally got to the first chapter that was a pretty dense intro.