Abstract
Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead intended to use a combination of text, still photographs, and motion picture film in the report of their study of character development in Bali, but found this technically impossible. Multimedia computational devices have now made it possible to do what they could not do, making the three media (in Latour's terms) ‘combinable on a flat surface.’ We were compelled to economize on motion-picture film, and disregarding the future difficulties of exposition, we assumed that the still photography and the motion-picture film together would constitute our record of behavior. (Notes to the Photographs, in Bateson and Mead, 1942 (italics Bateson's)) If inventions are made that transform numbers, images and texts from all over the world into the same binary code inside computers, then indeed the handling, the combination, the mobility, the conservation and the display of the traces will all be fantastically facilitated. When you hear someone say that he or she ‘masters’ a question better, meaning that his or her mind had enlarged, look first for inventions bearing on the mobility, immutability or versatility of the traces; and it is only later, if by some extraordinary chance, something is still unaccounted for, that you may turn towards the mind. (Latour, 1986 (italics Latour's)).
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