Page 138 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

Media as Mathematics - Calculating Justice 129

decades there has been a transformation in the design and engineering of
media systems. Traditional analogue technology reproduced and recorded
events onto material medium such as film, paper, video and audiotape. The
reproduced image involved some form of literal copy or analogy of its source.
For example, for more than a century a photograph involved a chemical
recording and processing of an external object onto celluloid film. The
technology that supported analogue media, for example film projectors and
cameras, was often expensive and large scale. From the mid 1990‘s, media
signals began to encode moving images as mathematical and electronic
signals, ensuring faster, cheaper and more efficient equipment and methods for
all stages of production and transmission.
The mathematisation of processes is not always transparent to
audiences.Its effects in terms of digital television broadcast results in more and
even better of the same, high fidelity, realism. Yet the same technology that
produces more glamorous, high definition images can also produce graphic
and statistical displays, photographic and AV records and transcription,
mobile, portable and high quality video systems, all interfaced with intelligent
and efficient computational and database resources.
Kevelson wrote just before the full effects of digital technology were
realized; yet she displays prescient conceptual understandings of the nature of
digital media representation and imaging, and the effects of technology on
logic and reasoning. In doing so, Kevelson appropriates the work of Charles
Saunders Peirce. Peirce was foremost a scientist and mathematician, as well as
logician, and his theories of language and signs, while applied widely today in
social analysis, are steeped in mathematical terminology and understanding.
Peirce is potentially a valuable reference for a multi dimensioned account of
digital media, and Kevelson provides a valuable link, via legal theory, to a
general understanding of the distinct qualities of Peircean concepts and their
relevance to contemporary media.
Kevelson claims to adopt the ―amorphous‖, ―entire project‖ of Peirce‘s
radical and semiotic understanding of mathematics as a sign system. Her
―adaptation‖ can be seen as ―traditionally part of the Semiotics-of-Law
project‖ [1987, p. 203], and ―as amorphous as is the notion of legal semiotics,
it is no more nor less amorphous than the entire project of the field of general
semiotics.‖ Thus, Kevelson claims to be progressing an argument about media
and semiotics generally, in which legal theory becomes a significant and
leading case study.
What is distinctive and invaluable is her focus on the explicit themes of
Peirce‘s mature semiotics, including the graphical or iconic nature of