苦雨之地、奇雲與其他棲息地取向的傳播思想

The Land of Little Rain, The Marvelous Clouds, and other Habitat-Oriented Ideas of Communication

If a university teacher is a medium, what and how does he/she mediate, and from what sort of habitat and relations? I probably wouldn't ask these questions if I didn't struggle with making theorization-not just theories-relevant to my communication students over the years. Certain thinkers in the field, like John D. Peters, has a way to always seize the basic question (what is a medium) and animate it with new thoughts (e.g., elemental media from The Marvelous Clouds). This essay illustrates how a creative nonfiction from contemporary Taiwan-Wu Ming-yi's The Land of Little Rain (2019)-can complement a discussion of Peters' elemental media. The rich details of ''habitat'' in the novel reference the science community, Taiwan's ecology, and the overlapping nature/culture. To underline how such hybrid and assembled notion of habitat formulate certain relationship around species, devices, technologies, I discuss the framework of biomediation which Mack Hagood developed from disability media studies, and the generative narratives of companion species by Donna Haraway. Ultimately, the takeaway is to recognize the power of the specific and the ordinary habitat.