“Stories are how we understand the world, and technology is how we choose our stories.” (176)

In the talk that Jed gave on tuesday, he said that “when you are immersed in language, you don’t pay attention to it.” How then, might we apply that to this notion that technology is how we choose our stories? We are arguably very immersed in our technology, and it would be a departure from the norm to step back and look at how those stories are made, or what they are even. Jed talked about language becoming palpable when you are forced to pay attention to it, and I would like to end this thought with a quote from a linguist referenced in both my and Jed’s bibliography: “The artist-innovator must impose a new form on our perceptions, if we are able to detect in a given thing those traits that went unnoticed the day before. He may present the object in an unusual perspective, he may violate the rules of composition canonized by his predecessors.” The key to making meaning palpable is through ostranenie, or defamiliarization-or Ezra Pound’s “make it new”. Why then, does the word “weird” have such a negative connotation?