Digital Hybridity

I’m part of a research project at the University of Derby, a two-month on-line discussion of Digital Hybridity .  The topic itself seems to change every time I think about it.  Hybridity is a quality, surely, a quality that may often — perhaps usually — not be perceptible.  It is perceptible exactly to the extent the observer already knows the constituents, and so can recognise that the hybrid differs from all of them.  If you don’t know the constituents, you may be seeing a blend of things that looks perfectly plausible, but isn’t, and never was…like a hallucination.

The qualifier “digital” indicates that we talking about media, which I take to be codes.  Maybe any sort of perceptibility depends on some sort of overcoming of difference, some kind of meshing or merging in keeping with a coherent, if not a uniform code.  So the transaction, or transition from constituents to hybrid involves loss and gain.  Two sets of chromosomes copy parts of themselves into a new mix according to rules, insuring that resulting creature will have just one head, two arms, etc…