As discussed in his text “Limites Borrados” [Blurred Boundaries] (in: O Estado de São Paulo, no. 398, September 19, 1964), for Vilém Flusser models signify worldviews within a cultural process. Models are structures that organize thinking and are experienced as reality by people belonging to the same culture. Models are reality, and reality is language, which means that models are linguistic creations. In this sense, nothing is “given” or natural; everything is created by thinking. Humans create languages because they need to communicate with others. Languages function as media from which reality emerges, like mechanisms of externalization and intersubjectivity. The difference between things which are perceived as natural and those that are not is that the former are already so internalized that they appear as “givens.”Yet they were created by thinking just like the others. Therefore, if nothing is “given,” it is because realities can be changed. Nonetheless, all realities function as models of experience.

Models are structures that organize thinking, are experienced as references to culture, and serve as role models and norms. This is because they usually endure beyond the span of individual lifetimes and even for generations. Models are relatively stable; they serve as the basis of cultures and thus, as a consequence, of each of its members. Their structure is based on a thought pattern, which is characterized both by a dominant medium and by the relationship between various languages. In other words, the thought pattern of a certain era is directly connected with the form imposed by the dominant communication medium and by the linguistic diversity that constitutes this cultural process. As Flusser puts it, models are the ground we stand on (ibid., p. 1).

Original article by Rachel Costa in Flusseriana