I’m trying to decide whether the words in my conference are embodied or not. It’s surprisingly difficult. Is Santa embodied? What about heavens? Or mind? I’m writing this, so is writing embodied?<\/p>\n
The distinction between virtual and real isn’t very clear when you come to think of it.<\/p>\n
I guess all abstract nouns are virtual: goodness, health, opinion. But they’re pre-technology virtual. So health is abstract and therefore virtual, but it’s also embodied most of the time.<\/p>\n
The Ancient Greeks used to personify all abstract nouns as gods. I guess if they’d been around today there’d have been a range of gods in the pantheon representing email and virtual community. This idea has been taken up to a certain extent by the Catholic church, where abstract nouns get patrons saints. I note that Saint Isidore of Seville is the proposed saint of Internet users despite his having died in the seventh century.<\/p>\n
\u00a0OK, I’m rambling, enough already.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m trying to decide whether the words in my conference are embodied or not. It’s surprisingly difficult. Is Santa embodied? What about heavens? Or mind? I’m writing this, so is writing embodied? The distinction between virtual and real isn’t very clear when you come to think of it. I guess all abstract nouns are virtual: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-embodiment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/r.m.ferguson\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}