Post 10: Soderman

I thought that Soderman's expansion of the notion of the indexical was intriguing. I am particularly interested in his discussion of the function of the index as assurance of the external world, his statement that "with the emergence of computerization and digital imaging ... our "common environment" has mutated and thus indexicality has mutated," and how both of these relate to his injunction at the end of the article, that whatever "assurance" the digital image gives us about our "common environment" "must be interrogated" (161, 176). It seems that Soderman's conception of the digital index invests the index with more...power? Meaning? (I'm not sure of exactly what I want to say here). Maybe it's this: there is a sense that, in his expansion of the index, he makes the distance between the indexical and the objective more apparent.