McLuhan starts with a bang, and includes probably his most well-known catchphrase in the first sentence: "The medium is the message." Somebody put a check mark next to it in the library book I'm reading. Thanks.
I think the media people use do influence their way of thinking, perhaps the structure of their thoughts or ideas, but I am not sure I literally believe the medium is the message. The medium influences the message, and filters it. For example there are "television" stories, (with nice things to look at) and there are "newspaper" stories (with ideas, argument, and conflict, usually between people). I think changes introduced by a new medium are usually accidental. The intended message is still the content.
Page 9
Was General Electric really in the business of “moving” information, just because it made electric lights? Would it be more accurate to say GE is “enabling” content? Maybe my sense of the phrase “moving information” is different than it would have been to someone in 1962. I think of a file being FTP'ed across the internet. Perhaps using AT&T internet service!
Oooo!!!! Mainstream Media Smackdown on Page 11!
I think this passage is interesting, because it shows how some attitudes have changed, and changed again.
I assume the old-guard “General” David Sarnoff was responding to a growing skepticism towards technology in the 1960's, at a time when more avant garde people were realized that technology had brought us the nuclear bomb and ICBM's (see the lyrics to Plastic Fantastic Lover by Jefferson Airplane). I suspect McLuhan would have sided with those suspicious of the high tech/military industrial complex.
Of course, the internet which this class is all about was at least partly created by that same military industrial complex. And some of the same avant garde people who forty years ago would have been criticizing dehumanization because of technology, are today taking part in social media. Today, the old guard tends to criticize social media (“Twitter? You can't say anything in so few words.” “Facebook? I'm worried about putting all my information up there where anyone can see.”)
There is an odd sort of a shift here: Because of the internet and social media, I think the young or avant garde people are more tech-friendly than they would have been in the 1960's. The old guard today is more suspicious, or at least less understanding of it.
Sarnoff does have a legitimate point. In the context of content, any medium can be helpful or horrible. After an earthquake in Italy, the radio can broadcast instructions on where shelters or medical clinics are operating. In an ethnic powder keg in Rawanda, the radio can broadcast persuasive instructions to Hutus on where to find Tutsis and hack their limbs off with machetes. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3257748.stm)
Page 12
Hmm. Here is another quote that might be relevant in a class on new media: “Just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves become visible on the wings of the plane. The sudden visibility of sound just as sound ends is an apt instance of that great pattern of being that reveals new and opposite forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance.”
Were newspapers in their peak performance in the 1990's???
Page 14
“DeToqueville, in earlier work on the French Revolution, had explained how it was the printed word that, achieving cutural saturation in the eighteenth century, had homogenized the French nation. Frenchmen were the same kind of people from north to south. The typographic principles of uniformity, continuity, and lineality had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society. The Revolution was carried out by the new literati and lawyers.”
Does the internet/social media make some sort of change possible in the United States (or the world) today?
Page 16
“...understanding stops action, and Nietzsche observed...” How does this observation apply to talk topics during listener call in segments on AM radio...? If the callers or host only have one side of an issue, it makes it easier for them to fill in the gaps, and generate outrage (which is the spice that keeps much talk radio interesting).
Page 16
“We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world, and beaches him in individual isolation.”
This sounds similar to the modern concept of digital immigrants and digital natives. The immigrants being people who are coming to new media later in life, after having grown accustomed to the norms of old media. They learn to get by, but they are never truly at home, and they will probably always speak with an accent. The natives are the people (usually young) for who new media have simply always been around. They grew up in this media space, so it is their homeland.
Page 19
Okaaaaay... If electronic media circa 1964 was the equivalent of Hitler in the 1930's, have we really seen World War Three in the minds of Americans in the last 45 years? I don't think so. Perhaps McLuhan would argue his work alerted the nation to this threat? If so, what happened in the ensuing decade to defeat this “electric technology within the gates?”
Page 20/21
“For each of the media is also a powerful weapon with which to clobber other media and other groups. The result is that the present age has been one of multiple civil wars that are not limited to the world of art and entertainment.”
Media cause wars?
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