Upload
tiffany-wilkerson
View
214
Download
0
Tags:
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
UNDERSTANDING MEDIA: WHAT WOULD MCLUHAN SAY?
Image: Thomas Mannhttp://www.pixtur.org/welcome/about
Anne Balsamo,Understanding Media Studies September 21, 2015
Fluid Fiction
How does one understand the cultural impact of media?
Fluid Fiction
What is the relationship between technology and culture?
Fluid Fiction
The Medium is the Message|The Medium is the Massage
Fluid Fiction
Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time….
Every culture and every age has its favorite model ofperception and knowledge that it is inclined to prescribefor everybody and everything.
[My work] explores the contours of our own extendedbeings in our technologies, seeking the principle o intelligibility in each of them.
The Medium is the Message|
Fluid Fiction
Every culture and every age has its favorite model ofperception and knowledge that it is inclined to prescribefor everybody and everything.
[My work] explores the contours of our own extendedbeings in our technologies, seeking the principle ofintelligibility in each of them.
The Medium is the Message|
Fluid Fiction
What is the meaning of a particular technology?
How can we see on the unobserved and the unintended impact, as well as on the obvious and preferred?
The Medium is the Message|
The personal and social consequences of any medium – that is of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale introduced into our affairs by any new technology.
The message of any medium or technology is the change in scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.
The Medium is the Message|
The content of any medium is always another medium.
It is typical that the content of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.
Our approach to media study considers not only content but [also] the medium itself and the cultural matrix within which the particular medium operates.
The Medium is the Message|
Fluid Fiction
What does the artifact enlarge or ENHANCE?
What does it erode or OBSOLESCE?
What does it RETRIEVE that waspreviously obsolesced?
What does it REVERSE into when pushed to the limits of its potential?
McLuhan’s Method|The Tetradic Grid
Fluid Fiction
ENHANCE OBSOLESCE
RETRIEVE REVERSE
McLuhan’s Method|The Tetradic Grid
Fluid Fiction
McLuhan’s Method|The Tetradic Grid
Fluid Fiction
The Printed WordThe PhotographMotorcarGamesThe TelephoneMoviesTelevisionElectronic Media
The Four Laws of Media|
Fluid Fiction
ENHANCES: Spread of power; fixed point of view; detachment and objectivity; cause and effect reasoning; uniformity and repeatability; nationalism.
OBSOLESCES: Gesture and personal memory
RETRIEVES: The written word
REVERSES: Ubiquity of text without meaning; text as symbol
The Four Laws of Media|The Printed Word
Fluid Fiction
ENHANCES: Human self-awareness
OBSOLESCES: Painting
RETRIEVES: Attention to gesture and posture
REVERSES: The purpose of travel: not to encounter the strange and unfamiliar, but to visit the familiar and the already seen
The Four Laws of Media|The Photograph
Fluid Fiction
ENHANCES: Movement through time and space; the suburbs; the shopping mall
OBSOLESCES: Walking; physical and social distance
RETRIEVES: Armor for the horserider
REVERSES: Standing still
The Four Laws of Media|The Motorcar
Fluid Fiction
ENHANCES: Social interaction within artificial paradises
OBSOLESCES: Stress of daily life
RETRIEVES: Collective re-enactment of shared drama
REVERSES: All the world’s a game, men are merely players
The Four Laws of Media|Games
Fluid Fiction
ENHANCES: The ear and the voice
OBSOLESCES: The telegraph, smoke signals, hierarchy
RETRIEVES: Total participation in communication
REVERSES: Loneliness, a busy signal, “no one can come to the phone right now”
The Four Laws of Media|The Telephone
Fluid Fiction
ENHANCES: Multiple worlds; storytelling; dreams
OBSOLESCES: Time and single point of view
RETRIEVES: The theater; the ensemble art troupe
REVERSES: Fantasy as reality; reality as dream
The Four Laws of Media|Movies
Fluid Fiction
ENHANCES: Viewer as screen; non-linear storytelling; the global village; homogenization
OBSOLESCES: Movies, newspapers; linear narrative; high definition
RETRIEVES: The close up examination of human emotion
REVERSES: 500 channels and nothing to watch
The Four Laws of Media|Television
Fluid Fiction
ENHANCES: Simultaneity (all pov’s at once)
OBSOLESCES: Human logic and reasoning
RETRIEVES: The nervous system
REVERSES: Cacophony and the sender gets sent
The Four Laws of Media|Electronic Media
What is culture?
What is technology?
How to think about technology in non-deterministic ways?
How to recognize, so as to intervene, in the determining force of technology?
Cultural Studies|The relationship of technology & culture