Knowledge media and McLuhan

Communicating Knowledge in New MediaOr just Communicating?

The Legacy of Marshall McLuhan - Revisiting the Message Copenhagen Oct 31 2011

Hans Jørn Nielsen Royal School of Library and Information Science

Associate Professor PhD Hans Jørn Nielsen

Media are about communications

The McLuhan inspiration: exploring the traffic patterns of communication and their impact on society and on being a human

Media as social technologies, not as ”literary” content Mediation and ”mediatization” processes

For McLuhan the transition from print media to electronic media made media visible

Media were not just containers of content or transparent windows

For us the transition from print media and electronic mass media to digtial media networks makes media visible once again

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A textbook

Hans Jørn Nielsen, Helene Høyrup, Hans Dam Christensen (ed.): Nye vidensmedier. Kultur, læring, kommunikation. Frederiksberg: Forlaget Samfundslitteratur, 2011

Title in English: New Knowledge Media. Culture, Learning, Communication

Our textbook is not about McLuhan

He is, though, mentioned in a few of the articles Several of the articles focus on kinds of media and kinds of communications Knowledge mediation

I will present some of the themes of the book and shortly make a few associative links to McLuhan

It will be slightly biased and will not do justice to all of the articles

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Knowledge media

Our textbook explores mediation of knowledge in several kinds of media

Knowledge as a generic term

Knowledge = embedding of information in agents of communications

Knowledge media are not some specific media

A knowledge medium is any medium facilitating acquisition of knowledge (formally and informally)

You can regard any medium as a knowledge medium

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Themes of knowledge in the articles

Theory of knowledge Epistemological and theoretical concepts of knowledge and of media

Theory of Knowledge Organization Knowledge and learning

Media in formal learning processes, education Web tutorials

Knowledge and literacy Knowledge from print to digital media

From authoritative encyclopedia to Wikipedia Knowledge and social media

From one-way communication to participatory cultures Knowledge in visual mediation Knowledge in fiction and Literary festivals as knowledge media The art exhibition as knowledge medium

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Documents and literacies

A medium may be defined in a narrow sense as different formatations of a written document

As print As digital PDF As microfilm As xerox copy

These may be seen as different ”media” versions of exactly the same document (B. Hjørland’s article)

And then ”the medium is not the message”, Hjørland claims From another point of view they are all versions of written texts (and therefore they are

remediations of the same medium) Pure digitalizations of books, e-books, are not neccessarily a farewell to print culture They still belong to the old literacy

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”Neither Hume nor Kant, however, detected the hidden cause of our Western bias toward sequence as ”logic” in the allpervasive technology of the alphabet. Today in the electric age we feel as free to invent nonlineal logics as we do to make non-Euclidean geometries”

(Understanding media, 1964. Ark edition 1987:85)

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Text and Knowledge Structure

Charles Bazerman in his article:

It is within texts that we record and share our information; in fact we often gather information for the purpose of creating texts to carry out a desired action. Thus there is a correspondence between genre and the kind of information contained in it

We organize information and knowledge in texts, and the genres of texts determine the knowledge structure

And genres are imbedded in different social systems with different purposes

Texts are not just containers of data

Even publication manuals are not neutral standards of knowledge organization

Hjørland points at the critique of Publication manual of the American Psychological Association: It favours specific philosophies of science

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“Gutenberg made everybody a reader. Xerox makes everybody a publisher”(McLuhan in interview 1975)

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The Medium is the Message

The content of the single document is the same in PDF, Xerox copy, microfilm, HTML, but the message of the Xerox as a communication medium is: everybody can be a publisher

The same message goes for the internet as a medium

Axel Bruns: Produser og produsage (producer+user; product+usage) Mentioned in two of the articles

A radical change in the conditions of knowledge mediation

Authoritative knowledge is still needed But it is embedded in a medium where it constantly is object for negotiations, dialogues and

perhaps changes (Wikipedia), redistributions, remixings, retellings Information is already there; in hundreds of versions The Gutenberg Paranthesis (article by Lars Ole Sauerberg)

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”I have no point of view. As for example now: See, I could’n’t possibly have a point of view. I’m just moving around, picking up information from many directions”

(McLuhan in TV interview 1967. Sitting on an office chair in front of an audience, pivoting all the time)

”No, a point of view means a static, fixed position, and you cannot have a static, fixed position in the electric age. It is impossible to have a point of view in the electric age and have any meaning at all”

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The need of a critical theory of media

Jack Andersen’s article:

The necessity of a critical theory of knowledge and of knowledge media

Media today are embedded in people’s everyday life (communication and construction of knowledge)

Search machines are not neutral

How is the first post in a Google search created?

We are ”picking up information from many directions” (McLuhan), i.e. zapping and surfing

Which consequences has this in relation to truth?

A critical theory of media will create reflexive users

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Digital Literacy

Helene Høyrup’s article:

The new ”Digital Paradigm”: Literacy from ”Book Space” to multimodal and multimedial media

New literacy is not only new competences but holds changes in our cultural makings of meaning at all levels

Again: the tradition of Medium Theory (and indirectly: McLuhan)

New digital network media are born to be media of dialogue and knowledge exchange

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A Conversation Medium

Hans Jørn Nielsen’s article:

The Internet is both a huge knowledge archive and a medium for conversation

Neil Postman said that the message of the internet is ”More information”

”The message is that through more and more information, more conveniently packaged, more swiftly delivered, we will find solutions to our problems” (Speech in Stuttgart 1990)

Postman – of course - did not approve this message (”Informing ourselves to Death”)

Another message of the Internet is: ”More conversation”

Dialogical conversation media ”More conversation is good”; The utopias of the internet: Participatory culture, collective intelligens, the knowledge space

of participatory networks (Henry Jenkins); the ”produsers” of the internet (Axel Bruns)

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Conversations of the Net

Resemblance with face-to-face oral communication

Contact, feelings, communion, social intercourse The phatic function of language (Roman Jakobson) ”exchange of ritualized formulas” Facebook, Twitter, IM

B. Malinowski: the language as ”free aimless, social intercourse”

[…] all such are exchanged, not in order to inform, not in this case to connect people in action, certainly not in order to express any thought “

Small talk, chat, twitter

On the borderline to a non-existing referential function

Knowledge media? Communicating knowledge or just communicating?

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Social media as conversation and knowledge exchange

But sometimes they are talking about something

The Jenkins optimism is followed in two articles

Lotte Nyboe: the participatory culture in a children’s social book site Tove Arendt Rasmussen: video production and social video exchange on YouTube

Examples of social media with ”free aimless social intercourse” and at the same time sharing and distributing knowledge

Creation of new ”knowledge communities”

Often in circuits outside traditionel knowledge institutions

The old knowledge centres must be distributed

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”Electric speeds create centers everywhere. Margins cease to exist on this planet”

(Understanding Media, 1964. ARK edition 1987:91)

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Knowledge media and McLuhan

Education

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