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

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ENHANCE OBSOLESCE

RETRIEVE REVERSE

McLuhan’s Method|The Tetradic Grid

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McLuhan’s Method|The Tetradic Grid

Fluid Fiction

The Printed WordThe PhotographMotorcarGamesThe TelephoneMoviesTelevisionElectronic Media

The Four Laws of Media|

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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

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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