NOTES ON TEXTS RELATING TO MEDIA
NOTES -> MEDIA
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Medium is the Message - Marshal Mcluhan
Imaginative strategy based on adequate diagnosis would prescribe a corresponding depth or structural approach to the existing literaly and visual world
Perhaps the most obvious ‘closure’ or psychic consequence of any new technology is just the demand for it
This power of technology to create its own world of demand is not independent of technology being first an extension of our own bodies and senses
The need to use the senses that are available is as insistent and breathing- a fact that makes sense of the urge to keep Radio and TV going more or less continuously
Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of ‘what the public wants’ played over its own nerves
Extensions of our own bodies as really ‘out there’ and really independent of us
The area of impact and incision is numb. It is the entire system that is changed
The somewhat devious means of diagnosis that have to be used to pin down the actual form and impact of a new medium are not unlike those indicated in detective fiction
The technique of starting with the thing to be discovered and working back, step by step, as on an assembly line, to the point at which its is necessary to start in order to reach the desired object --→ in the arts this meant starting with the effect and then inventing a poem, painting, or building that would have just that effect and no other
This is a very different thing from the numbing or narcotic effect of new technology that lulls attention while the new form slams the gates of judgment and perception
Technique of the suspended judgment, presents the possibility of rejecting the narcotic and of postponing indefinitely the operation of inserting the new technology in the social psyche
New media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics
(impunity)
aware of the changes in sense perception
money has reorganized the sense life of peoples just because it is an extension of our sense lives - ???
(etherialization) – screens??
Is the response of our opinions that is relevant to the effect of media and technology in society, a ‘point of view’ that is plainly the result of the typographic spell
Acquires the illusion of the third dimension
Technological media are staples or natural resources, society whose economy is dependent upon one or two major staples, is going to have some obvious social patterns of organization as a result. Stress on a few major staples created extreme instability in the economy but great endurance in the population
Cotton and oil, like radio and tv, become ‘fixed charges’ on the entire psychic life of the community
That it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind
The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another medium as ‘content’
Everything seemed cut off at its root and therefore infected with illusion
But in England the paths run criss-cross, and it is only by traveling down each one of them that one can build up a picture of the whole
Cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole
The message, it seemed, was the ‘content’, as people used to ask what a painting was about
For mechanization is achieved by fragmentation of any process and by putting the fragmented parts in a series
That one thing follows another accounts for nothing. Nothing follows from following, except change
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
If it works, its obsolete - ???
The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value
Splitting and dividing all things as means of control
Personal and social consequences of any medium
Result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves
It was not the machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message
The essence of automation technology is the opposite. It is integral and decentralist in depth, just as the machine was fragmentary, centralist, and superficial in its patterning of human relationships
The electric light is pure information. It is medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. this fact, characteristic of all media, means that the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium
For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs
The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association
Content of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium
Moving information (with content) escapes attention as a medium because it has no content VISIBLE
It is not the light but the content that is noticed
Decentralized
Eliminate time and space factors
Creating involvement in depth
“but soft! What light though yonder window breaks? It speaks, yet says nothing” – romeo and julliet
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________