User:Luni/Into the Universe of Technical Images, Vilém Flusser, 1985

Intro

- What becomes most salient for Flusser’s theory of media is the consequence of writing for temporality. Flusser makes a great deal of the fact that writing is linear—that in this medium, one thing inexorably comes after another. One cannot easily skip around in a written text (i.e., until hypertext emerged with the digitization of writing).

- Like McLuhan, Flusser repeatedly hailed the end of print and the onset of the age of images. He opens his book on writing, for example, with the following: “Writing, in the sense of placing letters and other marks one after another, appears to have little or no future.”3 Just as McLuhan pronounced the end of the “Gutenberg Galaxy,” so Flusser proclaimed the end of writing.

- Flusser contrasts culture based on writing with culture based on images. In contrast to Derrida, Flusser associates the institution of writing not so much with a change in the form of memory (as différance) but with resistance to images: “Greek philosophy and Jewish prophecy are battle cries against images on behalf of texts.”8

- There is a thickening, intensification, and increasing complexity to the use of information machines, technologies that are necessary in the production, reproduction, storage, and distribution of texts, images, and sounds—the constituent elements of culture. This phenomenon has been termed a “media ecology,”1 adding a new layer to the ecologies of animal, vegetable, and mineral. It behooves anyone engaged in critical discourse to take serious account of media. I argue that media offer a key to understanding the process of globalization in relation to a new configuration of interaction between humans and machines.

Abstract

- And so one is tempted to say that linear texts have played only an ephemeral role in the life of human beings, that “history” was only a diversion, and that we are now in the process of turning back to two-dimensionality, into the imaginary, magical, and mythical. Many aspects of emerging life structures, for example, the magic that flows from technical images or the magic-ritual behavior of those knowledgeable about technical images, appear to confirm this view.