understanding media: mcluhan

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964)

preface to third printing

vi: one explanation of medium is the message; any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment. “Environments are not passive wrappings but active processes.” thus electronic age creates a new environment in which the content is the old mechanized environment of industrial age–’reprocesses’ teh old one [just as tv reprocesses film.

vii: the change to writing and phonetic alphabet (later made even 'hotter' by printing) necessitates new education by 'classified data'

in electronic age, 'data classification yields to pattern recognition' or study of configurations. Note that the student who grows up in this electronically configured world of circuits, integral patterns, not of fragments is viewed as having depth (perhaps in line with his view of participator cool media

"The student today lives mthically and in depth. At school, however, he encounters a situation organized by means of classified information."

[intersting that this view locates distraction and fragmentation with the mechanical that the electronic replaces, specifically with print and typography, typographic man--and locates depth and participation with the cooler media of electronic communication/information.--direct reversal of Birkerts]

furhters this in writing about the ‘technology of literacy’ (4) and the fragmentaion of machine technology (of which the alphabet and print are paramount) vs the integral nature of automation technology–p. 8

172: history of printed word: lack of understanding of its effects

chapter on photography:

190: don’t agree with his view that syntax disappears (seems to neglect photographic metonymy–or view this as without code) ’statement without syntax–201. But 194: interesting view of how photography affects art: turn to inner making, present creative processes for public participation. [thus photography makes art cooler medium

31: cool medium demands involvement in process, participation in depth.

i wonder if much has been followed up on the issue of education/pedagogy and McLuhan–especially with reference to cool/participation. would it be effective to apply this to views of writing pedagogy: frame it in part as a contest or tension between the hot characterists of print and paper (which seems to be an echo of Lanham’s looking through) and desire for more participation in the process.

57: chapter “Media as Translators”

perhaps here a way to bring in my view of metonymy to his focus on shift from mechanical to electronic (and hot to cold). key shift: mechanical media, extensions of body; electronic, extensions of consciousness. But in this shift into information, perhaps (a la Hayles) still seem trace of the body and mechanical. REads as determinsitic (yes), but also links the new with old.

By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth…will be translated into information systems…

hayles: how we became posthuman

 

Critical link on virtuality (and its materiality): Hayles. A version, more complex and historicized, of the remediation argument: of the material reality of mediation, despite and because of its apprent claims for transparency (immateriality, virtuality)

How We Became Posthuman

Page 28: medium’s materiality.

All information (despite the postmodern view towards immateriality and disembodiment) always tied to a medium [p. 13]

 

26: difference between the signification of type and how electronic changes that (returns us to its visual as well as mediational. Note that the apparently immaterial actually turns into greater sense of the material and embodiment; but also a resistance to abstraction, comprehension. Absorbing—but then note it is absorbing the recognition of dispersion.

Seems to me she is envisioning a reader’s touch with text that Whitman is imagining—where reading doesn’t stop.

 

Her argument here sounds like version of remediation: the erasure of the medium is in effect (or should be) the focus of the information, and where the information derives its effect.

I see here a particular place to apply to what digital textuality is revealing/remediating of the erased materiality/mediacy of print texts.

“As the emphasis shifts to pattern and randomness, characteristics of print texts that used to be transparent (because they were so pervasive) are becoming visible again through their differences from digital textuality… The pattern/radnomness dialectic [the information binary that seems to have replaced the presnece/absence binary of embodiment and earlier textual bodies] does not erase the material world…This illusion of erasure should be the subject of inquiry.

 

p. 29: uses term ‘informatics’ to define relation between human and textual bodies

[echoes of WW—the links sought in the body of work

 

Hayles then not only reminds us that virtuality (and information) always has a material base in a medium, a body of information; she argues that the very locations of virutal bodies and texts that today seem to take us further into immateriality, into the dispersion of information, in fact can serve to highlight the erasures of embodiment that are not new to 21st c. virtuality. Thus: erasures also of the print age. Isn’t this the case with Whitman—who sought the virtual as a form of embodiment?

 

 

3.6..07:

Thought is to frame the exploration through three areas/issues of virtuality that the digital archive offers. My effort is to re-think distraction: as a textual condition that resists abstraction. The three areas—which emerge in the focus on the materiality of the medium, hypermediacy:

–embodiment: focusing on Whitman’s textual body (especially the images, the books); ties to Mcgann

–empathy: the reader; tie to Remediation’s focus on virtual empathy. Focus on summoning of the memoranda?

–error: Joyce—fervent error, extravagance—issues of hypertext and pedagogy; mcgann’s notice of the interdiscilinary—the moving across boundaries.

For Whitman, error tied to wandering, to dispersion and deferral to reader (to future readers, incomplete texts, specimens). A serious question to raise is always how far do we take students in that direction—how seriously can they enter into error (or into Emerson’s circles, another version: another circle can be drawn). To the extent that digital archive shifts toward a writerly environment, I believe it makes this possible without falling into deconstructive versions of error, call it ruminant textuality. And a middle ground I can end with: interdisciplinary (and related: multimedia). These are things we as scholars and teachers know are important to books and reading and writing and learning—and which we have left out of our classrooms for too long.