Week 3 (Machinic)

This weeks readings on Media Ecology confused me quite a lot with the various European and American readings combined with the multiple theorists like Guattari, Mcluhan and Ong and their many critics. However, I feel the easiest way for me to grasp even an inkling of this vast theorem is to focus the North American perception which is more in line with McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” which builds upon last week.

What particularly interested me this week was the way McLuhan split history into four periods, the tribal, literate, print and electronic ages. This somewhat simplified look that brought the focus to our five primary senses beginning with hearing slowly making way to sight throughout history, slowly ending in a convolution of almost all the senses in the electronic age. When I mulled over this concept I found that technology itself has not only become extensions of our human selves but also grown their own senses. From buttons to heat sensors, the smart phone in particular has grown to encompass both hearing and touch.

Think about Siri for a second; while coming with a number of frustrating drawbacks, namely accent detection, it is perhaps one of the earliest globally commercialised voice command technologies that is sure to evolve in the future. This ‘app’ essentially gave the “living” sense of hearing to a technology that was perhaps the sole outcome of convergence. Furthermore, the smart phone and more recently the tablet PC, has hijacked the sense of touch. Today, communication isn’t about how we ‘feel’ (asin touch), but rather, how we obtain results by satisfying the devices sensors. It is as if humans have become the ‘tools’, where, if your friend can’t use your touch screen it is always the friend’s fail and not the devices.

When looking at all four of McLuhan’s ages, it seems the next (or perhaps only) step is to cover the senses of smell and taste. This is somewhat already in effect with a number of artworks (some of which are electronic) incorporating smell as well as marketing campaigns for internet taste testing, for example Pepsi’s somewhat failed attempt at a midcalorie soda the “Pepsi NEXT internet taste test”. While in its infancy, these technologies are sure to evolve and bring the senses of smell and taste streaming into our media governed world.

Main References:

Levinson, Paul (1997) ‘The First Digital Medium’ in Soft Edge; a natural history and future of the information revolution London: Routledge:11-20

 ‘Media Ecology’, Wikipedia, available at < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_ecology > 

 Anon. (2008) ‘The Three Ecologies – Felix Guattari’, Media Ecologies and Digital Activism: thoughts about change for a changing world. Available at <http://mediaecologies.wordpress.com/2008/10/07/the-three-ecologies-felix-guattari/ >

Week 2 (Events)

For my first blog I will focus on the week 2 lecture and readings as most of the week 1 content involved book keeping and past subjects from previous courses.

This weeks main concept of the 'Machinic Ecology' highlighted the importance of media and technology not only in modern society, but throughout most if not all of human history; that the human way of life now basically only involves technology and the various techniques we use to access and operate them. Through all this, two major opposing theories have emerged, with opinion swaying between Mcluhan's "the medium is the message" (technical determinism) and the more current postulation that includes the complex interplay of factors associated with cultural change (cultural materialist) focusing on a number of issues technical determinism seems to have dismissed as petty distractions.

While there a number of perfectly valid and rational assertions by those of the cultural materialist view, I personally agree with Mcluhan's view that the "message is the medium" as it creates a relatively simplistic yet rational view of a complex situation perhaps over-complicated by cultural materialists. The obvious example in supporting this is the televised era where it seemed that the T.V. was the centre of every household, with popular televised shows dictating conversation throughout society. It became habit and routine where even content faded and the act of watching t.v. was done for the sole purpose of having watched t.v. Even today parallel's can be found while looking at the countless hours spent by people of all ages (myself included) trawling through the internet just as a form of procrastination. Technology has even become part of the language we speak (which in itself can be seen as a technology), with words like "facebooked", "Wiki'd", and "googled" becoming commonplace in conversations, even substituting as a form of legitimacy with having "googled" something bringing considerable backing to its truth.

A number of other points also interested me, including Jeffries (the guardian article) example of the lightbulb which doesn't have content yet its technology allwoed us to 'colonise the dark'. McLuhan further wrote "A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence." I found this had distinct parallels to the "invention" or discovery of the fire by cavemen, who, with this new technology, were opened to an entirely new world inaccessible beforehand. This further links to Plato's Cave which utilizes the properties of the fire to reveal the new world which was discovered, and quite similar to the techinical determinist view, seems to have dictated how the people who existed then, as well as us today, existed in our technologically ordained way of life.

 

 

Main References:

Murphie, Andrew and Potts, John (2002) 'Theoretical Framworks' in Culture and technology London: Palgrave: 11-38.

Jeffries, Stuart (2011) 'Friedrich Kittler and the rise of the machine' in The Guardian accessible at <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/28/friedrich-kittler-rise-of-the-machine >

[image found at] <http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm>