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/ >