06 Technology & Mediation

Paper

McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

Thesis

• Societies more shaped by the nature of the media than by the content of the communication. All media are extensions of some human faculty.

• The global village; we all connected and able to participate without the limitations of time and space. Electric circuitry message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic and political parochialism. A place for everything and everything in its place.

  • We used to go to the factory to work and resume our personal lives after we step out but now work is ubiquitous and permeates into every moment of our lives. It is life and work has been blended into a single concoction, and you are unable to separate them back.

  • It is an instantaneous world of electric informational media involves all of us, all at once.

So what? & Notes

• Applying this to social media Instagram = dominated by edited curation of a person life = simulation of reality = creates a hyperreality = causes depression

• Printing as the first uniform repeatable commodity

• Print tech created the public. Electric tech created the mass. Public =sepeate individuals walking around with separated fixed pov.

• Our official culture is striving to force the new media to do the world of the old

• Teach-in = package to discovery in educational processes = new way

• Electric circuitry confers a mythic dimension our ordinary individual and group action, Forces us to live myth but we continue to fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes.

• Television demands participation and involvement = engagement

• Information war happening constantly and involving everybody everywhere

Manovich, "Understanding Meta-Media"

• Metamedia is the remapping of old media objects into new structures

• Data or parameters from old media is channeled into a new domain for manipulation. Eg. using visual to sound then glitched then back to visual

• This does not apply to just media but only our bodies too, we can use sensors and interactive gadgets that mapped human interaction or processes. Eg. The works of Afik Rendol using machine-learning algorithm to sort 1.7 million documents to generate an immersive installation

• Metamedia object contains language and meta-language - the original media structure and the extension/simulation/amplification

So What?

• It echoes the McLuhan's Medium is the message; where everything is simply an extension of something else: Thoughts > speech > writing > prints > internet??

Conclusion

• Everything has become unified and ubiquitous - there is no linear form of production or consumption. Everything is being churned out and consume at the same time in a radical new way. Internet and media has birthed a collective consciousness of the world