Rachael Shapiro

learner. teacher. maker.

Search Results Tag: marshall mcluhan

Bolter, Jay and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media.

by Rachael

Published on: January 12, 2012

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1999, digital democracy, diss, hypermediacy, immediacy, jay bolter, marshall mcluhan, remediation, richard grusin

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Bolter, Jay and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999. Print.

Summary

In this work on new media, Bolter and Grusin explain remediation as a contextualized process born of the relationship between immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy is the effect of representations whose media become so convincing as to become invisible, or “transparent.” Hypermediacy, on the other hand, is the achievement of near-reality through an overabundance of media that create a rich environment. In their assessment, all mediation is remediation, and all mediation seeks to get as close to reality as possible. Remediation also shapes reality, even as it attempts to emulate it.

Quotes

In addressing our culture’s contradictory imperatives for immediacy and hypermediacy, this film demonstrates what we call a double logic of remediation. Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them. (5)

Furthermore, media technologies constitute networks or hybrids that can be expressed in physical, social, aesthetic, and economic terms. Introducing a new media technology does not mean simply inventing new hardware and software, but rather fashioning (or refashioning) such a network. The World Wide Web is not merely a software protocol and text and data files. It is also the sum of the uses to which this protocol is now being put: for marketing and advertising, scholarship, personal expression, and so on. These uses are as much a part of the technology as the software itself. For this reason, we can say that media technologies are agents in our culture without falling into the trap of technological determinism. New digital media are not external agents that come to disrupt an unsuspecting culture. They emerge from within cultural contexts, and they refashion other media, which are embedded in the same or similar contexts. (19)

It is important to note that the logic of transparent immediacy does not necessarily commit the viewer to an utterly naive or magical conviction that the representation is the same thing as what it represents. Immediacy is our name for a family of beliefs and practices that express themselves differently at various times among various groups, and our quick survey cannot do justice to this variety. The common feature of all these forms is a belief in some necessary contact point between the medium and what it represents. (30)

Where immediacy suggests a unified visual space, contemporary hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is conceived of not as a window on to the world, but rather as “windowed” itself–with windows that open on to other representations or other media. The logic of hypermediacy multiplies the signs of mediation and in this way tries to reproduce the rich sensorium of human experience. On the other hand, hypermediacy can operate even in a single and apparently unified medium, particularly when the illusion of realistic representation is somehow stretched or altogether ruptured. (34)

In all its various forms, the logic of hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a visual space as mediated and as a “real” space that lies beyond mediation. (41)

Again, we call the representation of one medium in another remediation, and we will argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital media. What might seem at first to be an esoteric practice is so widespread that we can identify a spectrum of different ways in which digital media remediate their predecessors, a spectrum depending on the degree of perceived competition or rivalry between the new media and the old. (45)

Hypermedia and transparent media are opposite manifestations of the same desire: the desire to get past the limits of representation and to achieve the real. They are not striving for the real in any metaphysical sense. Instead, the real is defined in terms of the viewer;s experience; it is that which would evoke an immediate (and therefore authentic) emotional response. Transparent digital applications seek to get to the real by bravely denying the fact of mediation; digital hypermedia seek the real by multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as reality. Both of these moves are strategies of remediation. (53)

It would seem, then, that all mediation is remediation.

*Remediation as the mediation of mediation.

*Remediation as the inseparability of mediation and reality.

*Remediation as reform. (55-60)

Remediation can also imply reform in a social or political sense, and again this sense has emerged with particular clarity in the case of digital media. A number of American political figures have even suggested that the World Wide Web can the Internet can reform democracy by lending immediacy to the process of making decisions. When citizens are able to participate in the debate of issues and possibly even vote electronically, we may substitute direct, “digital” democracy for our representational system. Here too, digital media promise to overcome representation. Even beyond claims for overt political reform, many cyberenthusiasts assert that the web and computer applications are creating a digital culture that will revolutionize commerce, education, and social relationships. Thus, broadcast television is associated with the old order of hierarchical control, while interactive media move the locus of control to the individual. That digital media can reform and even save society reminds us of the promise that has been made for technologies throughout much of the twentieth century: it is a peculiarly, if not exclusively, American promise. American culture seems to believe in technology…(60)

“In an effort to avoid both technological determinism and determined technology, we propose to treat social forces and technical forms as two aspects of the same phenomenon: to explore digital technologies themselves as hybrids of technical, material, social, and economic facets.” (77)

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

by Rachael

Published on: January 12, 2012

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1964, cool media, extensions of man, hot media, marshall mcluhan, medium is the message, self-amputation

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McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994. Print.

Summary

In this seminal work, McLuhan provides an analysis of electronic media as the extension of human consciousness. Where in the mechanical age and with early media we extended our physical capacities, electronic media represent an extension of our central nervous system. This has the result of our being more open, more accountable to each other, more responsible as we are part of the global village, while at once also less potent. He distinguishes between hot media and cool media: hot are those media that are intense and deliver massive amounts of information directly to an individual, while cool media requires participation in order to build content. For McLuhan, that the medium is the message has only just become visible. That we attend to and understand these media and how they change us is McLuhan’s ultimate goal.

Quotes and Notes

The electronic age represents the extension of “our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man–the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. Whether the extension of consciousness, so long sought by advertisers for specific products, will be ‘a good thing’ is a question that admits of a wide solution. There is little possibility of answering such questions about the extensions of man without considering all of them together. Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex” (3-4)

The mechnical age and literacy allowed Westerners the ability to detach themselves from the products of their social actions, but: “In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the while of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner” (4). This aligns well with Jenkins, et al, but the whole drone thing combats the notion a bit… though global reaction reinforces it…

Global village: “As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed in bringing all social nd political functions together in sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree” (5).

From “The Medium is the Message”: That we can see the medium as the message is the result of a conflict brought on by electronic media: literacy as a technology shaped man to believe in sequence and rationality as appropriate sequence. But the ways in which electronic media expose and shed light on sequence, at the same that they compress time and space (and hence, confound it), bring us back to the understanding of the medium as the message. When we can look past it as vehicle for content (or other mediums), that is. (pp-14-17)

24: “Specialist technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes.”

30: “Nevertheless, it makes all the difference whether a hot medium is used in a hot or a cool culture.”

35: We think in terms of explosion, but this is due to the implosion brought on by electronic media which has made us more aware of and involved in each others’ lives.

38: Critique of Marx: While Marx reduced everything to the factory, he missed the opportunity to think in terms of media. “Marx based his analysis most untimely on the machine, just as the telegraph and other implosive forms began to reverse the mechanical dynamic” (38).

46: “To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it. To listen to radio or to read the printed page is to accept these extensions of ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the ‘closure’ or displacement of perception that follows automatically. It is this continuous embrace of our own technology in daily use that puts us in the Narcissus role of subliminal awareness and numbness in relation to these images of ourselves. By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods or minor religions. … Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology.”

47: “The principle of numbness comes into play with electric technology, as with any other. We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die. Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition. With our central nervous system strategically numbed, the tasks of conscious awareness and order are transferred to the physical life of man, so that for the first time he has become aware of technology as an extension of his physical body. Apparently this could not have happened before the electric age gave us the means of instant, total field-awareness. With such awareness, the subliminal life, private and social, has been hoicked up into full view, with the result that we have ‘social consciousness’ presented to us as a cause of guilt-felings. Existentialism offers a philosophy of structures, rather than categories, and of total social involvement instead of the bourgeois spirit of individual separateness or points of view. In the electric age we weal all mankind as our skin.”

49-51: Literacy was the most explosive technology.

51: Hybridity of technologies allows us to see media where before they were invisible, as we have come to understand language as a medium, for example.

56: “The technologies are ways of translating one kind of knowledge into another mode…”

57: “The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way. Words are a kind of information retrieval that can range over the total environment and experience at high speed. Words are complex systems of metaphors and symbols that translate experience into our uttered or outer senses. They are a technology of explicitness. By means of translation of immediate sense experience into vocal symbols the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant.”

58: “Under electric technology, the whole business of man becomes learning and knowing.”

61: “If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lived into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?”

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.

by Rachael

Published on: December 12, 2011

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:1994, death of literacy, digital literacy, eric havelock, historical continuity, literacy and culture, ludditism, marshall mcluhan, sven birkerts, walter ong

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Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York: Faber and Faber, 2006. Print.

Summary

Throughout this collection of essays, Birkerts juxtaposes (in often reductive binaries) the impact of print culture’s shift to electronic media, essaying his way through what he sees or foresees as the consequences of that shift. His primary concern has to do with the ways in which a decrease in reading and attention span will effect our collective ability to share a sense of values that follow historical continuity. Paradoxically, he is also concerned that people will be less able to form themselves as individuals (27-9). Ultimately, what Birkets seems to lament is his shifting place in history, given the displacement of many (privileged) traditional values with the proliferation of web technologies, an expanding canon, and shifting linguistic norms and practices.

His primary concern is that the material practice of reading print books has been an integral part of shaping the world and our culture, and ourselves, as we have known them, and that the ripple effect of media and how it reshapes each of those things are dangerous and should be held suspect.

Quotes

What this meant was not, narrowly, that a large sector of our population would not be able to enjoy certain works of literature, but that a much more serious situation was developing. For, in fact, our entire collective subjective history–the soul of our societal body–is encoded in print. Is encoded, and has for countless generations been passed along by way of the word, mainly through books. I’m not talking about facts and information here, but about the somewhat more elusive soft data, the expressions that tell us who we are and who we have been, that are, in effect, the cumulative speculations of the species. If a person turns from print–finding it too slow, too hard, irrelevant to the excitements of the present–then what happens to that person’s sense of cultural continuity? (20)

We can think of the matter in terms of gains and losses. The gins of electronic postmodernity could be said to include, for individuals, (a) an increased awareness of the “big picture,” a global perspective that admits the extraordinary complexity of interrelations; (b) an expanded neural capacity, an ability to accommodate a broad range of stimuli simultaneously; (c) a relativistic comprehension of situations that promotes the erosion of old biases and often expresses itself as tolerance; and (d) a matter-of-fact and unencumbered sort of readiness, a willingness to try new situations and arrangements.

In the loss column, meanwhile, are (a) a fragmented sense of time and a loss of the so-called duration experience, that depth phenomenon we associate with reverie; (b) a reduced attention span and a general impatience with sustained inquiry; (c) a shattered faith in institutions and in the explanatory narratives that formerly gave shape to subjective experience; (d) a divorce from the past, from a vital sense of history as a cumulative or organic process; (e) an estrangement from geographic place and community; and (f) an absence of any strong vision of a personal or collective future. (27)

As we now find ourselves at a cultural watershed–as the fundamental process of transmitting information is shifting from mechanical to circuit-driven, from page to screen–it may be time to ask how modifications in our way of reading may impinge upon our mental life. For how we receive information bears vitally on the ways we experience and interpret reality. (71-2)

We are experiencing in our times a loss of depth–a loss, that is, of the very paradigm of depth. A sense of the deep and natural connectedness of things is a function of vertical consciousness. Its apotheosis is what was once called wisdom. Wisdom: the knowing not of facts but of truths about human nature and the processes of life. But swamped by data, and in thrall to the technologies that manipulate it, we no longer think in these larger and necessarily more imprecise terms. In our lateral age, living in the bureaucracies of information, we don’t venture a claim to that kind of understanding. Indeed, we tend to act embarrassed around those once-frightened terms–truth, meaning, soul, destiny… We suspect the people who use such words of being soft and nostalgic. We prefer the deflating one-liner that reassures us that nothing need be taken that seriously; we inhale the atmospheres of irony. (74)

The order of print is linear, and bound to logic by the imperatives of syntax. It requires the active engagement of the reader, for reading is fundamentally an act of translation: ciphers are turned into their verbal referents and these are in turn interpreted. The print engagement is, further, private. While it does represent an act of communication, the contents pass from the privacy of the sender to the privacy of the receiver–writer to reader. Print also posits a time-axis; the turning of pages, not to mention the vertical progress through the page, is a forward-moving succession, with earlier contents at every point serving as a ground for what follows. Moreover, the printed material is static–it is the reader, not the book, the moves forward. The physical arrangements of print can be seen to accord with our traditional sense of history. Materials are layered; they lend themselves to rereading and to sustained inquiry. The pace of reading is variable, with progress determined by attentiveness and comprehension.

The electronic order is in most ways the opposite. Information and contents do not simply move from one private space to another, but they travel along a network. Engagement is intrinsically public, taking place within a circuit of larger connectedness. It can be passive, as with television watching, or interactive, as with computers. Contents, unless they are printed out (and thus part of the static order of print) are evanescent. With visual media, impression and image take precedence over logic and concept. The pace is quick, and the movement is laterally associative rather then vertically cumulative. The presentation prestructures the reception–the viewer absorbs a steady wash of packaged messages.

Further, the technology–visual and non-visual–in every way encourages in the user a heightened and ever-changing awareness of the present. The now. It works against historical perception, which must depend upon the inimical notions of logic and sequential succession. If the print medium exalts the world, fixing it into permanence, the electronic counterpart reduces it to a signal, a means to an end.

Transitions such as the one from print to electronic media do not take place without rippling–more likely, reweaving–the whole of the social and cultural web. And we don’t need to look far for evidence that this is what is happening. We can begin with the headlines, and the millennial lamentations sounded in the op-ed pages and on talk shows. That our educational systems are in decline; that our students are less and less able to read and comprehend their required texts, and that their aptitude scores are falling like the index of consumer confidence. That tag-line communication, called “bite-speak” by some, has destroyed the last remnants of discourse in our public political life and made spin-doctors and media consultants our new shamans. That as communications empires fight for global hegemony, publishing itself has fallen to the tyranny of the bottom line, and that the era of the “blockbuster” is upon us. That funding for the arts is being cut on every front, while the arts themselves appear to be suffering a deep crisis of irrelevance. And so on.

Every one of these developments is, of course, overdetermined, but there can be no doubt that they are profoundly connected to the transition that is underway. (122-3)

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.”

by Rachael

Published on: January 27, 2011

Categories: digital literacies, exams, Reading Notes

Tags:2004, composition, deborah brandt, discipline, globalization, kathy yancey, lester faigley, literacy, marshall mcluhan, multimodal composition, rhetoric of literacy

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Citation: Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” College Composition and Communication 56.2 (2004): 297-328. Print.

Summary: In the publication of her 2004 chair’s address, Yancey composes an intertextual work with four quartets, blocked off and bolded quotations, epigraphs, and metacommentary that tries to capture the spirit of her argument in a print-bound space.

She sets the piece with a description of the current moment of composition. She writes that:

never before has the proliferation of writings outside the academy so counterpointed the compositions inside. Never before have the technologies of writing contributed so quickly to the creation of new genres. The consequences of there two factors is the creation of a writing public that, in development and in linkage to technology, parallels the development of a reading pubic in the 19th century. And these parallels, they raise good questions, suggest ways that literacy is created across spaces, across time. (298)

Like those earlier reading publics, she points to the fervor with which people now engage in self-motivated public writing. She ends the opening by asking what writing is and how we should approach it, given the circumstances.

In the first quartet, Yancey further delineates the parallel between the 19th century reading public and today’s extensive writing public. She further highlights the global moment and the astounding fact that in an age of so much access to education, so much of this writing has nothing to do with school. She writes:

Like 19th-century readers creating their own social contexts for reading in reading circles, writers in the 21st centruy self-organize into what seem to be overlapping technologically driven writing circles, what we might call a series of newly imagined communities, communities that cross borders of all kinds–nation, state, class, gender, ethnicity. [...] the members of the writing public have learned–in this case, to write, to think together, to organize, and to act within these forums–largely without instruction and, more to the point here, largely without our instruction. (301)

As she transitions to the next quartet, Yancey poses the question of what all these shifts mean for teachers and researchers of composition. Following this, she discusses comp’s history as a gatekeeping system and suggests that through appropriate and better curriculum design we could be a gateway as well. After describing some common current practices in the comp classroom, she argues that “we already inhabit a model of communication practices incorporating multiple genres related to each other, those multiple genres remediated across contexts of time and space, linked one to the next, circulating across and around rhetorical situations both inside and outside school” (308).

Her next transition asks what ought to be the content of composition, in response to which she poses that we work on “three changes: Develop a new curriculum; revisit and revise our writing-across-the-curriculum efforts; and develop a major in composition and rhetoric” (308).

She proposes a writing and rhetoric major, which would fill the gap between FYC and grad education in comp. She urges us to think about circulation of texts in a multivalent way (public, intertextual, contextual, etc) (311), and she pitches a new model of composition that includes “circulation of composition, canons of rhetoric, and deicity of technology” (312). Circulation in this case means thing about genre, remediation, and knowledge making, among other things, her discussion of the canons reminds me of Collin’s book-calling for us to rethink them in the contemporary context; deicity refers to words like now and then, or, words that can mean very different things depending on the time or place. Literacy is like this, she says, especially now that technological change is so rapid. The spaces of digital writing prompt users to imagine new uses unintended by designers, and encourage new inventionary moments. She writes that

This new composition includes rhetoric and is about literacy.New composition includes the literacy of print: it adds on to it and brings the notions of practice and activity and circulation and media and screen and networking to our conceptions of process. It will require a new expertise of us as it does of our students. And ultimately, new composition may require a new site for learning for all of us. (320)

And concludes that:

In helping create writing public, we also foster the development of citizens who vote, of citizens whose civic literacy is global in its sensibility and its communicative potential, and whose commitment to humanity is characterized by consistency and generosity as well as the ability to write for purposes that are unconstrained and audiences that are nearly unlimited. (321)

Discussion:

In this piece, like in Grabills, we see the rhetoric of literacy as a sort of all-powerful tool for navigating the social and political complexities of life. I’m not trying to be reductive-the types of literacy she’s implying here are far reaching and complex to be sure. My concern, however, would be the lack of specificity and attention of material details of life in particular individuals’, communities’, institutions’, and nations’ circumstances. As Collins and Ross explain in Global Crises, we need to use digital literacies to exploit the tensions in high tech global capitalism toward the cause of social justice, but we need attentive, thick, macro/mezzo/micro level thick description of the context at hand in order to do so. I suppose rhetorics of literacy like this one are wonderful general goals, but we should encourage research that takes it seriously the deixis (to stretch Yancey’s metaphor) of literacy. Although, I don’t think there are so many works that do this that are also well-regarded in the field. I’ll have to think more on it and keep my eyes open, as well as hold it in mind as a methodological principle for future work of my own.

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