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Material Media and Political Clout

Submitted by magoo on 16 October 2006 - 1:16pm. | | | |

Zoey raises a key concept in the entry about Ariana Huffington. Certain people and ideas gain or lose influence because of media form.

This has to happen extensively. Extreme cases will probably be obvious: for years deaf people couldn't use phones; dyslexia is considered a handicap primarily in alphabetic cultures. Likewise, not all messages travel equally in all media. Most people consider a poem or song more appropriate for a confession of love than, say, a table of data, a pie chart, or a formal essay with MLA style works-cited page attached.

It seems inevitable to extend to perhaps less obvious and more critical circumstances. Noam Chomsky and others have pointed out that 30-second TV or radio soundbytes tend to squelch dissent. One can quickly express an opinion that shares the audience's assumptions because one needn't repeat the groundwork, but if one must reform those assumptions, one needs time.

Ultimately, probably no two of us have equal talents or resources in any one medium or media landscape, and the balance must shift when the requirements of the medium shift.

As a related point, the usage of each medium seems to shift as new media arrive. Drop in another rock, the whole pool ripples. For instance, until the early 20th Century, poetry was a great way to record human thought that involved sound and language, so when people began to record, of course they recorded Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson and such people. But T.S. Eliot reading the very musical "Prufrock" compares badly with whoever your favorite recording artist is when considered as music. So, clearly, poetry had to do something besides melodize to establish value.

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hypertext authors

Submitted by Anonymous on 17 October 2006 - 2:12pm.

I love this point. Clearly a different kind of author than a Tolstoy is needed to create hypertext, just as Axl Rose was no Eliot but can belt out one hell of a rock anthem. And so far no singular hypertext author has come along to define the genre as, some say, Tolstoy did the novel.

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hypertext fiction

Submitted by magoo on 18 October 2006 - 3:33pm.

Yes, I think we're still shy our Shakespeare. And one person won't do it, of course -- not even as much as Shakespeare did, or Tolstoy, I suspect. We no longer have a single set of tales to be retold in the new medium.

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Shakespeare in the Inland Empire

Submitted by Shock and Awe on 18 October 2006 - 9:42pm.

Hmmmmm. This is something I've thought about a lot and still have no answer for. Do we really no longer have a set of tales to tell, tales that will touch us all? What would Shakespeare write if he were alive today? Or is Shakespeare an impossibility today, is our culture too diverse and spread apart for a unifying voice? Has the ground been broken and all we can hope to do is till it through our myriad voices?

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. I don't believe so. The funny thing is Shakespeare certainly didn't have a clue what he was doing. He just set out to capture his time and place in such a way as to fill the seats in the Globe. Through his genius with language he did so much more, created something timeless. Maybe he could do the same thing writing from a Travelodge in the Inland Empire.

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Shakespeare at the Travel Lodge

Submitted by magoo on 23 October 2006 - 10:37am.

You've got me, honestly.

If he did the same thing, would that do the same thing? Would the same people read him the same way?

(BTW, these questions always remind me of Jorge Luis Borges' story about the Quixote of Menard; does anyone recall the exact title?)

Experimental theater director Jerzy Grotowski once commented that he had different problems working with 3rd-world and 1st-world performers (not his terms, but I'm paraphrasing from memory). He claimed that they approach originality differently. Post-industrial performers came with considerable amounts of theory, came in search of roots or passions, and required of themselves originality in the sense that they saw themselves as creating a different idea from ground up with each project.

Performers from so-called underdeveloped countries, conversely, did not think of what they were doing in what we consider theoretical terms, but were trained extensively in a defined canon. They expected to perform previously created material, but their originality came through in subtle distinctions in performance.

The connection I find here is that I don't think we as a (one, single, or unitary) society have a canon in the sense that societies have, even though subgroups may more or less have their canonical saints or deities.

Perhaps cybertext needs a dozen Shakespeares.

Maybe I should stroll around midday with a lamp.

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