Media gets replaced or supplanted when folks find better ways. But media don't deliver message equally, so replacement is incomplete.

Sometimes replacement is almost total

Okay, so I've been reading some of this book by Marshall McLuhan (of "the message is the medium" fame), and (in addition to being an even more trippy read than Understanding Media) it's a pretty amazing document. The book is called The Gutenberg Galaxy and was (obviously?) published sometime back in the sixties when Star Trek fervor was still running strong.

Now there's a million cool (and naturally underdeveloped) ideas running around in this book. One of them has to do with materiality, and McLuhan conjectures as follows:

"As our age translates itself back into the oral and auditory modes because of the electronic pressure of simultaneity, we become sharply aware of the uncritical acceptance of visual metaphors and models by many past centuries ... We become extremely conscious of cultural models and bias when moving from one dominant form of awareness to another, as between Greek and Latin or English and French. So we are no longer amazed that the oriental world has no concept of 'substance' or of 'substantial form,' since they experience no visual pressure to break up experience into such packages [because their alphabet is symbolic rather than syllabic]."

Something that has been on my mind for a little while now and has consequently passed its class discussion expiration date. . . McLuhan makes a big deal out of the idea that media provide us with extensions of ourselves, but what if the medium is unreliable? I'm concerned only about the mechanics of the medium, not about the misrepresentation of any "real" world. I mean what happens when you reach for something and it's just not there? Objects in the physical world rarely surprise us with their sudden absence; very few things seem to be there but aren't. We don't tolerate books with missing pages, or television signals that spontaneously drop segments from shows. But the internet, which we imagine will one day encompass all content everywhere, is full of dead links, of pages that don't turn. How many times has class in ITS been momentarily derailed by a misdirected browser? And thanks to our sexy embedded hyperlinks, even search engines can't help locate the truant content of the blogosphere.

I've seen a few entries about machines and individuality or humanity. This is an issue that feels different today than it did in 1965 or 1980.

I strongly suspect that a lot of the assumption that computers would impose inhuman standards on humans comes from the broad dissatisfaction with the culture that came out of manufacturing. Manufacturing enforced uniformity and non-responsiveness to human rythms on many aspects of human life. Trains and corporations had to run on time. Information had to be stored and retrieved by varied people; therefore, filing systems had to be created that used least-common-denominator ways of organizing information -- last name first, alphabetic, for example, or by date.

So grumpymutt and I were discussing a few passages in the McLuhan piece, starting at the top of page 17. "If the criminal appears as a nonconformist who is unable to meet the demand of technology that we behave in uniform and continuous patterns, literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat pathetic. Especially the child, the cripple, the woman, and the colored person appear in a world of visual and typographic technology as victims of injustice." I assume that he's using "pathetic" here in terms of having pity for something in a sort of compassionate way, which is the way he uses it in the paragraph above.

We already touched on my group’s passage in class, but I think I would be good to post a few more notes about it since it relates to the threat and danger of electric technology. The passage begins on page 17 of the McLuhan, midway through the bottom paragraph with the words “The American stake”, then continues through the following paragraph until “The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.” In the beginning of our passage, McLuhan emphasizes the danger electric technology poses to all aspects of American society, and he says that perhaps one of the reasons it is so dangerous is that humans are unaware of the danger it poses (it is “quite invisible”, “quite unrecognizable” to us). Precisely because the content of this new electric technology is the same as the content in other medium, we are unaware of the effect this new medium has on us. He writes, “For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind” (18). In other words, though we are focused on the content, the effect of the form/medium in which the content is sent is extremely important.

Something I've been thinking about (the relationship between people and media):

Bolter and Grusin write: "Computer programs may ultimately be human products, in the sense that they embody algorithms devised by human programmers, but once the program is written and loaded, the machine can operate without human intervention. Programming, then, employes erasure or effacement" (27).

Two observations on this quotation:

1. The blog seems to be one big exception to B&G's assertion that all computer programs can function without human intervention. You can't have a blog unless you have a human interacting with the computer software-- and frequently. The same goes for 'online community' sites like MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook. Because the purpose of these sites is to extend the human processes of talking to other people and making friends into a technological world, they do not function unless people interact with them and input information into them. Even computer-programmed chatbots rely on actual human beings talking to them in order to learn the patterns of human speech. They can't be programmed with everything they need to know and then left alone.

Questions of technological determinism remind me of similar dichotomies -- mind|body, nature|nurture, and so forth. The problem seems created by a misposing of the question. One asks whether a presumed factor in some change has all impact or no impact, or some impact; one measures the impact on change as though the factors were addeded incrementally. This misrepresents causal relationships.
The seems like something in the family of the "complex clause" fallacy. A couple of metaphors might clarify what I mean.
Consider factors like "technology" and "human nature" to speak very broadly, as multiplying against each other instead of aggregating. It becomes absurd to ask whether in the equation 3*2=6, the 3 or 2 is more important: There are two threes, three twos. Removing either nullifies the entire result. Similarly, ask oneself whether the length or breadth of a 2*3 table is more important. One might be tempted to say that the length is more important, since the # is greater, but how much length remains if one removes the width?

So Frabby's post on "Hot and Cold" (and note the URL if you can!) gave me an idea: if we didn't get to your passage in class today -- or even if we did -- you might consider posting it and your stabs at interpretation on your blog. It could be useful for us to puzzle through some of those passages in the comments!

This is in response to the previous post about hot and cold, but I'm writing it as a new entry because I'm under the impression we are supposed to do that if our comments will be particularly long and cover slightly different ideas. Correct me if I'm wrong!
Anyways, Silversprung and I discussed the passage on page 27 of McLuhan to get a better handle on the differences between hot and cold. Everything that follows is half Silversprung's as she and I worked together. The passage starts with "In terms of the theme of media hot and cold, backward countries are cool, and we are hot. The 'city slicker' is hot, and the rustic is cool."