Artefacts in the digital era (original) (raw)
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Marshall McLuhan: The Possibility of Re-Reading His Notion of Medium
Philosophies, 2016
After describing the origins of media ecology and the role of Marshall McLuhan in that theoretical constitution process, this article addresses McLuhan's perspective on technology and media. In this context, the article warns that the impossibility of reading McLuhan stems from segregating technique and culture. This is impossible because there is a need to think about the extension of his idea of medium. The article proposes a conversation between McLuhan's contributions and the works of thinkers like Don Ihde and Martin Heidegger, and ends with a final discussion on the meaning of concept of medium.
Gadamer and McLuhan: The Hermeneutics of Cyberspace
2020
The new media environment scatters the senses and understanding and thus puts immense pressure on those educated in a reading culture to create unity of understanding. Hans-Georg Gadamer is apt to consult in this regard. His art of interpretation is oriented toward forging common ground among divergent and contrasting point of view. However, his description of the event of Being/unity of understanding in the “middle” of the hermeneutic circle, does not account of the influence of mediums of communication on consciousness. As a result, the extent to which he responds to the dilemma of the new electronic media environment is unclear. Hence, Marshall McLuhan’s theory of communication is used to reinterpret Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle in terms of orality and literacy, hearing and seeing, respectively. They have qualities that pull understanding in contrary directions and thereby form a tension filled field of potential to bind opposites together. From McLuhan’s perspective, this harmonisation is accomplished within the acoustic space of electronic communications that he argues, hearkens to oral cultures. Since Gadamer also returns to those cultures, specifically the early Greeks to describe an experience of “being-as-a-whole,” he inadvertently responds in a positive way to the scattering effects of the internet. This has implications for understanding the role of touch and tact in Gadamer’s hermeneutics as well as his claim that he does not have a method.
"Mediality": On Some Fundamental Questions of the Theory and History of Media
Dějiny - teorie - kritika, 2018
The article looks at basic questions concerning mediality, which it defines as a common attribute of techno-anthropological means of representation and communication, as developed and developing through mutual interaction, such as to give rise to a particular environment in which certain forms (of sense) can be distinguished. Among the basic questions of mediality and media are thus also those of whether and to what extent media conceptualize their own history and development. The study presents – primarily from the perspective of the theory and history of literature and art – a critical overview of media theory, starting with the ideas of Friedrich Kittler. It compares these with certain aspects of Marshall McLuhan’s thought, pointing out a conflict between the concept of an escalating development of media towards a closed cybernetic loop, and the concept of media as an evolutionary extension of human senses. The rhetorical and stylistic aspects of Kittler’s perspective are interpreted through Bürger’s (and Benjamin’s) thesis of the melancholic dimension of modernism. The basic principles of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of systems are analysed as a stimulus for thinking about mediality, together with his concept of a system of art as a functionally differentiated social system, historically established with the dawning of the modern age. We also pay attention to the intermedial research carried out by Lars Elleström and his description of a system of modalities, which sets up a new frame for approaching media. Elleström’s model enables us to reflect on media from many varied perspectives (such as mass media studies, new media, film media, film science, art history and theory, literary criticism, etc.), yet does not cover sources of media dynamics; these may relate to a certain gap or difference that enters the relationship between consciousness and communication, technology and the body, technology and the senses, and seems to set in motion the development of these constantly changing techno-anthropological tools.
Mcluhan and new communication technologies: from Posthumanism to Neuromedia
McLuhan Galaxy Conference. Understanding Media, Today. Ciastellardi, M., Miranda, C. y Scolari, C.A. (eds.). Barcelona: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. ISBN 978-84-938802-1-7., 2011
In the XXI century, McLuhan's postulates have become an indispensable framework for current and future media research. With the establishment of the new intermedia paradigm, there is a growing interest in developing a neurocommunication and neuromedia system based on old researches in neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotic devices. In the early 1960s Marshall McLuhan revealed how communication technology affects cognitive organization. In the Prologue to 1962's The Gutenberg Galaxy, he announced that media are “extensions” of our human senses, bodies and minds. A key concept that nowadays must be reviewed, in fact, with neuromedia McLuhan's theories become extraordinarily visionary. Direct interaction between new media and the brain would establish a new principle for interactive communication. The medium would be our own brain, a bio-digital revolution to ensure an information exchange without filtering and trasmission error. As Caspar Stracke recalls in his essay about the age of cerebral simulation, the US Congress declared the 1990s to be the “Decade of the Brain” and approved a research program costing billions of dollars. This measure was the result of an old dream: the desire to render human thought visible in order to open up a new reliable and simultaneous communication system. For the last years many theoreticians and researchers have been working on bio-digital communication challenges. One of the most interesting proposals has been suggested by Peter Weibel, who mantains an innovative form of “genetic art”: the neurocinema (Future Cinema, MIT/ZKM, 2003). Weibel supports the possibility of generating a new net composed by interconnected brains able to receive immages and sounds through quantums or ultrasounds. It means that whereas in the nineteenth century machinery was releated to experimental physiology, the new machines of vision will be releated to neuroscience and cognitive science. With the future cinema, the cinematographic apparatus will deveice the brain, not the eye (“trompe le cerveau, not trompe l’oeil”). Weibel explains that “Thanks to pulse-based temporal codes that directly stimulate the brain with the help of neurochips or brain-chips, there would be perception without the senses, seeing without the eyes”. The result is that simulation would be replaced by stimulation, it means that the brain would become the screen. Weibel's project is not only linked to systems of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality and 3D Vision, it is also based on new researches about “artificial senses” (Tokyo University's Yokose-Tanikawa Laboratory, 2010) and, particularly, to post-human condition in media sphere. This is an ideal context to develop and improve new interfaces through BCI Technology (Brain Computer Interface) where McLuhan's philosophical and technological perspective will turn out to be essential to redefine multidisciplinar researches about the brain and communication process from a post-organic view. In the field of brain research, at C.I.T.'s Biological Imaginig Center, Steve Potter is working on the first bi-directional, multi-channel interface based on a biochip that measures all possible stimulus reactions. Another interesting example is the Center for Biological and Computational Learning at MIT in Boston (USA), co-directed by Tomaso Poggio with the project “The MIT Intelligence Initiative”, focused on the interrelation between neurosciences and AI. In Italy, there is an innovative initiative called “Trip to the moon” leaded by Roberto Cigolani at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia di Genova. This project consists on the creation of the most perfect umanoid robot with arms and legs, eyes and skin with tactile sensitivity, a target that should be reached by 2023. These researches refresh McLuhan's “mechanical wife” or Futurist Ray Kurzweil's postulates about “technological singularity”. Instead of focusing on the development of computer sciences, current studies about neurosciences shows an increasing interest in the interrelation of the human brain and new media, following the anthropological philosophy of Marshall McLuhan. According to the Canadian theoretician, the advent of new technologies exert a gravitational effect on cognition which affects our perceptual habits and our social interactions. Neuromedia revolution revisits the difference between the languages of seeing and laguages of hearing: new interfaces for mobile reading and telecommunication or new vision machines (as 3D Holographic Transmission and Tridimensional Telepresence, Nature, Vol. 468, November 4th 2010) constitute a milestone in the theoretical revolution about media hibridation set up by McLuhan. The aim of this paper is to reflect about the repercussion of neuromedia in new communication technologies. It would be interesting to review the evolution of this interrelation from Avant-garde postulates to current imaginary. In this proposal it will be indispensable to look through McLuhan's main contribution, which still remains an essential framework for electronic media and visual culture.
McLuhan’s General Theory Media
It is suggested that despite the fact that McLuhan claimed not to have a theory of communication that in fact the body of his work does indeed constitute a theory of media and their effects, which is termed as Marshall McLuhan’s General Theory of Media (GTOM). It is shown that his reversals of figure and ground; concepts and percepts; cause and effect; visual and acoustic spaces; a medium and its content (i.e. it’s message) and the fourth Law of Media are interconnected together with his systemic ecological field approach and they form the basis of his GTOM. Sixty-two reversals that appear in his writings have been cataloged in Appendix I.
We compare the nature of the meaning, the medium, the content, the message, the communication and the information within the domain of human symbolic interactions. This domain includes language and culture and the domain of non-symbolic interactions of living organisms defined as biosemiosis. We argue that for biosemiosis the information and organization that is propagated in a living organism cannot be separated from the medium in which it is instantiated, unlike human symbolic communication. We show that the symbol-based human activities of language, culture, technology, governance and economics represent the propagation of organization parallel to the propagating organization of living organisms. We show that McLuhan’s notion that “the medium is the message” is not equivalent to technological determinism. Finally we show that for human symbolic communication one can distinguish between the medium, the content and the message whereas for biosemiosis the content, the medium and the message are all the same, i.e. “the medium is the message is the content.”
MARSHALL McLUHAN UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, THE EXTENSIONS OF MAN ROUTLEDGE, LONDON – 1964
2013
This review is the prolongation of a long study that dealt with, among other topics but essentially, Ray Kurzweil’s “popular-science”-fiction wrapped up as MIT expertise. Marshall McLuhan is essential here because he deals with the media and not the machines, or rather with all inventions, mechanical or not, starting with oral language, considered as media all of them extending man’s body, body parts, central nervous system and even “consciousness” as he calls the mind. We will concentrate on his 1964 book Understanding Media, The extensions of Man. We have to get some detail on his theory and, to remain in our own logic, consider it in a phylogenic perspective though Marshall McLuhan does not envisage any other human phase before the invention of writing systems (even his short chapter on “The Spoken Word” is entirely oriented towards writing systems). Hence he starts considering humanity around 5,000 years ago in a sequential presentation of various inventions one after another in chronological order. What’s more he centers his interest on what he calls the “electric age” that starts with the “discovery” of electricity and the invention of means to produce, store and transport it. His electric age is based on the stage of universal (though even today it is still not fully achieved) networked distribution (the electrical grid) of this electricity characterized as continuous and instantaneous, meaning we can use it at any time and in any place we want at the commanding tip of one finger pressing a button on or off. In other words his discourse is centered on the last one hundred years when he wrote this essential book in the 1960s and today for us on the last 150 years. I will consider his approach in both phylogenic and psychogenetic perspective.