Media: Keys to Understanding (2004) (Afterword) (original) (raw)
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A French interdisciplinary academic, Michel Foucault was a leading late twentieth century intellectual and for the last fifteen years of his life professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the prestigious Collège de France. Foucault reconstructed the systems of the periodspecific practices of past disciplines whose objects of analysis or manipulation were particular aspects of the human being. He had one foot in the historical archive, piecing together aspects of past disciplines, and the other in the present, putting in perspective various features of what we have become. Playing original and radical reconstructions of the past against apparently indispensable presuppositions of the present, Foucault generated very controversial critical "histories of the present," and contributed to the political advocacy of marginalized groups. His work resulted in a considerable following throughout the arts and social sciences, but also considerable criticism. While the young Foucault was being educated, which included studying at the celebrated École normale supérieure, the French intellectual world experienced the zenith of phenomenology and existentialism, the central figure of which was Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), philosopher, author, and critic of bourgeois conformism, oppression, and capitalism. Sartre, who quit the academy and became an internationally recognized public intellectual, argued that humans are essentially free to choose what they will be-"man is nothing but what he makes of himself." This radical account of human agency amounted to a philosophical humanism in which each individual is and ought to be fully responsible for his or her life. Eventually, Sartre would weave into his humanism the threads of Marxism, according to which
SEMIOTIC PARADOX OF THE NEW MEDIA: EXPERIENCING TRANSPARENT REALITY IN A TRANSMODERN WORLD
The new media have brought more profound changes to social, cultural, economic, and political systems than human beings have ever experienced before. Computers, the Intemet, e-mail, mobile/smart phones, virtual games, and digital photos are the artifacts of the new media. Although most of these artifacts have been around for nearly three decades, we still put them within the domain of "new" media technologies, which have pervaded all aspects of our life. There still are amazing, almost magical aspects of the new media, and predicaments arising from them, that seem to raise some fundamental questions for contemporary digital cultures. What is the purpose of the new media? How do we deal with their unintended consequences and contradictions? And how do we use the new media to initiate and lead meaningful social and cultural change or to maintain cultural heritages?
Given Jacques Ellul’s role at the origins of the Media Ecology intellectual tradition, It is high time to include in the latter’s canon his mentor Bernard Charbonneau (1910-1996), to whom he owed his key insights about technological society. There are thus innovative interpretations and new ethical perspectives to be drawn specifically from Charbonneau’s lifelong engagement with media issues as central to meaningful change in that new kind of society, and a reflection fed by the bitter experience of being ignored by it for dealing with its mechanisms as such rather than the established discourses about current affairs under cover of which it reshapes human reality unimpeded. For Charbonneau, meaningful communication remains an ethical matter of communing with others in shared experiential knowledge, as opposed to being in-formed, i.e. being formatted and programmed by indirect mediation. He likens information to informatics and genetic engineering as a technique for the mechanical reproduction of codes, imprinted on a plastic mass by programming. Referring to “information-advertising-propaganda” as a single technical phenomenon, whether practiced by the market or the State, he outlined his diagnosis in two late texts that this paper will be dwelling on: a 1991 article in the Montreal magazine Vice Versa on “Mediatized Information: Knowledge or Entertainment?”, taking the First Gulf War as an illustration, and a privately printed manuscript written in the mid-1980s on Mediatized Society. Charbonneau wrote the latter with the hope of steering the ecological movement he had pioneered in France away from the traps of media attention in which it had gotten mired and diverted from its true aims, as he wrote in a just-translated “self-critique” of it (The Green Light, Bloomsbury 2018). In his view, “from the printed Press to the image-based Press, from radio to TV, from TV to X…, the media’s hold extends relentlessly, until it occupies the whole of human space-time,” now ruled by “sensational news” that make people blind to both the micro and macrolevels of everyday reality. The media thus “generate a philosophy and a society that identify with the instant, as religions and societies of the past did to an illusory eternity” even as they changed imperceptibly, whereas “mediatized information prevents man from fulfilling his calling to maintain permanence within movement, to go further without losing his way, in other words to progress”, thus undermining “any effort, whether conservative or revolutionary, at social transformation.” The trajectory “from speech to its industrial reproduction” culminates in the “manufacturing of an antireality”, besides which corporate or State censorship is secondary: for that of a “Third Power”: the media, is “automatic”, beyond the awareness of those who experience or exert it. The public just “loses the habit of finding out what is true as it falls into that of being passively informed”, while “freedom of opinion becomes that of the mediators” as slaves to the pressures of their trade, whose only law is the scoop “that strictly gauges news: disasters, wars, personalities selected for their media interest, etc.” Grassroots media criticism becomes vital to liberal democracy.
"Forgetting to be (Post)Human: Media and Memory in a Kairotic Age"
If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility-without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises-were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
Media Powerhouse: Challenges to Contemporary Philosophers (2006)
Philosophia: International Journal of Philosophy, 2006
Not only that we should understand media in terms of transportation and communications, but we should likewise face the latter’s challenges in terms of speed, ideology, cultural epistemé, interpretation, and relative meaning. We need to tame speed, neutralize ideology, respect cultural epistemés, possibly objectify interpretation, and perhaps go back to the existential meaning of life.
The Man-as-Media as the Latest Media (full text)
In our opinion, the latest in the abundance of new media is the man: man-as-media. The man-as-media is an articulated, structured and engaged response of the modern man to the role and action of traditional mass media in the public space, and it represents a new means of communication which articulates an attitude of resistance towards the “one-dimensional image” of media monopoles, and gives an entirely new dimension and connotation to the media culture as a dialectical place of various media interpretations. As an individual or a group of people, the man-as-media takes over the media functions (the functions of mediation that actually define the media), as well as the functions of traditional informative media (production, collection and distribution of information) and it practically moves the traditional media out of the institutions (television, radio, newspaper), from a highly determined and bounded real space (TV, radio and newspaper buildings, studios, editors’ offices etc.) and finally, out of a specific material form to a non-material, personalized, personal engagement of an individual. The place of the media as technical devices, and the place of their spatial and subject logistics, is now taken by the man, interested to participate in the public arena as a medium, and thanks to the new information technologies, he is now for the first time able to realize this role without an intermediary and in real time (unlike his media ancestors “sentenced” on a chain of mediators and “delayed” time. key words: media, man, democracy, media monopoles, information.
Book Review: Postphenomenology and media: Essays on human-media-world relations
New Media and Society, 2019
New media incessantly create objects. The burgeoning of new media artefacts has formed various areas of study: Free Labour, Networks, F/OSS, Software Studies, Cyberspace and Digital Methods. These are informed by methodologies such as mediatisation, media ecology and media archaeology, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, cybernetics phenomenology and postphenomenology. Postphenomenology helps analyse new media, the editors of Postphenomenology and Media inform us, through locating how they are 'moving into our bodies, or at least into our bodily activity and behaviour', which ultimately creates an environment of media 'ubiquity, digitality, and seamlessness' (p. xxvii). In order to unpick this fluid state, postphenomenology is 'specifically oriented towards an analysis of transparency-opacity ratios, multistability, multiple types of human-technology-world relations, perception and understanding, micro-and macroperception dynamics' (p. xxvi). The collection looks at how postphenomenology can tackle new media in three parts: the first part aims at 'scouting the perimeters' of new media to provide a framework for the rest of the book, part two uses case studies to outline how postphenomenology can be applied and part three examines postphenomenology as a