Back to Cyber Terminology Notes 1/3 KL
Writing and Media
- Marshall McLuhan
- 1964, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
- Medium is not just “mass media”
- Ira Shor (87) : Critical Teaching and Everyday life
- Your chair- what does it tell you? What is the college trying to tell you about the chairs they bought for your classroom? Lazy boy vs wooden chair
- The message can distract us from the truth of what the medium does
- McLuhan- Burglar who gives a dog a piece of meat so the dog won’t try to stop the burglar from robbing the owners
- Ruled by Big Brother. Watch and listen to Wizard of Oz, and not remember to look behind the curtain
- Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities 1983
- Nationality- ideology that emerged to reinforce the power structures as empire and religious structures
- Print Capitalism “simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present”
- newspaper provided technical means for representing the kind of imagined community that is the nation
- By using a community, people were linked even though they never would have been
- So what?
- ''Medium is the message
- Missed the fact that they were thrown into an unnatural community.
The Medium Controls the Message
- Neil Postman
- 1984-1985: Amusing Ourselves to Death
- Age of show Business and Peak-A-Boo Culture
- Media prevents us from learning more, little view, no relevance
- Privileges visual over textual
- Medium is soma that keeps us from understanding what the message is doing.
- Big Brother does not watch us, we watch him by choice
- Not McLuhan vs. Postman.
- Every technology has an inherent bias, need to know how to read the medium
- Nothing wrong with entertainment, problem is when we try to live in it.
Texts to Consider*Special Broadcasts
- Documentaries
- News Feed
- Tweet
- Texting conversations
- New York Times
- Cosmo
Artifacts Relying on Cyberspace... Knowns and Unknowns
- Known, Known: What is happening?
- Its their birthday, people can see it
- Known, Unknown: What is happening that we don’t understand?
- Techy stuff- don’t know how our message gets to their wall
- Their Personal Reactions to you wishing them a Happy Birthday
- Unknown, Known: What is happening that we know is happening but we choose to forget?
- Don’t attempt to remember people’s birthdays anymore
- Don’t need to call them, can just post
- Unknown, Unknown: What is happening that people are completely unaware of?
When we read/view things on cyberspace? *How are messages made more appealing?
- How are we doped (soma-fied) by new media?
- What is happening that people might be completely unaware of?