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I wish I had time to read more weblogs, but here are the few I check in on regularly Introduction to Writing Studies
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McLuhan, Ulmer, Method I'm working on an essay about McLuhan's Laws of Media, and I am often thinking about how McLuhan's laws relate to Burke's Pentad, and tonight, Ulmer's CATT(t). Whenever I bring McLuhan and Ulmer together, I see in their work a lot of similarities even though Ulmer specifically distanced himself from McLuhan in Applied Grammatology. Okay, to the heart of the matter. McLuhan and McLuhan say that if you drop one of the laws of the tetrad, you end up with "not formal but efficient cause, and familiar Method" (8). Ulmer's first chapter in Heuretics establishes his own heuretic, CATT(t), which I have tried to map onto the Laws: Contrast = obsolescence or reversal (can't quite tell). Analogy = enhancement, intensification, or amplification. Theory = a repetition of an existing theory, modified = retrieval Target = enhancement or reversal (also can't quite tell). Ulmer's "tale" is the telling of the new theory, and while McLuhan did not include the tale as part of the tetrad, he clearly understood that his own new tale needed a new kind of telling, a telling consistent with his message and distinct from the old kind of telling. If analogy and target both function to describe how a Method (or a technology) are kinds of enhancements, and contrast is in fact best mapped to obsolescence, what Ulmer seems to be dropping is reversal--what will the new Method become, when taken to its limits? Because his frames of reference are Plato's Phaedrus, Descartes on Method, Breton's "Manifesto of Surrealism," none of these methods contain within it an account of their own reversal. They are all methods concerned with asserting themselves, with pushing other examples and problems aside, drawing on existing, authoritative theories. Ulmer, to the extent that he continues to work in the tradition of Method, is in the process of trying to invent something new (hence his latest book, Internet Inventions), and his work focuses fairly precisely on issues of composition--how should we compose in the age of video? within the apparatus of electracy rather than literacy? McLuhan did not pose that question so much as simply tackle it through his own compositions, focusing instead more precisely on the hermeneutic tasks of "understanding media". Ulmer may consistently identify with Derrida rather than McLuhan, but it seems increasingly like he builds off of McLuhan implicity as more or more than he builds off of Derrida. That said, if his CATT(t) in fact does not consider reversal, the future ground, the reversal of the New Method, remains unclear, and the invention is made without a sense of its consequences. Ulmer's focus on Methods and theories and even genres, framed in the context of rhetoric, perhaps makes the question of reversal less pressing than say, inventions like nanotechnology, although the questions of reversal for discourse do seem worth considering. Ulmer's objects of analysis are pretty consistently textual, rather than material, although he clearly understands that rhetoric, invention, literacy, and electracy happen within the context of technologies and a material world. So, in sum ; ) McLuhan's objects: media, technology, texts (in his literary scholarship). Ulmer's objects: texts, pedagogies, Methods, media--although largely assumed. McLuhan's goal: understanding, with a generalized sense of action. Ulmer's goal: application, invention, understanding assumed. McLuhan's laws: figures and grounds balanced. Ulmer's CATT(t): figures privileged, obsolesced grounds acknowledged. Nuff' said?
Links to Tetrads online I'm compiling a list of online materials that explain or use McLuhan's "laws of media," also known as the tetrad. I'll probably update this note periodically, but here is what I have so far. I'll make the links active, eventually. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. "The Internet, Laws of Media, and Identity Politics." http://folk.uio.no/geirthe/Tetrads.html. 1996. Accessed June 3, 2004. A good essay, especially for emphasizing the need to go beyond the tetrad. Federman, Mark. "Laws of Media Tetrads." http://www3.sympatico.ca/federman/MerrillConsulting/transform/ncb2.htm. Accessed June 3, 2004. Federman consistently does a nice job of glossing McLuhan. Goodbrey, Daniel Merlin. A Webcomic Tetrad: http://www.e-merl.com/comtet.htm. Accessed June 6, 2004. This webcomic tetrad is a webcomic in itself, offering a narrator and a story line--although viewers are free to move around the space. Very cool. Moulthrop, Stuart. "You Say you Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media." Postmodern Culture 1.3 (1991) 53 para. Archived in Project Muse: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v001/1.3moulthrop.html. Accessed Oct. 3, 2001. Probably the most extensive application of the laws of media in the field of Computers and Writing, although Moulthrop does not exploit the visual dimension of tetrads. "The Tetrads: Four Laws of Media." http://www.jesgrew.org/wake/tetrads/index.html ND. Accessed June 3, 2004. And McLuhan, Eric. "Survivor Tetrad." http://www.jesgrew.org/wake/tetrads/Survivor.html. ND. Accessed June 3, 2004. Eric McLuhan's tetard is a link off of the main tetrad site. Both are short and to the point. Rheingold, Howard. "McLuhanizing Mobile Media." Mon Nov. 24, 2003. http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100229&ref=1310423 A short article that emphasizes the brainstorming qualities and use of the Laws of Media.
what if we have already learned all of McLuhan's lessons? In reading a stunning lecture McLuhan delivered to educators in 1959, I started to wonder what a retrieval of McLuhan can really add to educational reform. Not that his radical vision‹discovery based education, problem-based education, educating students in the mastery of global new media, etc.‹has been realized, but that many radical educators are still pushing many of the same kinds of reforms. Joshua Meyorwitz essay about taking mcluhan seriously ends with this observations: "In the long run, educational theorists and practitioners have taken McLuhan and "medium theory" rather seriously after all‹even if they have not been fully conscious of it" (106). So, what is the value in recovering his ideas? The rhetorical weight of being able to say to those who resist "look it was obvious to McLuhan in 1959 what needed to be done, and we still haven't done it!" ? A "theory value" is often attributed to doing this kind of recovery work, but McLuhan's reputation is so problematics, the dynamics are considerably different than the great Bakhtinian recovery of the 1990s. Is the recovery worth the risk? Although Ulmer chose to use Derrida as his relay, there would seem to be a relay-value in working through McLuhan's texts, as they more adequeately spur me to write like tv than do Ulmer's texts. McLuhan, as I noted in an earlier post, can be thought of as an early practitioner of alternative academic writing. I also wrote about Jeff Rice discovering, after the fact, that his pedagogy essentially matched up with McLuhans--raising the very problem I have started this entry with. Maybe some of the value will be in looking at contempories who have been influenced by McLuhan but continue to be overlooked in educational circles. scott McCloud's work on comics, David Byrne's films, music, and multi-media composition, david carson's photografiks, etc. The grand sweeping move would be to re-configure the humanities based on McLuhan, vygotsky, Montessori rather than Frye, Bruner, Newman -- although such a totalizing move seems antithetical to the McLuhan project of probe and exploring rather than theorizing and explaining McLuhan himself preached "understanding," but I like the notion that we can only have "simple knowing," -- see the introduction to gramophone, film, typewriter. The anti-theory arguments have always had a certain appeal for me; theory hope continues to prevail.
Cooling off classroom discussion I was thinking about McLuhan's "acoustic space" today and trying to figure out ways to illustrate it that are more concerete than the examples he tends to give. I thought about my education--my time as a student--and my attempts as an educator--my so called life as a professor. My professors were certainly all products of print culture and more or less products of visual space: ordered, hierarchical, communication moving in a single direction. I certainly didn't email my professors, doubt that I ever called them on the phone, remember getting calls for two of them. None of them blogged. Even during the four years I was working on my PhD, I have few memories of emailing my professors. I can remember a couple of classes that set up listservs--usually the students set them up--and I can remember a few of the discussions getting Hot really quickly. The email culture at that institution, in that department, was generally quite Hot. But as I probed that memory, I also thought about my interface: the old vt 100 terminal or whatever that thing was called. Orange text on black screen. I usually composed my Hot contributions to class discussion late at night, dark room, dark screen, nothing but letters appearing on the screen. I don't think I have been involved in any exchanges online quite so hot since then. I am wondering how much that has to do with the move to GUIs, to discussion boards where all the text is there to be read and re-read, rather than disappearing in to mail boxes. I've become goofy, ridiculous, a McLuhan-wanna-be punster typing away in black on white and surrounded by the serene blues of OSX, the puppy dog icon for Fetch, etc. Apparently flaming (such an appropriately hot metaphor) still exists on slash dot or other techie lists where the involvement in work is sufficiently intenses that fires still burn through words, and various websites still steam with hatred for the Other, but I am going to bet that in the ground of classroom, online discussion, the fires of the 1990s have cooled, and the interface(s) have some significant(?) roles to play. I
McLuhan and academic writing Baeten, Jan. "Illustrations, Images, and Anti-Illustrations." Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media. Cambridge MA: MIT P, 2003. 179-99. The point I would like to stress here is how McLuhan and Fiore's two books play a fundamental role in the emergence of a new type of academic writing, in which word and image (or better: textuality and visuality) are merged in a kind of big McLuhanian move toward "global connectedness" and in which the principle of scholarly distance and Olympian neutrality is abandoned in favor of a more committed and "writerly" way of writing, and thus of thinking. (190) The general point about McLuhan and Fiore being innovators in re-thinking academic writing is solid, but this article drove me crazy with its misrepresentations of McLuhan as determinist and postive futurist, and with its claim to advance a "screen theory" which is simply a variation on "the medium is the massage."
Jeff Rice on cool Rice, Jeff. "writing about cool: teaching hypertext as juxtaposition." Computers and composition 20 (2003): 221-36. available at sciencedirect.com if your institution subscribes. Drawing on Ulmer's chorography, Rice describes a class built around the many meanings of cool‹McLuhan's participatory media (cool media) and Amiri Baraka's notion of cool as calm, unimpressed by the horror's of the world, including African American cool towards oppression and appropriation, among others. Rice connects the works of McLuhan and Baraka to the 1963 4Cs call for a rethinking of research paper, a rethinking that is needed more than ever, Rice suggests, considering the changes in the writing environments. Student produced handbooks of cool are mosaics, juxtapositions, embodiments of cool about cool that perform the cultural studies practice of decoding "cool" with the rhetorical practice of making something cool. Rice acknowledges that he inadvertently is proposing essentially what McLuhan, Hutchon, and McLuhan proposed in 1977 (234). I have never met Jeff, but I dreamt about him the other night. What better sign that I should get reading and blogging him?
The Tetrad in Action Mark Federman, host of the McLuhan Program weblog, has an extended discussion of the fallacy of the brainstorming and the ways in which the tetrad can make brainstorming more productive. scroll down to his Nov. 14 entry.
The Toronto School of Communication The McLuhan Program Blog alerted me to a new site about the Toronto School of Communication. Twyla Gibson, a senior fellow at the program, has published excerpts or synopses from her dissertation (2000), and the site provides a quick visual and textual outline of the ways in which the Toronto School (Havelock, Innis, McLuhan, and others) drew from Plato and each other.
Time and Blogging One of McLuhan's Laws of Media is that a new technology obsolesces, or pushes aside, another technology--if it takes hold culturally and individually. John Lovas at De Anza College identifies TV as the pushed aside technology in his life. I suspect that when I ask students to blog, they feel the opposite impulse or pressure: instead of gladly pushing aside TV or some other activity, they resent the time away from a preferred activity (including human interaction).
Thoughts on McLuhan and PowerPoint (399) Donald Kunze, an Associate Professor of Architecture at Penn State U, claims that McLuhan had "it" right all along--a man after my own biases. Kunze uses McLuhan's notions of hot and cool media to analyze PowerPoint. When presenters simply offer text that they then read, the presentation is hot on hot--intensity without audience participation (participation in the sense of closure). Kunze suggests that a move towards highly graphical, image-driven presentations can increase audience participation--the cool(ness) effect. Hot and cool are slippery terms, but Scott McCloud in understanding comics points out that television and comic books are the pre-eminent cool mediums. PowerPoint is certainly comic-bookish in nature.
McLuhan and Manovich, again Nice review of Manovich's The Language of New Media by William B Warner in Telepolis. Warner sees Manovich's work as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan," and he goes on to do a nice job of summarizing McLuhan's basic premises (the medium is the message, the medium is the massage, media exist in an environment in which we need to pay attention to all media). Warner also quickly identifies with main critiques of McLuhan's work: that he is a determinist, that the probes are "facile" and "anecdotal," and that McLuhan seems to adopt a quasi religious perspective on the ways in which electronic communication are like primitive communication. I particularly like this summary of the critiques because all three points are off base, although the concern about the probes is not one I had read much about. Definitely something to keep in mind as I conduct my own probes.
Views on PowerPoint Wired, Sept 2003, offers two teazers articles--David Byrne (from Talking Heads--see other music notes) and Edward Tufte (visual communication guru) on PowerPoint. The two pieces are set up as point-counterpoint fashion, but in fact, they don't address or respond to one another and they compliment each other. Byrne started using PowerPoint as satire--he would make presentations about making presentation, he would us the ultimate corporate tool to satirize corporate communication. He understands McLuhan--the medium is the message--as I have said elsewhere on this blog. But slowly, he says, he discovered more earnest (though not boring) and valueable potential in making graphic art with PowerPoint. He is releasing a book/DVD with this art in September, as well as new music. Tufte has long despised chart junk, and considers PowerPoint the ultimate tool for producing chart junk. If he had responded directly to Byrne, he would have agreed that PP is best for producing art, for playing around, and not much use for supporting straight-forward corporate presentations. Tufte's piece is a teazer for his book on PowerPoint, its excesses, and the negative cognitive impact it is having in schools and corporate America. These pieces aren't available online--yet. I'll check on them later.
Sean D. Williams on teaching integrated composition I just spent a couple of hours getting to know the scholarship of Sean D. Williams, currently at Clemson. He wrote a 2 part piece for Computers and Composition in 2001 (18.1 and 18.2), and his essay in JAC 22.2 builds on that work. His fundamental argument in C&C isn't going to get any arguments for those of us who want to encourage/teach digital literacy--he says we need to expand the definition of composition to include visual as well as verbal components. The actual work that he envisions students doing, however, is always presented as hypothetical--no specific examples are used--and he always labels these integrated compositions as "arguments." He works from Mark Berstein's notion of neighborhoods to visualize hypertext, but I guess since I have started blogging, I have been thinking and worrying less about the structure of hypertext. Now I think in terms of database and scroll, not neighborhoods. And while I am engaged in an argument with William's text right now, I see the central purpose of my weblog as not being argumentative, but as being connective. I hope a few people will google by, and maybe exchange some ideas and observations, but I don't really want to argue with them. Sean, if you read this, I am not arguing with you--I just want to talk more, and flesh out our similarities and differences. I suppose I am starting to split hairs about what an "argument" is, but let me wrap up with one more observation. In the JAC article, he turns to Toulmin's The Uses of Arguments to continue expanding on his notion of how arguments on the web work, but I can't imagine a more print-based theory of argumentation than Toulmin's. I know I am being ego centric to wonder why he doesn't turn to McLuhan to think about web arguments, or turn to McLuhan to understand that the web is not primarily a medium of argumentation. Sure, there are lots of arguments going on via the web, but a cool medium like the web encourages participation and engagement, it encourages images and associations, and it encourages collecting, but not the sustained kind of argument that Toulmin theorizes, and that Williams seems to be imagining for his studetns. I just read the other day that web-readers, on average, spend less than a minute on a screen when they are surfing--no time for engaging in an argument! So, yeah, I guess if I want my students to construct a good old fashioned web argument that is still pretty print-biased (spiced by an image and associative logic), Williams is definitely on the right track. If I want a videossay, a probe, a killer power-point, I think I slightly need a different frame of refernce. I hope this doesn't sound to argumentative. These are good pieces--I'm just more interested in understanding how my own take on digital literacy, on integrated composition, is different from the views of leaders in this field.
McLuhan on NPR NPR hosted a special, "Marshall McLuhan Revisited" in August of 2002, with guests Paul Levinson, Derrick de Kerchkove, [both McLuhan-esque scholars] and Kevin Kelly, founding editor of wired. The sound file didn't download for me--somebody tell me what they said! Oh, and web site's first paragraph is very misleading. McLuhan didn't have trouble communicating with American students in the 1960s as the intro says [well, he might have, but that is a different issue]. The standard story is that McLuhan didn't know how to communicate with the first-year students at U of W, Madison, in the 1940s, and that lead to his first book, on advertising, the Mechanical Bride, 1951, I believe.
Nancy K. Miller on Autobiography Nancy K. Miller's new book But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives jumped off the library shelf at me--I might have to rename my weblog "But Enough About Me." Key insights from the book so far: "it takes two to perform an autobiographical act--in reading as in writing . . . the writing autobiographical subject--female or male--almost always requires a partner in crime--and often that partner is the reader" (2). heightened sense of identification in reading memoir, and writers seek readers who identify with them. "Writers of autobiography and readers of autobiography are codependent. Writing autobiography, like reading autobiography, can be addictive." (3) Miller also has a great list of reasons why memoir is so hot as a genre, including the "me" generation, the access to truth, the minority experience in an antielite era, an assertion of identity and agency in a postmodern era, voyeurism for a declining, imperial narcissism (12). Miller doesn't buy, or doesn't stress, the "me" component of the autobiographical act, however, as her title suggests. "I want to propose the notion of memoir as prothesis--an aid to memory. What helps you remember. In this sense what memoirs do is support you in the act of remembering. The memoir boom, then, should be understood not as a proliferation of self-serving representations of individualistic memory but as an aid or a spur to keep cultural memory alive." (13-14) I really like her rhetorical focus: she is getting at what the genre does, not what it says, and that is fundamentally important act for understanding weblogging. Memoirs seem more narrative than database, to use Manovich's distinction in (new) media forms, so I'm inclined to think that bloggers are comfortable with fragmented identities, and may not be railing against postmodernism. And I am a little underwhelmed by the notion of memoir as prothesis, because since Socrates/Phaedrus, writing in general has been understood as either a poison to memory (if memory is seen as contained only within an individual), or as an aid to memory (an extension or prothesis). Miller's analysis, however has got me thinking that blogging is about participating in a moment / movement, about participating in the sputtering, tentative, growth of the web as interactive space. Bloggers are definitely not writing for themselves: they are hoping, screaming, crying, philosophizing, performing in the hopes that someone will stop by and say hello. I shouldn't over pitch that notion--I am finding much intrinsic value in blogging. But I have, since the middle 1990s, since I first became aware of the web, sought, interaction through discussion boards, listservs, maintaining a website, and now blogging. Other teachers stop by the site occasionally. With any luck, a few McLuhan scholars might say hello at some point.
The latest words on weblogs Sixteen days since my last post--ouch. Working on a paper tentatively entitled "Understanding Weblogs: A Rhetorical-Poetical Probe," and I need to update some of the scholarship/journalism about blogs. Here goes: Increasingly, I realize that Dave Winer must be cited for insight/opinions on the web: his brief history identifies early bloggers like himself, and links to some stories from '99 and '00. From Dave, I got Nichole Manktelow's observation: "There are two kinds of bloggers. Those who want complete control over every morsel of their website, and those who'd prefer someone else did all the hard work." Dave also shows up at the "Harvard Weblogs" site: good ol' HU is offering weblog services to students. On his BloggerCon site, he filters Chris Lydon filtering Harold Bloom saying that Ralph Waldo Emerson is a valuable figure for Americans (and especially bloggers) during these transformative times. Would McLuhan call this a movement from cliche to archetype?
Online Lives: Blog essays The journal Biography published a special issue about "Online Lives" in winter, 2003. I've skimmed the first two essays, and both authors are in one way or another disturbed by weblogging. Having been blogging for about a year now, and having included very little of my personal life on this teaching blog, I sometimes forget how raw and perhaps disturbing the journal / personal blogs might be. But to be honest, when a reader is disturbed by somebody else's presentation of self, it seems likely that the reader is, in general, disturbed the huge cultural barrier that is being broken. The self-contained, private, individual self of print culture is, McLuhan might say, "imploding," or turning him or her self inside out. Neither article draws on McLuhan or Ong or any of the scholarship that has really tried to trace the historical changes in orality, print, literacy, electracy. Manovich is well used to talk about blogs as personal databases. I will definitely need to come back to this issue later.
Byrne, Joyce, Pope McLuhan, in Gutenberg Galaxy, wrote about Pope's Dunciad in a way that made me think of Byrne's True Stories. Donald Theall wrote about Pope and James Joyce in 1954 -- "Joyce's interest, like Pope's, is in providing dynamic models for the changes taking place within the sensibility of man in the contemporary world". And he goes on to write: "In other words, if Joyce's approach is to be followed, Pope and Joyce are looking at the "chaosmos" and constructing "map[s] of the soul's groupography" from opposite moments of a historical span" (Virtual McLuhan 183). In my words, Pope is coming to understand the ramifications of print culture in The Dunciad , Joyce is coming to understand the ramifications of electric culture, and Byrne shows astute understanding of the intensification of electric culture through the invention of the computer chip. The movie is billed a "totally cool multipurpose movie," and Byrne pokes fun at the multi-purpose architecture of the late 20th century -- the box -- but as sympathetic as I am to the notion of literature (or film) as being tools for living, maps, instructions, etc., the actual playing out of those functions is much harder to pin down --especially if so few people read Pope or Joyce, or see Byrne's movie.
Theall on the Tetrad Donald Theall in Virtual McLuhan makes a detailed and convincing argument for understanding McLuhan within the context of Modernist writers like Joyce and Pound, and does a particularly nice job of explaining how to read and write tetrads. "The question then becomes how to read these complex, multiplex, semiotic constructions. Essentially there are two ways to read (and for that matter to construct) a tetrad as well as any McLuhanesque percept and/or affect: first, reading (or constructing) it as a poetic construct, permitting it to have all the necessary ambivalence in the interactions of the four components, including in each tetrad all of its complementary and supplementary quotes and comments; second, imitating ("matching" its structure) by merely inserting relatively flat single-directed, or at best dual-directed elements into each of its positions as many who imitate the tetrads do. The latter readings move the tetrad away from being the rhetorico-grammatic device McLuhan suggests they should be, turning them into what he would have labelled a dialectical device--a trivialized logical square. McLuhan's weakness, which he shares with most of his commentators and most commentators on media, is that his suppleness, dexterity, and complexity is more restricted and restrained than that of a poet like Joyce or theoreticians such as Walter Benjamin or Gilles Deleuze. " (152) I know I am guilty of having tried to use the tetrad as a dialectical device, and before reading Theall, I struggled to understand the poetic dimension of McLuhan's tetrad. But some colleagues and I are going to try and play around with what Paul Levinson calls "spiraling tetrads" -- tetrads about reading and writing weblogs, about how the effects might differ (or be surprisingly similar) if one weblogs for academic, creative, and / or personal purposes.
McLuhan links from Bernard J. Hibbits Hibbits is the Associate Dean for Communications and Information Technology at the School of Law, U of Pittsburgh. His list of McLuhan articles, projects, courses, research centers, and other McLuhanisms is clean, useful, and contains quite a few new resources for me. I was actually on the hunt for McLuhan - William Gibson connections in order to keep my Gibson-Byrne ideas afloat. Michael Doherty has a nice piece on the connection from CMC, 1995 [ancient history, I know, but I'm reading McLuhan, right?]. He resists turning McLuhan into Nostradamus, he notes McLuhan's preference for the artists, and the sci-fi writer in particular, as a visionary or antanea of change, he pushes the notion that "cyberspace" is a concept that functions as a tool for helping us make sense of where we are going, but that is is also more than simply instrumental and invokes a whole way of thinking / being. One line seems worth medition in the context of True Stories: "While Gibson's world of the Sprawl is still a fiction, scientists and phrackers alike adopt the words and concepts of his novel as a vocabulary with which they can talk about, and tools with which they can build the future. " True Stories is a much better analysis of what is going on in our world, but doesn't offer a vocabulary or a vision--perhaps. This point might be the one worth pushing--the appeal of Gibson's vision of a world not yet here, probably never here, compared to Byrne's vision of our world, viewed perceptively, insighfully, as a mosaic. And perhaps satirized. Gibson's lack of satire and humor might be part of his appeal ; )
True Stories, David Byrne I watched David Byrne's True Stories the other night. I watched it a few years ago when I was teaching a class called Social implication of Computers, but I haven't seen it recently, and not in the context of thinking about McLuhan. So many resonances: * the mosaic approach: many stories, only one story line (also a kind of database-narrative synthesis along the lines Manovich discusses); the musical number, "Puzzling Evidence" is itself the mosaic approach to cultural analysis in very condensed form. * communication as tactile, phatic, a global consciousness: the "radio head" character grabs people's noses to pick up their signals, and sings about a kind of global consciousness (his band is even cleverly titled "Los Globos"--for all you Los Lobos fans out there!) * the electric age as creative, as reducing the space between work and play, as a new religion, illustrated by the Computer Guy and Spalding Gray's character (the visionary businessman who brought Vericorps to Virgil, Texas). * the turn to voodoo, the new primitivism in the search for love * the world's laziest woman: surrounded by technology, immobolized by it but not necessarily saddened or distressed by it, and ultimately TV leads her to Lewis Fyne, her future husband (because love is for sale). I could go on, but I also have to think about tone and irony in this piece. I was just reading about McLuhan's satire as cynical, a bit angry, and James Joyce's satire as more carnivalesque and celebratory. Byrne's tone in the movie generally seems whimsical, but as the Computer Guy is explaining how creative the "new scientists" are, you see about 5 of them in the shot, all wearning almost identical clothing. And Spalding Gray's character seems to take considerable pleasure in the massive changes he sees going on around him, but he says to Byrne something like "you wouldn't want to raise kids in this world, would you?" And the one story line that gets resolved is Lewis Fyne's quest for marriage after he sings "people like us don't want justice, don't want truth, we just want someone to love". Byrne has certainly been labeled "angry" at times in his career, and I'm not exactly sure what he thinks of the affable Bear, Lewis Fyne. The Name of this Site is Talking Heads: refers to "Vericorps" as the "industrial heart of Virgil," a label which misses the point of this "true body." Nice review, though, from an obviously pro Talking Head site.
Slayers, survivors, other TV metaphors Betsy, Mark, and I were talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer at lunch today. They were talking, and I was listening. They talked about doing reception analysis of the show: why the popularity among teenage girls and young women, the popularity within the lesbian community, and -- I suggested -- the popularity of the show with our retiring colleague, Steve Ward. I didn't have much to say because I am trying to think my way out of the box of literary analysis and cultural studies, and into the box (or tetrad), or circle, of poetic/rhetorical invention (Ulmer) or simply probes (McLuhan). I had been thinking the other day (but not blogging) about "Survivor" as a show that works in the Internet age because of its "participatory" quality and because culturally we seem to be tiring a little bit of the familiar, mass produced television genres. We seem to want people and not actors on our TV sets these days, although obviously that is a complicated category nowadays. But I was also thinking about "survivor" simply as a metaphor, and the kind of power the show is drawing on, the kind of resonance it makes even among those, like me, who haven't seen an episode. Sorry I can't really complete that thought, but I am now also thinking about "Slayer" as metaphor: the similarities and differences between slayer and survivor, the sense of agency communicated, the resonance of the archetypes of both. What about "friends" (from Cheers to Friends)? All of these shows put the people first, the survivor, the slayer, the friends, and presumably reflect or more likely construct identities that people buy into (viewers, after all, being the content of the TV). On the big screen, superheroes are back (again, still, did they ever go away), but the Matrix as metaphor puts the ground, rather than the figure, at the heart of the metaphor. The movie becomes "neo" against "nature" -- the other shows pit people against people, people against demons (the unknown?), and people both with and against people (the comic obviously dealing with the daily rather than the epic / dramatic). Gotta go read McLuhan's From Archetype to Cliche some more.
Imagining a MOO I was working on a paper, and somehow started thinking about my Electronic Communication course, spring 2004. I started thinking about that class as the "homesteaders" of a great plains e-space, and about getting them to contruct Ulmer-influenced mystories in this MOO. No big deal, right, but might be an interesting entree into MOO ville for me. Why would you go into a MOO and build rather than make a web site? I always bump up against these questions when I think about using MOOs. Here are some ideas: Barn-raising. Sure, we can help each other build websites, but in a MOO, students can literally make some shared objects, help each other decorate their places, talk to each other online, etc. Community building. If 10 students put up 10 websites, here there and everywhere, there is no collective archive of the course, and more than likely, most of the sites will disappear within a few years. Maybe that isn't all bad--Mark Federman has been writing about the dangers of "digiselves" coming back to haunt us over on the McLuhan blog. But if each class is a potential settlement, it might be interesting to see what towns stick around, how people move to set up new towns as their own town dwindles and dies. Okay, let me spin this a little further: my mind is churning. What if we sent out a "homesteader's act" for a MOO space (sort of been done, I know), and treated it as a social experiment--can an online community be grown and sustained for 30 years (look at material on the Well). What sustains a community? education, economics, faith, recreation / arts, families, diversity? People would need distinct roles, not just be in the community: librarian/database manager, educator, priest, etc. Does the place need to be such a robust place? What would go into it: some brochures, some plans, some visions. It could be history and futurology at the same time. Look at the civilizaton games, look at the Sims--how can this compete?
Richard Cavell and McLuhan I first came across Richard Cavell's work on McLuhan and acoustic space in a special issue of the Western Journal of Communication; my wife also had an essay in that issue on "space." Last year (2002), the U of Toronto P published McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. The book starts with a description of a film that McLuhan made in 1973, and I have been reading in other places that McLuhan was influenced by the Russian filmmaker, Eisenstein. Putting these two facts together, I can't believe that Greg Ulmer, who thinks modern scholarship needs to be more like film or television, and who draws extensively on Eisenstein, felt compelled to distance himself from McLuhan very explicitly and immediately in his first two books. I need to do a little Ulmer-like wandering to re-connect the dots for him (well, for me, I guess).
Review of two books about McLuhan In a 1999 issue of the Canadian Journal of Communication, Nancy Shaw reviews Method Is the Message: Rethinking McLuhan through Critical Theory. By Paul Grosswiler. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1998. 244 pp. and McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse. By Glenn Willmott. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. 262 pp. I haven't read these two yet (although parts of Willmott's book), but the review, and the books, do a nice job of trying to "retrieve" McLuhan from the dustbin of "technological determinist." I see from the review that Raymond Williams seems to have been particularly influential in slapping that label on McLuhan--not surprising, of course, that the criticism would come from a Marxist / materialist. Shaw's review says that the authors rescue McLuhan from this charge by drawing on other theorists, but it still seems to me that McLuhan's own explanations of why he wasn't a determinist need a better listening. What could be more determinist than a materialist / Marxists who believe in a base-superstructure relationship?
Donald Theall and McLuhan Just picked up Donald Theall's Virtual McLuhan. From the dust cover I learned that Theall was McLuhan's first graduate student, and from Google I learned that Theall has amazing e-text versions of Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses. From an epigraph in one of Theall's essays, I learned that I have my reading cut out for me: "Nobody could pretend serious interest in my work who is not completely familiar with all of the works of James Joyce and the French symbolists." Marshall McLuhan
Photocams and Weblogs Same issues as the Virgina Postrel article (Wired, 11.07, July 2003) has a short piece about phonecams, "a cheap, fast strain of DIY publishing in which everyone is an embedded reporter. The rise of the technology resembles the leap from late-'90s personal homepages to today's weblogs: Like blogs, phonecams are a fresh combination of familiar elements that equal way more than the sum of their parts." This piece isn't online, so I'll quote some more. "Weblogs are giving way to photoblogs, and these are morphing into phoneblogs. . . . They may not consider themselves writers or photographers, but they're using the gadgets to broadcast the days of our lives, every wherer they go, through improvised frame-by-frame stroyboards. " -- story by Xeni Jardin Good description of remediation, although I'm not sure that the current technologies obsolesce other technologies in quite this linear a fashion. McLuhan didn't make this point as well as Bolter and Grusin--convergence keeps more technologies in play, and in either competition or a symbiotic relationship. I'm unlikely to move from blogging to photoblogging because I like to write and my environment isn't photogenic. Or, I'm likely at some point to pepper my weblog with photos, but keep working with words. That will be a bandwith issue.
What's the Matter with the Internet? Reading Mark Poster's What's the Matter with the Internet ? today. Despite the title, Poster is optimistic that the Internet is the kind of technology that has the potential to reshape democratic spaces / practices in (north) america. The internet distinguishes itself from print and broadcast media by (direct quotation follows) 1. enabling many to many communications 2. enabling the simultaneous reception, alteration, and redistribution of cultural objects 3. dislocating communicative action from the posts of the nation, from the territorialized spatial relations of modernity 4. providing instantaneous global contact 5. inserting the modern/ late modern subject into an information machine apparatus that is networked. (16). This would be a great list of "enhancements" as one one node in a McLuhan - esque tetradic analysis, but the multiple factors that are needed to account for or energize social change seem to be more effectively accounted for in Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone . Poster argues for a radical restructuring of the subject based on these enhancements, but watching and listening to college students for the past 10 years, I see excitement and activity primarily about #1 (instant messaging), and fear of #4 and #5. When I (or my friends and colleagues) teach #2, students are often very excited, but they doesn't seem to lead to #3. I'm not convinced that many people want to speak out or be heard, and people from this region seem particularly interested in going unnoticed / unheard. Putnam has a great section about the telephone, and ultimately the ways in which it is primarily used to maintain f2f relations--much like IMing.
Language of New Media: Reversal of touch I'm reading Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media and seeing lots of interesting overlap and intersection with McLuhan (who gets only a couple of respectful but brief mentions), and Bolter and Grusin's Understanding New Media which gets only one respectful paragraph. Being the symbiotic scholar that I am, I might work on a synthesis / review of these three books some time for Tekka or another 'zine, but for Note 1 (undoubtedly more to follow), I want to connect LM's work to McLuhan's visual and acoustic spaces, and his tetrad. LM summarizes the work of Benjamin and Varillo in terms that match up with McLuhan's broad picture of western civilization. B & V both agree that we are making a move from a culture that privileged the visual over the haptic, the distant over the close or intimate. This line of argument seems a bit counter-intuitive because "visual culture" is a hot phrase right now, but if we can hold onto the kinds of things that we associate with the rise of print/book/visual culture--science, objectivity, positivism, isolation (personal, regional, national isolations--we can understand the new "graphic culture" (a phrase McLuhan sometimes uses)--as embracing inter-relatedness (or intersubjectivity), relativism, a "global village." LM says of this movement "We may be tempted . . . to read the lack of distance characteristic of the act of touching as allowing for a different relationship between subject and object. [But] Benjamin and Virilio block this seemingly logical line of argument, since they both stress the agression potentially present in touching. Rather than understanding touch as a respectful and careful contact or as a caress, they present it as an unceremonious and aggressive disruption of matter. Thus the standard connotations of vision and touch become reversed" (175). In Mcluhan terms, then, LM has invoked the tetrad, the "reversal" or "flip," the tendency of any media to be taken to its extremes. In other words, some see respect and care in touch, and others like B&J see danger and agreession in touch, and both are "right". Both are focusing on only one aspect of touch, and only one aspect of a technology / media. Listservs and chatrooms can reach out and touch/connect people, and they can lead to rape in cyberspace. Very few scholars / commentators pay much attention to this and / and dimension of technology, it seems, preferring instead to champion or denigrate change. Using McLuhan's tetrad as a tool for analysis encourages sustained analysis and suspension of quick judgement.
McLuhan sites, including clips Two new-to-me Mcluhan sites: 1. The CBC archives with video and audio clips. (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) 2. The McLuhan Global Reasearch Network. I think I have visited this site before. Course available starting June 17th, 2003--maybe I'll be there.
PowerBox: Plato and Community Literacy? (275) PowerBox Productions is a multimedia company (one person show?) that has interesting resonances for Intro to Writing Studies. The site's header quotes McLuhan, a featured exhibit is the "Magic Cave" (inverting Plato's dark cave, perhaps), and PowerBox productions seems very concerned with education children, working with community organizations, and bringing multimedia expression to those who might want to explore it.
Popular genres and the study of literature In Cliche to Archetype, McLuhan and Wilfred Watson write: "Today [1970] the entire world of rock poetry and of related forms of jazz, of song and speech and dance, has created a complex world of genre which no professor of literature can ignore if he has any concern about maintaining contact with his students. The interests of literature are not really served by ignoring its rivals." (87) McLuhan is entirely overlooked in the scholarship on genre, but he clearly understood the ecology of genre as part of the ecology of media. His notion of "retrieval," which is now being revived via Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin as "remediation," is at the heart of an understanding of genres not as static, but as always working and reworking existing forms and content. Although McLuhan himself slips on / into the phrase "new genres," the implication of his work a radically "new" genre is impossible. One more note on genres and the electric era. "Realism is specialism and fragmentation. That is why electric circuitry, in creating new integral patterns of social organization, also re-creates iconic patterns of daily life, as well as in the arts." (89) Hypertext, as "fragmentation," is realism and not particularly "electric," perhaps. Fantasy, which dimishes realism, is "electric" and holistic. McLuhan oftens says the west, in the electric age, is becoming more eastern (more holistic, more ying and yang-ish), while the east, in being "modernized," is becoming more western and fragmented, more specialized.
Seeing through McLuhan's eyes (275) Two random notes on seeing the world through McLuhan's eyes, or at least seeing the way the world talks about and uses technology. 1. I was sitting in a Dr's office and saw a talk show; the guests and audience were debating whether it was appropriate or not for a publisher to have made "bubble gum cards" or "trading cards" of victims and heroes of 9-11. Most people liked the idea of commemorating the lost and the heroes, but were disturbed by the medium / genre, and disturbed that someone could make a profit off the venture. A spokesperson for the card company said, "in this case, the medium is not the message," but of course he was wrong. The medium continued to be the message, and even though the manufacturer wanted to send a different message, the history and power of the medium / genre could not be overcome with one gesture. 2. In Wired, April 2003, designer Bob Greenberg succinctly a kind of media ecology: the ways in which new media "remediate," change, push-around other media: "MTV combined film and music with faster editing and graphics, which really grabbed a younger demographic. It was really an extension of film language, adapted by television. The web is a new language, the first new one to come along since the introduction of film. The difference is that it's global and it's local and it cuts across age groups. That's why the impact of the Web will be much greater. The Web is MTV on steroids." In tetrad terms: Enhancement. When asked what the downside of "the web changing everything" is, he says: "I particularly notice the loss of the individual creator. There used to be one person sitting in front of millions of dollars of equipment--now there are eight people working collaboratively. This is one reason I collect outsider art‹to remind myself of the importance of singular vision. You have to have a point of view. " In tetrad terms: Obsolescence.
McLuhan on the Photograph (275) (399) Today, I started thinking about the visual culture and language class I will teach in the fall of 2003 (399) because I have to decide on some books. While I won't use McLuhan's Understanding Media, I did read his chapter on the photograph. From Understanding Media (1964). "Photography was almost as decisive in making the break between mere mechanical industrialism and and the graphic age of electronic man. The step from the age of Typographic Man to the age of Graphic Man was taken with the invention of photography" (171). ["The graphic age"--I haven't seen McLuhan use that before. His use of "visual culture" to describe print culture is often confusing. The graphic age might be a more useful label.] "If the phonetic alphabt was a technical means of severing the spoken word from its aspects of sound and gesture, the photograph and its development in the movie restored gesture to the human technology of recording experience. In fact, the snapshot of arrested human postures by photography directed more attention to physical and psychic posture than ever before." (174) "The photograph is just as useful for collective, as for individual, postures and gestures, whereas written and printed language is biased toward the private and individual posture. Thus, the traditional figures of rhetoric were individual postures of mind of the private speaker in relation to an audience, whereas myth and Jungian archetypes are collective postures of the mind with which the written form could not cope, any more than it could command mime and gesture" (174). [I was reading an online essay in Enculturation about the remediation of style, and the author drew on classical rhetoric as a means of making sense of the new style. If McLuhan is right, the new styles of visual communication that we will / might be teaching need to draw on myth and archetype, not classical rhetoric, to work effectively, appropriately, in our graphic age. ] "Education is ideally civil defense against media fall-out. Yet Western man has had, so far, no education or equipment for meeting any of the new media on their own terms. Literate man is not only numb and vague in the presence of film or photo, but he intensifies his ineptness by a defensive arrogance and condenscension to "pop kulch" and "mass entertainment" (175). [It seems to me that the literate of today (the specialized, highly literate English professor and students) has to make a case for what should be read and valued in literature, as well as figure out how to meet and use the new media on its own terms.] "In the age of the photograph, language takes on a graphic or iconic character, whose "meaning" belongs very little to the semantic universe, and not at all to the republic of letters" (176). [see above: the mythic basis for visual communication] "The age of Jung and Freud is, above all, the age of the photograph, the age of the full gamut of self-critical attitudes." (177) "To understand the medium of the photograph is quite impossible, then, without grasping its relations to other media, both old and new. For media, as extensions of our physical and nervous systems, constitute a world of biochemical interactions that must ever seek new equilibrium as new extensions occur" (181).
McLuhan on writers (275) This screen is an essay by Peter Montgomery from 1984 about the influence of various writers on McLuhan's thinking: "Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Joyce, and Percy Wyndham Lewis were Marshall McLuhan's beacons in the dark confusion of the modern technological explosion. " The piece does a nice job of devoting a paragraph to each, although Wyndham Lewis gets more attention than the rest.
A webtext with McLuhan, Plato, and friends (275) Robert P. Yagelski's "Computers, Literacy, and Being: Teaching with Technology for a Sustainable Future" is a long essay, but within it you will find a set of pages entitled "Plato Lives: Writing and the Western Self," and within that grouping you will find a screen entitled "The Sensual Reconfiguration of Communication". Yagelski summarizes McLuhan's ideas about a techology changing our sense ratios (from oral to visual for example), but he also offers a challenge to those ideas, drawing on philosopher David Abrams. The content of this essay should be relevant to IWS, and the screen on McLuhan is in itself a reasonable model for the essay I am asking you to write. Yagelski summarizes McLuhan (you would probably want to summarize a bit more than he does), puts McLuhan in a context, then offers a challenge to McLuhan via the argument that McLuhan, Ong, and others have not thought enough about the influence of the natural world on the self. They have focused, instead, to heavily on technologies. The "so what?" element is pretty strong--Yagelski and Abrams are saying that if we are going to use / develop theories of the self, they should account for nature's influence, not just technology's influence.
McLuhan and the Middle Ages (275) A succinct essay by Franceso Guardiani on the ways in which McLuhan sees the modern era as a renaissance of the middle ages. The key insight: "we have re-entered a world of multisensorial perception that recalls the world of our pre-modern forefathers." This essay is part of a short-lived web project on McLuhan studies. Essays by McLuhan and other scholars can be found here.
McLuhan one liners (275) I was thinking about my claim that readers should look for the nuggets in The Gutenberg Galaxy, when I remebered that I had read about a McLuhan quote generator. Traces of the website can still be found, but it is no longer active. I did find a collection of audio-clips--not so helpful in our sound-disabled campus clusters, but a site you might want to check from home. I found the clips via a project posted in 1999 by an undergraduate at Simon Fraser University; he was asked to wrestle with McLuhan, too, and found it no simple task. Is that fact consoling? Check out his links! You should definitely go to matx.ca -- Canadian, and a Mac-user. We are practically brothers.
Walter Ong and Dennis Baron (275) Thought I would personalize the authors we will be reading this week. I've already given Plato and Phaedrus their own page, but Walter Ong and Dennis Baron deserve an introduction. Walter Ong is considered one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, but there is surprisingly little good material about him on the web, and he hasn't put any material on the web. His book, Orality and Literacy, is frequently taught in courses about the history of writing, history of rhetoric, or even history of literature. I used it in Electronic Communication a year ago. He and McLuhan crossed paths early in their careers, and you will see Ong's name come up in The Gutenberg Galaxy. Dennis Baron is the department chair of English at the University of Illinois. In addition to "Pencils to Pixels," he has made a number of his essays available on his website, including one on "How to Write a Paper." He is an example of a professor who combines linguistics and writing instruction in his teaching and research.
Gutenberg Galaxay node Semester is wrapping up, I'm starting to think about next semester's courses (spring 2003), wondering if I can sustain my weblog. This is a transition entry--relevant to my class on technology and literacy, as well as the spring class, "Introduction to Writing Studies." I found a very brief summary/commentary on Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy in "The Electronic Labyrinth," a project from the early 1990s about electronic and hypertextual writing. The "Labyrinth" authors write: "McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. Movable type, with its ability to reproduce texts accurately and swiftly, extended the drive toward homogeneity and repeatability already in evidence in the emergence of perspectival art and the exigencies of the single "point of view". He [McLuhan} writes: the world of visual perspective is one of unified and homogeneous space. Such a world is alien to the resonating diversity of spoken words. So language was the last art to accept the visual logic of Gutenberg technology, and the first to rebound in the electric age. (136)" The Labyrinth authors doubt that a return to language (called "secondary orality" by Walter Ong, or sometimes referred to by McLuhan as a return to tribalism) will bring about a return to diversity, and use the homongeniety of American popular culture as their example. Most readers of McLuhan are concerned about his apparent technological determinism (technologies invent selves) and concerned about some of his conservative, utopian, speculations. I don't have good answers to these issues yet--his work, however, is always provocative and engaging.
The Limits of McLuhan's Influence How the Information Highway can Transform Education: Reflections on McLuhan's Vision by Dr. Kim H. Veltman challenges McLuhan's basic premise that the "medium is the message" by noting that the difference between print biases and visual biases is a long-standing cultural difference between Greek privileging of content and time on the one hand and hebraic privileging of form and space on the other hand. The pendulum may have swung in favor of an electronic culture, a television culture, Veltman says, but we shouldn't allow that swing to erode basic western cultural values. Her anxiety, however, seems to re-enforce, rather than challenge, the premise that "the medium is the message." Connecting the pendulum swing to a simple mechanism of the human condition begs the question: why has the pendulum swung at this time, if not because of technological change? She says, " It is vital that we recognize that these two approaches represent fundamental aspects of the human condition, that it is not a question of the one winning or the other losing, but rather a challenge of both complementing one another in the way that male and female, yin and yang do. " She senses that content is being lost, history and geography are being lost, and she seems to want them back, without acknowledging the ways in which those subjects need to adjust to changes in our cultural and educational environment. Two additional, random, funny things about this paper. She looks at trends in "sociology" then goes on to cite people in rhetoric and professional communication: Lester Faigely, Charie Thralls, Nancy Blyler, and Tom Kent. Her lack of understanding of her sources raises some doubts about her "ethos" as us rhetoricians would say. She uses a McLuhan list of binary opposties that contrasts "self-expression" (print era) with "group therapy" (electronic era). I've been thinking about blogs as self-expression, but may be they are better described as a kind of group therapy. Food for thought.
Understanding the Web as Media, Curt Cloninger. Understanding the Web as Media, Curt Cloninger. A really quick, smart, outline of what the web does well, what it doesn't do well. Starts with McLuhan--Cloninger really understands the importance of "the medium is the message". A. MANY-TO-MANY NETWORKING B. MULTIMEDIA C. DATABASE D. AUTOMATION (programmability) E. LIVE and/or TIME-SHIFTED F. LOCATION-INDEPENDENT and/or DEVICE-INDEPENDENT Great links and case studies. Check it out.
McLuhan, on Learning "Learning, the educational process, has long been associated only with the glum. We speak of the "serious" student. Our time presents a unique opportunity for learning by means of humor--a perceptive or incisive joke can be more meaningful than platitudes lying between two covers." -- Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage 10. I wish I could say I am funny guy, but I'm Canadian, like McLuhan, which means I tend to be dry and amusing, and not exactly funny. But my un-funniness is not meant to curtail the pleasure, play, or humor of learning. If you aren't playing around, experimenting, or exploring, chances are you aren't learning. About this siteI wish I had time to read more weblogs, but here are the few I check in on regularly |
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