Understanding Media
Boyer, D. (2007). Understanding media. Chicago, Ill: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Understanding Media: A Popular philosophy by Dominic Boyer introduced me to the work of Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher known for his work discussing media theory.
McLuhan speaks of the media being an extension of human knowledge and intellect however, it has become almost a taboo subject in which everybody knows everything and nothing about it.
The fact that media is constantly changing at a speed that no human could possibly keep up with, it becomes hard to discuss the issues that are created; especially in terms of the correlation between media and mental health.
Marx also believes that media can have it’s benefits, furthering the capacities of human capability. Despite this fact, media is never talked about properly and is not addressed as a serious issue. This potentially can cause individuals to feel isolated and alienated leading to issues with mental health
Quotes
“anxieties and fantasies are alway braided into our certainties about media” pg iv
“We are all, all of us, in our own ways, expert media makers and users and occasional media philosophers. But we all also make and use media differently and inhabit differently composed media environments. And so, by extension, we know different media and we engage them with different levels of intimacy and comfort.” pg v
“The media” has become one of those terms like “the government” or “the market” that are used to talk about forces that are extensive, abstract and complex, unknowable in the details of their supposed entireties, but, a the same time, immediate pervasive and banal in important ways.” pg 8
“The wheel, McLuhan wrote, is an extension of the mobile capacities of the foot and the book an extension of the visual capacities of the eye. But a wheel obviously has different intrinsic properties than a foot does. Media were prosthetic in the sense that they extended human power or “agency” in the world. But McLuhan argued that these prosthesis also redefined, re-proportioned and rescaled human powers in fundimental way. Once reliant upon a prothesis we could never walk or see or act the same way again.” pg 15
“The new media have made our world into a single unit. The world now is like a continuously sounding tribal drum where everybody gets the message all the time. A princess gets married in England and boom, boom, boom sound the drums. We hear all about it.” pg 19
“At it’s philosophical core, Marx’s critique of capitalism identifies and attacks the medial character of modern society.” pg 32
“Capitalism was foremost a problem of value for Marx; it was what happened when the objective value of human labour (think: the price of something) became more socially important than the subjective value of human labour (the value and meaning to a worker of putting his/her time and energy into producing something). Marx recognised that every society at every point in history had some kind of gap between objective value and subjective value and he called this “estrangement”.” pg 33
“Put simply, the poetic is attention to the capacity we humans have for producing, making, doing things. It reflects our awarenes of our capacity to bring forth, to create changes in our environmens. We are certain of the existence of the poetic principally because we are active sbjects in the world and we can believe that our activity is the result of ordained-from-above will, ontologial accident, or that the ony thing that matters is the experience of activity in the world itself.” pg 42
“Although the cultural phenomena in question are too various to distill down to a single root cause, I suspect the unease has something to do with the elusiveness of the medial in the first place, with an inability to define clearly where “middle grounds” and “means” end and the more experientially secure domains of the poetic and the formal (the domains of the “I” and the “not-I”) begin.” pg 46
“I explore how the core certanties we have about media often immedite the medial, that is, they temper the expansive and excessive qualities of social mediation by treating media as instruments of human creative powers or as technologies, technical forms with an intrinsic, objective set of qualities and capacities.” pg 48
“This is to say that the most of what human communication involves (tone, gesture, innuendo, intended meaning, unintended associations, negotiated meaning, social relations etc.) is also irrelevant to information theory’s formalist model of “information”. “Information” is defined as a set of possible communicative system that is ideally binary in character.” pg 73