Sue Ngo: ITP Coursework

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In his work, Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan famously theorizes that the medium and not the content affects how the message is received and understood by the audience.  According to McLuhan in chapter 1: The Medium is the Message, the invention of electricity caused a structural shift from sequential understanding of information to information being conveyed instantly. With each iteration, instant understanding masks the mechanization behind a medium and allows the user more organic and creative interaction with the medium.  The new environment embodied as content the old mechanized environment within it.  Established media is made to re-define itself within each new environment.  One example of this can be observed within print media.  Print media has adapted to the growing demand for instant access to news and information.  Many print powerhouses, like the New York Times, have dedicated more and more resources to their multimedia websites while retaining the same content.

In Chapter 2: Media Hot and Cold, McLuhan lumps media into two categories, hot and cold. Media is categorized by the ‘definition’ and the level of participation by the user within the medium. Hot mediums have higher definition with more data and require less interaction or participation by the audience, including, radio, print, movies.  A cool medium has low definition, requiring the audience to fill in the blanks. This low definition creates more interaction between the user and the medium. His examples of cold mediums include, cartoons, television and telephone.  Advancements in technology continue to create new environments and shift the way users interact with and understand media, as well as which mediums can be considered hot or cold.  I would go further to say that McLuhan’s segregation of hot and cold mediums no longer holds weight in our current technological media environment.

Following McLuhan’s example, today’s cold mediums would be social networking sites, microblogging, blogs, video blogs.   However, these social mediums are more often being used as the prefferred methods by users to disseminate information about hot topics.  For example, the recent ‘hot’ election controversy in Iran this past June could be played out in real time through one cold medium, twitter.  While the Iran government was jamming cellphones, social networking and texts, twitter became the means for people to relay information about the controversy before content could be censored.  Another example, to pull from Clay Shirky’s lecture to Red’s class, was the use of texting following the 2008 China Earthquake.  Information about the earthquake made its way to thousands of people before the government could have a change to ‘control’ the information.   These cold mediums are completely based on user input, but are very rich in information and data.

Untitled from Susan Ngo on Vimeo.

After a few false starts with many different ideas, one including cumbersome pumpkin seeds, at 10:30 last night we finally came to a winning concept.  The secrets of ER love must be exposed.

We only had about an hour and a half to shoot, so it is a very short piece.  We used the DVX HD camera with an ER lighting kit.  I would love to go back and spend more time on it in the future.  Next time I would smooth out the shots, and add more steps/dancemoves.

Written in 1909, E.M. Forster’s science-fiction short story, “The Machine Stops”, weaves a speculative future eerily parallel to our own culture. The author creates a society which has become completely reliant on technology to the point of worshipping the manual that runs the machines. The one Machine has become ‘the spirit of the age’ and is revered above all else to the point of religious fanaticism.

In Forster’s imagined society humans can no longer survive on the Earth’s surface, instead they dwell in single occupancy climate controlled pods underground. The main character of the short story, Vashanti, believes this way of life is extreme ‘sophistication’. She details the compromises individuals willingly make for the good of the Machine. Citizens in this future accept with minimal complaint any defects the machine may have and learn to live with them or ignore them.

This readiness to acquiesce for the sake of convenience parallels our society increasing reliance on social networking sites for social interaction.  In exchange for the ability to see what your second grade dance partner is eating for lunch, you trade your ideas.  The general public readily accepts one-sided copyright policies that groups like Facebook and Youtube enforce. Our intellectual property – thoughts, photos and videos – is not our own.

Today’s information culture also glosses over individual freedoms.   When the phrase “Google it” has replaced “look it up” in our lexicon, censorship of information by Google should be a major concern.  However, in 2005, Google entered the Chinese market and made an agreement with the government to comply with Chinese censorship rules. Certain words, such as, Tibet, Taiwan, and the Tiananmen Square protests were blocked, bolstering “the Great Firewall of China”.  The censoring by Google met with some criticism, but not enough to push Google to change its policies in China.

Forster wrote this deeply pessimistic short story as a cautionary tale.  The world he creates collapses under the weight of technology.  I think his work is applicable to our times, and our society should be more vigilant about where we put our information and how we receive it.

In the first four chapters of Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong explores the systems by which humans exchanged information within primary oral cultures.  He goes on to study the transformation of society with the spread of the written word.   The means by which humans communicated information and stored ideas worked to shape the social structures of societies.

In primary oral cultures, formulaic repetition of ideas passed down from one generation’s elders to the next preserved the oral history.  Ong’s breakdown of the psychodynamics of these societies characterized them as having a conservative thought processes that served neither to analyze nor challenge the state of things.  Rather speech was used to reinforce the present time, even at the risk of historical inaccuracy.  Only a few were masters of information because of the the specialized nature of this form of communication that relied heavily on memorization, presentation, and the present moment.  The way people in  primary oral traditions thought, stored knowledge, and structured the society changed with written word.

The invention of the written word was a humanizing technology.  With the written word, more of society had the power to create knowledge.  The invention of the first alphabet codified sound into visible marks that could be understood by both writer and reader.  According to Ong, the creation of an understood script was the most momentous of all human technological inventions (p. 84).   There was no longer a need for the long laborious study of oral tradition to express thought.  The simplification of alphabets and scripts along with the development of more accessible writing tools lead to the  heightening of the human consciousness.   Memorization gave way to more individuality and abstract thought.

The growing pains caused by this paradigm shift from oral tradition to a written one parallels our own struggle with the changing media landscape.  Modern technology has taken the democratization of communication a step further.  Most recently the written word has moved away from the elite print media towards a more democratized process with widely circulated blogs and the popularity of using online mediums for information.  Now any person with access to a computer or cellphone, with some exceptions, has the ability to communicate ideas via text, twitter, or other popular social networking sites and have them quickly disseminated next door or around the world.  It will be interesting to see how our society’s continues to restructure and reshape itself within this context.