LCC2400

First, watch Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera.

Evaulate how Manovich uses this film in The Language of New Media. Does it bear the interpretive weight he places on it? Be specific in both your summary of his argument and your evaluation of it.

Finally, name what you think may be a contemporary analogue to Vertov’s film, and explain how it could be used to explore the logic of new media in a manner similar to Manovich’s use. Feel free to be expansive here. You don’t have to restrict yourself to film.

Please read the piece by Alan Liu.

As students, what do you think of these recommendations?

In the style of Baudrillard’s essay on the Centre Pompidou, write an analysis of a given urban space (or particular building) in Atlanta. You won’t have as much space or desire to write at the same length as the model, of course, but you should try to compensate with density.

Contains descriptions of the predictable consequences of the information given on these sites.

I mentioned that I had read through some of my students’ facebook profiles last semester, and they seemed surprised–perhaps horrified–that I knew anything about it. All of these sites are to be thought of as semi-public at best, and you probably shouldn’t post anything there under your real name that you wouldn’t want a potential employer or your parents to read. Perhaps you have some thoughts on the different expectations of privacy in these emerging social networking tools.

Here’s an article about the sexiest topic in psychometry, the so-called “Flynn Effect.” Note in particular this paragraph:

The test at issue here, based on a methodology pioneered by the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, involved asking students to reason about the conservation of liquid and solid materials, the conservation of internal volume and volume displacements—a battery known as the Piagetian volume-and-heaviness tests. Shayer and his colleagues found a rather astounding, 25-percentile-point decline in the last quarter-century. “The kids now at 11 years and 10 months are doing as well as the eight- to nine-year-olds in 1976,” Shayer explains. Shayer posits that a distinct shift in the environment is at work—in particular, diminishing amounts of experiential play. “They’re glued to bloody computer games,” he laments, adding that “the food computers offer children is thin gruel indeed.”

I want you choose the chapter of Understanding Media that you found the most suggestive and explain why. Be specific and address both positive and negative aspects of McLuhan’s unusual expository and analytic style.

I want you to consider the following two passages:

The distracted person, too, can form habits. More, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one. (Benjamin, “Work of Art”)

The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry. The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees the world outside as an extension of the film he has just left (because the latter is intent upon reproducing the world of everyday perceptions), is now the producer’s guideline. The more intensely and flawlessly his techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on the screen. This purpose has been furthered by mechanical reproduction since the lightning takeover by the sound film. (Adorno & Horkheimer, “Mass Culture”)

Both of these quotes use film as their primary example of a medium which exerts control of a sort over its audience. In the sixty-to-seventy years since these analyses appeared, what changes, if any, in how films are produced and consumed have affected their arguments?

“Orality and Literacy”

This is the title Walter Ong, S. J. gave his 1982 book. Its subtitle, “the technologizing of the word,” is significant as well. There are oral cultures, such as Homeric Greece, and there are literate ones, such as post-Gutenberg Europe. Oral cultures exhibit what Ong calls “primary orality.” Highly technologized cultures, such as ours, display regressive tendencies Ong calls “secondary orality.” The technology, as Ong refers to it, of writing, fundamentally changes how people conceive of themselves and each other. The second chapter of the work is devoted to “the modern discovery of primary oral cultures.” Here Ong considers how philologists discovered that the work of Homer was a composite oral tradition, one relying on complex mnemonic techniques. Ong refers to the work of the classicist Eric Havelock, whose A Preface to Plato Ong suggests “has shown convincingly how the beginnings Greek philosophy were tied in with the restructuring of thought brought about by writing” (28). Another work, which, like McLuhan’s has acquired a quasi-cultic status, mentioned by Ong here is Julian Jaynes’s The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. “Bicameral,” as you may recall from civics class, refers to the hemispherical model of the mind, which Jaynes argues was unable to communicate in an oral culture. The oral human, for Jaynes, could not interpret the right hemisphere as being part of his own mind. The voices and images thus produced were interpreted by these preliterates as being the voices of gods, or the unifying spirit of the tribe. To the best of my knowledge, Jaynes’s hypothesis is not compatible with contemporary cognitive scientific understanding of how the mind works; but its suitability to the general ideas under discussion here should be clear. In the third chapter, “Some Psychodynamics of Orality,” Ong attempts to imagine what the thought-patterns of an oral human are like. The only way to remember things without a mnemonic inscription technology is to think memorable thoughts (35) and to think in formulas that implement rhythmic discourse. Thoughts without formulas would be wasteful and are much more unlikey to occur than in our own scattered consciousness. Among the various characteristics Ong uses to describe orality here, of particular interest is “homeostasis” (46). He suggests that the oral culture always keeps itself in equilibrium, that memories which no longer have relevance are removed from the ritualistic recitals. I find this particularly interesting because of the implicit contrast with a literate society, which presumably does not have this homeostatic process. This is a point that I think would be worth exploring in one of your paper’s, if it happens to grab your attention. Another concluding point worth keeping mind for the upcoming extrapolation from literacy to electracy (the coinage, is, as far as I know, Greg Ulmer’s, about whom more in a bit) is that mnemonic literature does not tolerate colorless personalities. Heroics and strangeness are structural necessities, and the concept of the anti-hero or everyman as protagonist is necessarily a literate one (the character of Odysseus, “no man,” seems to offer an interesting counterexample here, we might think).

The most important chapter in Ong’s work for our purposes is the fourth: “Writing Restructures Consciousness.” He makes explicit the analogy that orality is to literacy as literacy is to electracy by mentioning Plato’s contention in the Phaedrus, which we will discuss in more detail on Friday, that “writing is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can only be in the mind” (79). Ong says that the same is said of computers. Whether or not this analogy is exact, or in what sense it could said to be meaningful, is one of the main questions we will consider in this class; and I hope that you’ll begin thinking about and coming up with examples to support your developing opinions. You may raise your eyebrows at Ong’s assertion that “writing is a technology.” You may consider “technology” to be restricted to various gadgetry and large-scale apparatuses. Ong, on the other hand, writes that “technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word” (82). Speaking of writing systems, pictographic and syllabary, Ong notes that the alphabet was invented only once, by Semitic peoples around 1500 BCE (89). All alphabets derive ultimately from this one technological breakthrough. The alphabet and consequent development of literacy democratizes the hieratic act of writing. Ong refers to the often-mentioned etymology of “glamor,” and its derivation from “grammar.” Knowledge of the word is related, in the matter of semantic origin at least, to knowledge of magic. An amusing and poignant example Ong uses about the distinctions between oral and literate cultures is the amount of effort spent studying rhetoric in oral cultures, which originally referred to the procedures of oral discourse. The overwhelming systemicity of the study of rhetorical occasions is baffling to the reader in a highly technologized society, Ong suggests (110). His example, and one worth trying out for yourself if you never have, is to take a look at a handbook of classical rhetorical terms and trying to wonder if anyone could ever have had all of those at their ready disposal (even allowing for the fact that they were terms in a native language).

“The Third Term”

As I mentioned above, Ong himself and previous and subsequent scholars have sought to describe the shift from a literate to a post-literate society caused by the development of mass media and rapid communication technologies: telegraph, radio, cinema, television, the computer, the networked computer, virtual reality, ubiquitous computing, etc. Of the previous scholars, McLuhan is surely the most prominent, and we’ll be reading his most famous book, Understanding Media, in a couple of weeks. (In the introduction to the edition we’ll be using, Lewis Lapham, until recently the editor of Harper’s, notes that it took the computer and the widespread use of the internet for the world to catch up with McLuhan’s ideas, for their logic to be manifest. I don’t exactly agree with this assessment, but McLuhan’s continuing influence among some new media enthusiasts and what I call “technolibertarians” or technoutopianists [think Wired here] remains very strong.) Ong says that the effect of secondary orality is that technology has caused us to turn outward because we have turned inward (through the agency of the letter), whereas in primary orality, we turned outward because there was little inward (136). Confusing? Oh, yes.

Works Cited

Havelock, Eric. A Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1963.
Jaynes, Julian. The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.
Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.