McLuhan mailing list?
chris
so inactive, I'm sure there must a mailing list somewhere dedicated to
discussing his ideas.
thanks,
chris
Huascar
about McLuhan's ideas.
If someone will tell us where to find it, I will appreciate.
"chris" <someb...@yahoo.com> ha scritto nel messaggio
news:bfd66fe9.0404...@posting.google.com...
ReindeR Rustema
> I don't have idea, but I'm sure there must be somewhere a place to discuss
> about McLuhan's ideas.
> If someone will tell us where to find it, I will appreciate.
Yeah, let us know. Obviously the basis is too small here to have a
discussion.
--
ReindeR
bigpit
"ReindeR Rustema" <rei...@rustema.nl> wrote in message
news:1gc54th.bcnexj1ch9odrN%rei...@rustema.nl...
Perhaps we are finaly geting the message from this medium - go elsewhere for
mcluhan! :)
I look in occasionally, but theres not much doing, is there?
If I find a bulletin board or sokething, I'll post the adresshere.
Dave
ReindeR Rustema
> Perhaps we are finaly geting the message from this medium - go elsewhere for
> mcluhan! :)
>
> I look in occasionally, but theres not much doing, is there?
You might be interested in this book announcement I just read on the
nettime-nl mailinglist. On media-theory.
http://publishing.v2.nl/publications/
I read the preface and it made me curious. It's a mystery how to buy
this book by the way. Which only adds to its desirability I think.
McLuhan is first mentioned in the second but last paragraph. But already
the title is a reference evidently.
----------------------------------------
Understanding Media Theory
language, image, sound, behaviour
BOOK CONTENTS
PREFACE ....... Arjen Mulder
This is not a book about the best way to get into the media. Nor does it
describe how, once you are in the media, you can most effectively
profile yourself. It will not teach you how to best communicate your
message, regardless of that message's social desirability. Nor is it
about the temptations of the media or the dangers they pose to the
individual, the family and society: violence, child porn, dumbing down,
or manipulation of the masses. It is not an ode to media, nor is it a
pessimistic look at the cultural decay alleged to be an inevitable
consequence of ever-increasing media power. Finally, the book does not
survey or detail the technical workings of media. It does not discuss
circuits, relay stations, microchips, transistors or other mechanical
and electronic components of media. Nor does it discuss goose quills,
papyrus production or the secrets of oil paint.
This book is a theoretical introduction to media. It is about the new
media as well as the old, many of which are still alive and kicking.
This book describes how media make us who we are. It seeks to understand
the media of the last hundred thousand years and learn to play with them
instead of being played with by them. It seeks to create distance from
what we become through our ongoing interaction with media. The media are
read in this book over and over in terms of their technical capabilities
and limitations, which can repeatedly be seen in the capabilities and
limitations of the worldview and emotional spectrum of the users of
those media. All media are directed at our bodies. Media theory
endeavors to discover how our bodies react to media and how they are
programmed by media to react in a certain way. Media influence our
bodies independently of our selves, whether we like it or not. Our
bodies, however, do not exist independently of our selves, for who we
are and what we are almost one and the same thing. Therefore media also
determine in considerable part who we are.
This book comprises three parts plus an introduction. The first part,
"General Media Theory," develops a theory which is applicable to every
medium at once, whether binoculars, painting or hypertext - although the
emphasis here is on visual media. The second part, "Historical Media
Theory," describes how new media have been introduced again and again
throughout history, and what their consequences have been for humans and
society - this time with a focus on language media. The third part,
"Practical Media Theory," describes how the media intervene in our lives
on an everyday level, and how we can respond. The media of behavior and
sound are also dealt with more extensively here. So-called "dead media,"
such as tom-toms and pneumatic dispatch, fall outside the scope of this
book. The introduction, "Media Theory: The New Science," describes what
media are and what media theory's origins and ultimate goals are.
Because the point of departure is always the question of what kinds of
experiences media evoke in their users, no prior knowledge is needed to
read this book other than an everyday familiarity with media, which is
in any case characteristic of our age and our society. A certain
openness with respect to art is necessary, for almost all the examples
and applications of the theory discussed come from the artistic field.
Art need not be discussed ponderously: no one knows what it is, and
everyone must discover for themselves what it might be. In this book,
art (literature, painting, photography, film, music, interactive
installations, and so on) is considered to be a particular way of
handling media and using them to call forth certain experiences. These
experiences are linked to the canon of media theory books that have been
published in the past sixty years, supplemented with a few precursors
from previous centuries. At the moment, one theoretical introduction to
new media after the other is being published, and rightly so, except
that in these books the foundation for thinking about media is either
left out or else mentioned in passing. And this is not right: "classical
media theory" is much richer than any contemporary thought about
contemporary media.
Media theory as it is taught in art schools, colleges and universities
contains three main currents. The first emanates from film and
television studies, and cultural studies with a focus on visual culture.
The second springs from literary studies. These two currents can be
easily separated on the basis of the various books' bibliographies,
which always include or omit certain authors. An important third current
is borne by artists producing machine art, interactive installations and
network art, but also by non-university intellectuals who practice
speculative media theory. All of them feel the hot breath of the media
down their necks and can maintain their position only by developing
their own, often very personal, theories about what media and technology
can do. This current has remained largely invisible to academics, though
almost all the big media theory discoveries have been made or sensed for
the first time in this artistic domain. All of media theory, for that
matter, springs from an artistic movement, namely 20th-century
Modernism, as will be made apparent in the introduction.
Classical media theory consists of three schools which developed more
or less independently of each other. In the first school, a central
place is occupied by Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)[1]. He began in the
1930s as a literary scholar and in the 1950s developed into the first
pure media theorist under the influence of communication historian
Harold Innis. His sometimes well-founded, sometimes speculative books
are a continuing source of inspiration for later media theorists,
including the author of this book. Any book that bases itself on or
reacts against McLuhan's work can be considered to belong to the school
of pure media theory. The second, non-literary source for media theory
is information and communication theory, which was developed by the
cyberneticists of the 1940s, whose most important representatives in
this context were Claude Shannon (1916-2001) and Gregory Bateson
(1904-1980). Finally, a third pillar of classical media theory is the
philosophy of symbolic forms, articulated in the 1920s by Ernst
Cassirer[2] (1874-1945) and further developed in the 1950s by Susanne K.
Langer (1895-1985).
In Understanding Media Theory these three schools are used to elucidate
each other. The original literature is referred to in the notes but is
not dealt with explicitly. I retain concepts and approaches from
classical media theory books which have proved durable in the course of
fifteen years of teaching film and television students, activists,
future artists and designers-in-training. Works in the Bibliography were
selected chiefly for readability. References to useful but less gripping
reading matter can be found in the books mentioned in the Bibliography.
Media theory is aimed at understanding media, but it also considers
itself a product of media. This double consciousness is characteristic
of every interaction with media. Media show us the world, but at the
same time they so change us that we believe the world they show us is
the only real one. Put another way, media so change us that we believe
our medium to be the ideal means of perceiving, representing and calling
forth the world. Or changing the world so that it becomes real. Media do
not so much show us how life really is; rather, they give us the feeling
that we can only experience real life by connecting to them. Or else
they cause an aversive reaction, and make us feel that life is only real
once we get outside their reach, deep in the wild or on the last
pristine beach. Both reactions, for and against, are evoked by the media
themselves, and not by any deep internal core of authenticity. What is
authentic about people is how they deal with media. We cannot escape the
media, but we can certainly understand them.
--
ReindeR