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Media Time and Space Lectures and SeminarsWeek 1
Lecture
Defamiliarizing Time and Space
• Changes in media technologies have a cultural connection to their changes
• What are time and space? Two approaches: -> First approach involves a mechanical model->
takes time and space as measurable properties-> Time, pressure etc. can be measured ;
quantitative/objective ; Second approach-> subjective models -> how are time and space
experienced -> memories of the past, imagines of the future, a sense of place; qualitative/
subjective
• Time and space are the movement between the objective and the subjective
“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I
do not know.” - Saint Augustine
• Background of all experience that we take for granted-> Time and Space
“This is Water” David Foster Wallace
• Water as a invisible environment
• It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with
knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and
essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding
ourselves over and over: “This is water.”
• The message is that paying attention and being mindful of others is essential. Wallace's speech
also talked about decision making and the power of choice. Wallace's speech talked about
changing a person's perspective and attitude on others around them.
• The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being
able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty,
unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom.
• Environment becomes invisible -> making thought experiment in the time and space of
media to make our media environment visible again (Dolphins)
Radical change in a way people are living and working-> counter environment (thought
experiment)-> for example Covid-19
Forcing ourselves to live our time and space differently -> Covid-19 forces us to rethink basic
assumptions; Covid-19 therefore produces more and more conspiracy theories (= an attempt to
explain harmful or tragic events as the result of the actions of a small powerful group.)
Lecture: Nature and /as Media
“The question of how we define nature, humans, and media are ultimately the same
question” (Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, p. 51)
-> media studies studies more than media, Peter contrasts it with mainstream media which
sees media only in terms of objects and institutions, Peter calls media as modes of being
instead
,“Media are not just pipes or channels. Media theory has something both ecological and
existential to say. Media are more than the audiovisual and print institutions that strive to fill our
empty seconds with programming and advertising stimulus; they are our condition, our fate, and
our challenge. Without means there is no life. We are mediated by our bodies; by our
dependence on oxygen; by the ancient history of life written into each of our cells; by upright
posture, sexual pair bonding, and the domestication of plants and animals; by calendar-making and
astronomy; by the printing press, the green revolution, and the Internet. We are not only
surrounded by the history-rich artifacts of applied intelligence; we also are such artifacts.
Culture is part of our natural history.” (Peters, p. 52)
• attempt to broaden the conception of media but at the same time make it absolutely foundational
• The first media that we experience are our bodies
• Nature has a history-> precisely written in our DNA
• Media are the assembles of nature and culture; Peter means that our life is mediated on all
those mediums and does not differ them
The Concept of Media
• Medium has “always meant en element, enforcement, or vehicle in the middle of things” (Peters,
46) -> Media is in the middle
• Was connected to nature long before it was connected to technology-> Media
• Has roots in ancient Greece and Rome, but our contemporary understanding depends upon
medieval and modern transformations.
Classical roots
• Aristotle’s concept of τὸ περιέχον (to periekhon) named a “surrounding” or environment
which expressed “sympathy and harmony between the universe and man.” -> concept of
media being something that puts us in relation the universe
• Aristotle’s concept of τὸ µεταξύ (to metaxu), the in-between, was used to posit a transparent
substance that enabled the eyes to connect with objects. -> idea that in order of things to
have an affect they have to touch to produce the effect of images
• The concepts of medium and milieu are intimately linked, both deriving from the Latin word
medius (middle). (Peters, p.46)
-> transformation of the concept of Media:
Medieval and modern transformation
• Media more scientific
• In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas translates Aristotle and “smuggles in the term medium
to account for the missing link in the remote action of seeing.” -> Idea that something must be
hiding our eyes
• “Ever since, media have always stepped in to fill the environmental gaps to explain contact
at a distance.” -> Media establishes contact in a distance
• In the late 17th century, Isaac Newton reconceptualised medium to be more instrumental and
scientific, “an intermediate agent” for transmitting light, sound, gravity, and magnetism. ->
forces in the world that must be carried through some kind of media top produce action a a
distance (Peters, p.46-7)
• Medium is the master term for transmitting forces-> Medium is becoming the term ether
(Ether, also spelled aether, also called luminiferous ether, in physics, a theoretical universal
, substance believed during the 19th century to act as the medium for transmission of
electromagnetic waves; more physical meaning) and also environment (more biological,
economical meaning)
19th century:
• Combines physics and semiotics-> telegraph
• Medium also refer to spiritualist medium in 19th century -> key moment was the use of the term
to describe a person who could communicate with the dead: a spirit medium
• Edison with phonograph: his idea not only to record music, but also to record human voices ->
advertises it as a photo album -> that you can hear voice of your dead relative instead to see
picture in photo album
• Medium slowly comes to refer to the conveyance of specifically human signals.
• “The new concept of medium blurred together signal (physics) and symbol (semiotics).”
• Example: the telegraph (electromagnetism and writing)
->Media in connection with the spiritual medium (as a transition throughout the centuries).
“A spiritualist medium was not an environment enveloping organisms but a person
communicating meanings that were distinctly human—that is, located in minds (whether
incarnate or not).” (Peters, p. 48)
-> Key moment was the use of the term to describe a person who could communicate with the
dead: a spirit medium
-> Relation with Media and the spirit -> Had the belief that new media technologies could
capture traces of spirit since spirits had a kind of material presence but they weren’t visible to
human senses but photography could capture them
Late 20th and early 21st century popular afterlives of the spiritualist notion of media
Film: Ringu -> Media as contact in a distance (Video tape and telephone
Film: Host -> Zoom
20th century:
• Comes to means mass media of radio, television, film, newspapers and magazines -> most
think about media like this
• But also recovers an environmental meaning as an all pervasive “ecology” -> people think as
media as an environment and surrounding
• Money, power, love can also be media -> media as a concept gets stretched
• Money-> universal media-> brings things together that are usually not comparable like pen and
mug-> are not the same thing or same purpose but you can say how much money they have cost
• Money becomes a medium of expression
“Compared to mass media, digital media did seem like an enormous historical rupture. But if we
place digital devices in the broad history of communication practices, new media can look a lot
like old or ancient media. Like ‘new media,’ ancient media such as registers, indexes, the
census, calendars, and catalogs have always been in the business of recording, transmitting,
and processing culture; of managing subjects, objects, and data; of organizing time, space, and
power. ... The chief mode of communication in the heart of the twentieth century—audiovisual
broadcasting—is the historical exception. Digital media return us to the norm of data-processing
, devices of diverse size, shape and format in which many people take part and polished ‘content’ is
rare.” (Peters, p. 19)
-> media is about many to many communications but you also have the opposite movement
which is the concentration of power and wealth among the view (Amazon etc)
An Elemental Philosophy of Media
“I try to stir together semantic strains that speak to a historical moment in which we cannot think of
computation without thinking about carbon, or of the cloud without thinking about data. Today
natural facts are media, and cultural facts have elemental imprint. We can see the Internet as
a means of existence, in some ways close to water, air, earth, fire, and ether in its basic shaping
of environments.” (Peters, p. 49)
-> idea that the Internet becomes so essential to human existence for many people (not
everyone but many) that it starts to take on the quality of a basic and elemental property lies
for or water (also discussed in Documentary)
“The crossroads of humans and things defines the domain of media studies. We are conditioned
by conditions we condition. We, the created creators, shape tools that shape us. We live by our
crafts and conditions. It is hard to look them in the face.” (Peters, 51)
-> Media technologies make us as we make them; we are the created creators
-> Idea of co-evolution between humans and the things we make
“Artificiality is natural to human beings.” - Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The
Technologizing of the Word
-> Idea that the artificial is there from the beginning -> paradoxical thought
-> how we think about our relation to media
-> Peter found two crucial texts that follow this line: McLuhan and Leroi-Gourhan (Both
1964)
-> Media as the extension of the central nervous system- and also its “amputation”
Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media- The Extension of Man -> media as a extension of the
nervous system; every time you extent a capacity you create an incapacity for example:
remembering phone numbers-> due to the new technology you don’t need to remember others
phone numbers anymore as before
“Leroi-Gourhan showed the co-evolution of the human musculoskeletal form with techniques such
as walking, gathering, chewing, speaking, drawing, writing, and remembering. He understood that
the intertwinement of embodied practice and technical objects went from cranium to toe. For him
the human condition was defined precisely by our standing on two feet—and by our
consequent impossibility of separating nature and culture.” –Peters, p. 17
-> Theory that as soon as humans started to stand up right they freed up their hand and freed
up their mouths so they could use their hands top grasp and no longer needed to use their
mouth to grasps and therefore they could start to develop both speech and your hands
(because they no longer walked on hands and feet)
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