Week 1: Media and/as Nature
o Readings: Peters, Parmett, Sharma
o Viewing: Lo and Behold
Lecture
“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.”
Time and space are difficult to describe in themselves, because they are so familiar, very familiar
infrastructures.
Time and space are what we take for granted for the background of experience of such.
Example: David Foster Wallace ‘This is Water’ (analogy)
The fish doesn’t know what water is because it is a norm for them, their natural lives that they
don’t usually pay attention to.
Peter’s central claim
“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 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)
Ecological: About our experience of the environment.
Existential: Questions about life and death; Media are simply the means by which any form of
life can exist.
The Concept of Media
“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)
The method - the development of the word, the notion of media already contains this entire argument.
- Medium has always meant an element, environment or vehicle in the middle of things
- Was connected to nature before it was connected to technology.
- 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.”
- Aristotle’s concept of μεταξύ (to metaxu), the in-between, was used to posit a transparent
substance that enabled the eyes to connect with objects.
- The concept of medium and milieu are intimately linked, both deriving from the Latin word
medius, middle.
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,Medieval and modern transformation
13th century Thomas Aquinas translates Aristotle and “smuggles in the term medium to
account for the missing link in the remote action of seeing.”
“Ever since, media have always stepped in to fill the environmental gaps to
explain contact at a distance.”
17th century Isaac Newton reconceptualised medium to be more instrumental and
scientific, “an intermediate agent” for transmitting light, sound, gravity, and
magnetism.
19th century 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)
Key moment: the use of the term to describe a person who could
communicate with the dead: a spirit medium
Photography and sound recordings are intertwined with the spiritual world.
Example: Sound recording - the idea was to record the voices of your
ancestors, to preserve your voice for later generations. Not to record music
but to make contact with the dead.
20th century Comes to mean mass media of radio, television, film, newspapers and
magazines.
But also recovers an environmental meaning as an all pervasive “ecology.”
Money, power, love can also be media.
21st century “…new media can look a lot like old or ancient media.”
“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.”
Both late 20th and early 21st century popularize afterlives of the spiritualist notion of media.
Movie examples:
Spirit through video tape and telephone: Ringu
Spirit through Zoom, Skype: Host, Unfriended…
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)
“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, p.51)
It is hard to understand how we are created by the things we create.
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,“Artificiality is natural to human beings.” - Walter Ong
Media as the extension of the central nervous system - and also its “amputation.”
Andre Leroi-Gourhan: Cortical picture of voluntary motor function
“For him the human condition was defined precisely by our standing on two feet - and by our consequent impossibility of
separating nature and culture.”
- Once humans started walking on two feet, it freed up their mouths and hands and they could
develop new techniques.
- Those techniques have to do with communication. It happened trough posture.
Examples:
- QWERTY keyboard:
- Based on typewriter.
- The invention of another kind of keyboard is useless: Even though the new keyboard is
more logical/ easier to use, people are too used to the old one so no one has the time to
learn it again.
- Phantom vibration syndrome: You have the feeling that your phone is vibrating in your
pocket even though it’s not.
Once again, we are conditioned by conditions we condition.
“The question of how to define nature, humans, and media are ultimately the same question.”
(Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, p. 51)
Media and the Human condition
“Media show up wherever we humans face the unmanageable mortality of our material existence: the
melancholy facts that memory cannot hold up and body cannot last, that time is, at base, the merciless
and generous habitat for humans and things. Media lift us out of time by providing a symbolic world
that can store and process data, in the widest sense of that word.” (Peters, p. 50)
- Media profoundly shape or constitute our perception of time and space we must entertain a
great expansion of media.
- Greatly expanding or broadening what we understand by media.
- A shift from an oral culture to a literate culture.
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, Viewing: Lo and behold - Werner Herzog
The aim of the film: the history and the ramification of the internet for normal modern life. The
internet as the infrastructures of all infrastructures.
Discussion questions
1. In what ways does the film elaborate on Peters’s conception of media as environment?
- AI, artificial intelligence, the internet extending into objects in the world.
2. How does the film address the nature/human feedback loop?
(“We, the created creators, shape tools that shape us.”)
3. The human condition. What are the ethical questions posed by the film? What are the
possibilities and the dangers posed by the Internet as elemental media?
Ethical aspects are missing in the movie: The football robots are really killing
machines funded by the military.
The question of whether AI understands ethics of humans: A Google car killed a
person in America.
Pain is extremely useful for learning Ethical question: do you want to introduce
pain to AI to help them learn? But also, why would you introduce them pain which
didn’t exist before?
4. Criticisms. What was left out?
Heidegger: “The essence of technology is nothing technological.” The essence has to do with how we
are in the world or how it structures social life, being in the world.
Cloud: temporal and spatial, material and not material, more of a phenomenon than an object.
Analogy: how do you capture the essence of the internet?
The internet origin (60s – 70s)
- Counter-cultural revolution – distribution of knowledge: the hippie era.
- What’s funding it is the Cold War Preserve command and control in the case of a nuclear
strike Top down control.
Radiation disease
- Before: if you were suffering from a vague disease before the internet you would go to the
doctor.
- Now the internet creates these conditions because it gives it a name. You can find people
online with the same conditions. Radiation disease leads to radical estrangement.
McLuhan and Peterson: Whenever you add an extension you also create a new vulnerability.
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