MEDIA, TIME & SPACE SUMMARY
Lecture 1: Time and Space
• ‘Media as the strategies and tactics of culture and society, as the devices and crafts by which
humans and things, animals and data, hold together in time and space.’ (Peters, 18)
• Sarah Sharma “Temporality”: ‘the temporal is about power’ (195)
- How is power exercised?:
- recalibration: relationship between media and lived time
• Helen Morgan Parmett “Space”
- media both ‘annihilate’ and ‘produce’ space (symbolically and materially) They are
fundamentally orienting and disorienting
Time and space are di cult to explain, not because they’re unfamiliar, but because they’re
overfamiliar.
• ‘The question of how to de ne nature, humans and media are ultimately the same question’.
(Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, p.51)
• Quote by Peters (p.52)
The Concept of media (Peters)
• Medium has ‘always meant an element, an environment, a vehicle in the middle of things’.
(Peters, 46)
• Media was connected to nature long before it was connected to technology
• Has roots in ancient Greece and Rome, but our contemporary understanding depends upon
medieval and modern transformations.
• The classical roots
- Aristoteles’ concept of ‘to perikhon’ named a ‘surrounding’ or environment which expressed
‘sympathy and harmony between the universe and man.’
- Aristoteles’ concept of ‘to metaxu’, the in-between, was used to posit a transparent substance
that enabled the eyes to connect with objects.
- The concepts of medium and milieu are intimately linked, both deriving from the latin word
medius (middle).
ffi fi
, • Medieval and modern transformation
- In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas translates Aristotles 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 ll the environmental gaps to explain contact at a
distance’.
- In the late 17th century, Isaac Newton reconceptualised medium to be more instrumental and
scienti c, ‘an intermediate agent’ for transmitting light, sound, gravity and magnetism.
• 19th Century
- Medium slowly comes to refer to the conveyance (overdracht) of speci cally human signals.
- ‘The new concept of medium blurred together signal (physics) and symbol (semitics).’
- Example: the telegraph (electromagnetism and writing)
- Key moment was the use of the term to describe a person who could communicate with the
dead: a spirit medium.
• 20th Century
- Comes to mean mass media of radio, television, lm, newspaper and magazines.
- But also recovers an environmental meaning as an pervasive ‘ecology.’
- Money, power, love can also be media
- Money is in some sense the ultimate media cause it has no content
• 21st Century
- Quote by Peters (p.19):
- An Elemental Philosophy of Media
- what he is after: try to deal with occurred/aquired? moment, to think about the profound crisis
of contemporary moments in which the interpenetration of nature and culture is so
dangerous ????
• ‘Arti ciality is natural to human beings ( Walter Ong)
• Media as the extension of the central nerve system (and also its amputation) - McLuhan
• Andre Leroi - Gourhan (1:50:00)
fi fi fi fi fi
, In class exercise: write down:
- ‘The crossroads of humans and things de ne 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 (Peter, 51). (Dolphin example is a way
to look them in the face) Why is it so hard to look them in the face? (1:54:00)
• Media and the Human Condition
-not about human nature, bur human condition (what enables human life to continue).
- Media shows us how limited we are, how those limitations condition our ability to keep going
fi
