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Lecture Notes Media, Time and Space
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- Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
Lecture Notes Media, Time and Space
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Lecture 1 – GeneralThe reading for this week (The Marvelous Clouds by Peters) encourages us, as media scholars, to
pose big philosophical questions such as, what are time and space? And are they real?
For a very long time, people have tried to grasp what time and space are in themselves. Within the
history of philosophy and science, there are 2 models for understanding time and space:
1. Objective approach: time and space as measurable quantities. Time and space are durations
and extensions, which can be precisely and objectively measured and plotted.
2. Subjective approach: experience of time and space. Time as memories of the past,
perception of the present, imaginings of the future; space as a sense of place or location.
These 2 models (the objective and subjective; or the quantitative and qualitative) were never separate.
They are always in constant dialogue with one another. Technological innovations have powerful
effects in the human experience of time and space. Our experience in turn drives technological
advances in certain directions. However, at a deeper level, there is no absolute way of separating the
objective and subjective understandings of time and space. They are neither simply out there as
unchanging absolute things waiting to be measured nor they are simply in our heads as categories for
bringing order to the chaos in the world. Time and space are precisely the movement back and
forth between the quantitative and qualitative, the objective and subjective. Time and space are
constituted by the mediation between the two levels. This “mediation” has a history, which we can
trace in and through the question of media. This immediately raises a problem of perspective: it is in
the nature of media to disappear into the background.
“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. Describing time is so difficult not because it is strange or unfamiliar,
but because it is too familiar. Our understanding is assumed as the basis for all of our experiences.
Time and space are what we assume as the background of all experience.
McLuhan posits his metaphor “the obliviousness of fish to the environment of water” as an
analogy for our obliviousness to our media environment. “One thing about which fish know
exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive
the element they live in” – McLuhan. The point is that they have no comparison.
In his speech “This is Water” by Wallace, he asks us to exercise an extreme attentiveness about the
environment which has become invisible to most of us. Wallace suggests a thought experiment, in
which you speculatively enter the position of others who are also inhabiting this environment.
Lecture 1 – Nature and/as Media
If we begin from the premise that media profoundly shape and even constitute our experience at the
most basic level, the level of time and space, then we have to entertain a greatly expand and
conception of what counts as media.
In The Marvelous Clouds, Peters questions what it would mean to write a philosophy of elemental
media. To begin with, “the question of how to define nature, humans, and media are ultimately the
same question” (51). This asks for expanding the meaning of media and what we, as media
theorists/scholars, have to say about the world. Mainstream media studies see media only in terms of
objects and institutions. Peters, on the other hand, thinks of media in terms of modes of being.
“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 fire; by language, writing, and metalsmithing; by farming 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” (52). This is an elaboration on
what Peters means when he says that media are the ensembles of nature and culture. He essentially
says that the resources for developing this view of media studies are already found in the intellectual
history of the concept of media. He is producing an archeology of our idea of media.
The Concept of Media. First, Peters makes some general statements about the concept of media:
what has it for a long time come to mean? Initially, the medium has “always meant an element,
environment, or vehicle in the middle of things” (46). This is part of the history of the concept of
media, which is that it was connected to nature long before it was connected to technology. It is only
relatively recently that the primary definition of medium was technological. It has roots in ancient
Greece and Rome, but our contemporary understanding depends upon medieval and modern
transformations.
The Concept of Media – 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” (46). This concept of media is something that puts the human in relation to the universe.
Aristotle also had a concept of τὸ μεταξύ (to metaxu), the in-between, was used to posit a
transparent substance that enabled the eyes to connect with objects. The idea is that in order for things
to have an effect, they have to been put in contact. So, in order for our eyes to see things, some
invisible substance must have been hitting our eyes to produce the effect of images. The concepts of
medium and milieu are intimately linked, both deriving from the Latin words medius (middle). We
shift from Aristotle’s two Greek terms to two Latin words, medium and milieu.
The Concept of Media – Medieval and Modern Transformation. We start to get into the
transformation of the concept and the specification. In the 13 th century, 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 fil the environmental gaps to explain contact at a distance”
(46-47). This is a simple definition of media: media establishes contact at a distance. In the late 17th
century, Newton reconceptualized medium to be more instrumental and scientific, and called it “an
intermediate agent” for transmitting light, sound, gravity, and magnetism. There are these forces in
the world that must be caried through some kind of medium, some kind of substance that enables
them to produce action at a distance.
The Concept of Media – 19th Century. In the 19th century, there is a key shift from the concept of
media from a scientific, naturalistic notion to something that is specifically about humans, particularly
about human signals (the communication between humans). This new concept of medium blurred
together signal (physics; the actual transmission of data or the information of signs) and symbol
(semiotics; the form that those signs take). The preeminent example in the 19 th century is the
telegraph, which combines physics with electromagnetism and semiotics (writing, the production of
symbols).
The Concept of Media – 19th Century. Medium in the 19th century also began to refer to spiritualist
mediums. “A spiritualist medium was not an environment enveloping organism, but a person
communicating meanings that were distinctly human, that is, located in minds (whether incarnate or
not)” (48). This was a key moment in the shift of the term to this purely human communication sense,
which is the notion of the spirit medium. It is no longer an environment; it is localized in a figure or a
person. There was this belief that new media technologies could capture the traces of spirits. The idea
was that spirits had material presence, which were not visible to human sensory ratios, but
photography and phonography could somehow capture that.
This connection between the spirit world and medium has an interesting afterlife in the plot of
narrative films in the late 20th and early 21st century. It is if the 19th century understanding of media is
still haunting the late 20th and early 21st century. Thinking about media as this contact at a distance,
, then what is the most profound or unbridgeable distance in human life? Between the living and the
death, the afterlife. That media can bridge that unbridgeable distance is something that we still carry
with us.
The Concept of Media – 20th Century. Moving on from the 19th century conception and this
transition point from the spirit medium to the 20 th century, all of these understandings of media, from
antiquity forward, layer on top of one another. They point to the fact that we still live with this
accumulation of meanings of media. The 20th century conception of media is what most people think
about media today, which seems to refer to primarily mass media, which are radio, television film,
newspapers and magazines. It also starts to become, in the later 20 th century with the rise of
environmental movements, an ecological term, that is, people start to think of a media as an
“ecology” (a surrounding or environment). Finally, the term is extended as the understanding of what
could count as media, to include phenomena like power, money, love.
The Concept of Media – 20 th Century. This 20th century conception of media is the shift in Peters’
argument. He wants to bring us full circle in the way that we think about media. From most of the
history that Peters is sketching, and for our present, media does not just refer to this narrow set of
technologies. He says: “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 20 th 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” (19) . Media is not
about the few big mass media conglomerates; it is really about many-to-many communications. But
out of that, you still have these interesting concentrations, as you still have Google and Facebook. At
the same time as you have this dispersal of communication among many-to-many, you also have the
opposite movement, which is the concentration of power and wealth among a few.
Ultimately, what Peters is after with this comprehensive history of the concept of media is to show
how this broadest understanding, what he calls An Elemental Philosophy of Media, happens to
coincide in profound ways with the demands of our moment, which is that the interpretation of
nature and culture has never been so complete. It is often referred to as the Anthropocene, that is,
the idea that we are in a new epoch in which human-generated change is taking place at a global scale.
So, there is this huge context in which we are operating, but then there is also just a proliferation of
media device, for which this notion of environment starts to make a lot more sense. A mission
statement for Peters’ idea of 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” (49). This is a radical claim,
which is explored in Lo and Behold, in which the idea is that for many people the internet has
become so ubiquities and essential to human existence, it starts to take on the quality of basic
elemental property like air or water. This Elemental Philosophy of Media and the comparison between
internet and water returns us to the original problem that was posed about the metaphor of the fish in
water: how do we make available for thought what is taken for granted in our environment? If
media is this element we swim in, how do we take enough of a distance that we can describe it
critically?
This problem, in some sense, is a variation on the same problem of interpretation between nature and
culture. Peters writes: “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” (51) . That we are conditioned by
conditions we condition is a feedback loop. It is not that humans make media technologies and then
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