Page 20 - Vinkler, Jonatan, Ana Beguš and Marcello Potocco. Eds. 2019. Ideology in the 20th Century: Studies of literary and social discourses and practices. Koper: University of Primorska Press
P. 20
Ideology in the 20th Century: studies of literary and social discourses and practices
the message; i.e. that the cultural, social (and thus necessarily linguistic)
changes introduced by the new technology into the cultural environ-
ment are more cognitively and epistemologically formative than what is
mediated, i.e. transferred through these media. “The user of the electric
light—or a hammer, or a language, or a book—is the content. As such,
there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the met-
amorphosis that I consider the message” (C. McLuhan et al. 1987, 397).
The technological environment in which a text materializes can thus be
understood as a special level of textual and social context that can be sys-
tematically analyzed.
Typical of this technological process is remediation:3 every new tech-
nology reconfigures the existing media environment; the new technology
does not displace the old one, but changes the existing technological envi-
20 ronment so that the functions and status of the old technology or medi-
um are merely restructured—an example of this would be the new status
of movies in the age of mass television, or the changing status of jour-
nalism with the shift from print to online medium. The process of this
change is, by its nature, revolutionary:
All technology has the property of the Midas touch; whenever a society
develops an extension of itself, all other functions of that society tend to
be transmuted to accommodate that new form; once any new technology
penetrates a society, it saturates every institution of that society. New tech-
nology is thus a revolutionizing agent (McLuhan 2019, n.p.).
However, the old culture injected by the new technology still under-
stands itself in terms of a past paradigm—we view the future, says McLu-
han, through the rearview mirror:
People spend their lives making reasonable simulations od what has been
done in the preceding age. The Renaissance man lived in the Middle Ages
- mentally and imaginatively, deeply thrust through with uncritical classi-
cism. The nineteenth century man lived in the Renaissance. We live in the
munication studies. For a substantive understanding of technology, see the works of
Günther Anders, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Kittler, Lev Manovich or Emanuele
Severino (fully cited in the Works cited).
3 The concept of remediation derives from McLuhan’s tetrad of media effect as a gestalt
tool which examines the social processes underlying the adoption of a technology in
terms of a) what the technology enhances or brings forward, b) what it makes obso-
lete, c) what it retrieves that had been obsolesced earlier, and d) what it reverses to
when it fully saturates the environment. For more see McLuhan and Powers (1989);
Bolter and Grusin (1999).
the message; i.e. that the cultural, social (and thus necessarily linguistic)
changes introduced by the new technology into the cultural environ-
ment are more cognitively and epistemologically formative than what is
mediated, i.e. transferred through these media. “The user of the electric
light—or a hammer, or a language, or a book—is the content. As such,
there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the met-
amorphosis that I consider the message” (C. McLuhan et al. 1987, 397).
The technological environment in which a text materializes can thus be
understood as a special level of textual and social context that can be sys-
tematically analyzed.
Typical of this technological process is remediation:3 every new tech-
nology reconfigures the existing media environment; the new technology
does not displace the old one, but changes the existing technological envi-
20 ronment so that the functions and status of the old technology or medi-
um are merely restructured—an example of this would be the new status
of movies in the age of mass television, or the changing status of jour-
nalism with the shift from print to online medium. The process of this
change is, by its nature, revolutionary:
All technology has the property of the Midas touch; whenever a society
develops an extension of itself, all other functions of that society tend to
be transmuted to accommodate that new form; once any new technology
penetrates a society, it saturates every institution of that society. New tech-
nology is thus a revolutionizing agent (McLuhan 2019, n.p.).
However, the old culture injected by the new technology still under-
stands itself in terms of a past paradigm—we view the future, says McLu-
han, through the rearview mirror:
People spend their lives making reasonable simulations od what has been
done in the preceding age. The Renaissance man lived in the Middle Ages
- mentally and imaginatively, deeply thrust through with uncritical classi-
cism. The nineteenth century man lived in the Renaissance. We live in the
munication studies. For a substantive understanding of technology, see the works of
Günther Anders, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Kittler, Lev Manovich or Emanuele
Severino (fully cited in the Works cited).
3 The concept of remediation derives from McLuhan’s tetrad of media effect as a gestalt
tool which examines the social processes underlying the adoption of a technology in
terms of a) what the technology enhances or brings forward, b) what it makes obso-
lete, c) what it retrieves that had been obsolesced earlier, and d) what it reverses to
when it fully saturates the environment. For more see McLuhan and Powers (1989);
Bolter and Grusin (1999).
