I'll work on the specific prompts for this reflection later. (Overall, the class is working well for me. I need to consider and discuss a specific direction I made take for a paper for this class, but that's my responsibility.) Also, I'll work on last week's book chapters tomorrow.
For now though, I want to jot-down a few intersections/clashes/questions that occurred for me during last week in Madison. First, I don't know what to make of the volume and the quantity of the mediated messages to which we're exposed there or what to make of what we *do* with that volume and quantity. I mean in terms of sheer volume, it's sensory mind-boggling. I thought of this when seeing Anne's prompt to discuss the presumed change in the senses that technology (in this case, media and products of media and mediation). I responded to the this prompt by trying to understand the feeling of mid-century people experiencing loud, powerful technologies for the first time (and therefore without acclimation.) So, maybe I felt a similar sense of "wow, this is overwhelming to my senses." But, do I have a changed sensory mechanism where that change was caused by technology or by the mass culture industry (Adorno & Horkheimer)? And, am I left feeling like there's an inadequacy in my production capabilities? I don't know. I just know that the amount of text, inter-texts, is stunning. When Nicholas Carr said, in "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" that we are exposed to (and therefore read) more text than every before, I now see his point. It was/is almost like a caricature of that statement to see the tens of thousands of signs and to hear the tens of thousands of people talking and to know that there's all sorts of rebroadcasting of it (more texts!) via texting, tweeting, facebooking, tagging, picture-taking and uploading. Second, what determines that which gets through to each of us? What about individuality? Even with my like-minded friends, we see and hear and experience this all in such unique and individualistic ways. I'm not talking about just having different opinions or coming at it from differing perspectives. Rather, I'm talking about whether such a thing as a "mass" can even exist given this individuality -- which I feel is incredibly powerful in all of this....not just the individual *taking it all in* but the motivation to be there. This is important to me because the ways/reasons that social action occur -- and the way I can use media to make it happen -- are of great personal and professional interest to me. Third, I just keep thinking about the lyrics to Gil Scott Heron's song "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and wondering whether his statement, with those lyrics, can be true anymore.
Raising the Gil Scott Heron song is a good one for our class, Deedee. I understand him to be trying to get us to get off our butts because the revolution is not something you can watch on television: if you want it to happen, you have to get up and participate.
ReplyDeleteGiven the changes in media, then, would he sing that the revolution can't be Facebooked or Twittered? A friend of mine tweeted yesterday about "Re-tweet revolutionaries": is it enough just to pass on the information? And I think that's a good question to ask not only for itself but also against the background of your other questions about the quantity of information being spread through social networking software — as well as against the background of the question about mass/individuality.
The issue of the "mass" is always a touchy one, but an important one and necessary to keep in mind as we consider how the media have been used to mobilize folks in the past: this is where one could bring up the Nazi use of the then-new technology of radio, and the fears people then had about it being a non-interactive one-to-many broadcast technology. How do our (by "our" I mean Cairo as well as Madison) current uses of Twitter and Facebook to mobilize or at least inform differ from those uses of radio? What aspects of sense-of-self, sense-of-self-in-relation-to-others (visibility, publicity, responsibility) and sense of possible action come together in these new media uses, such that people will -- or don't -- come out? What other situations shape these senses, and so must also be addressed? And how, in all this, are we to encourage continual thinking, reflection, and information gathering, so that the masses are still thinking as individuals?
Yikes. Yes, it's a lot, but it's trenchant and it's important.
Thanks for asking all this and letting me think out loud here, Deedee.
Anne, I appreciate your thinking out loud here.
ReplyDeleteI had another thought (while clearing snow again for the millionth time): The chant is "tell me what/this is what democracy LOOKS like." It's *looks*. It's not *sounds* or *feels*. Perhaps the *look* is meant to be all-inclusive of these senses and perhaps it is meant to be symbolic. If so though, the words *sounds* or *feels* were not the ones used/chosen and that, perhaps, is indicative of the still resounding power of visuality. I mention this because, in thinking about twitter/fb, the change in their use of (and effect upon?) visuality seems significant to me. You know, there's that something powerful about *seeing* it all. Is this part of the "secret mechanism" of Kant?
On Gil Scott Heron, yes, I think that is his end statement, but I also think he's making a McLuhan-like statement/argument to get to that end statement....that the means of delivery/media encourages/discourages us from sitting on our collective ass and not acting) and that was the reason I think I raised it here. Then, later, I was thinking: Well, yes, these delivery means/media change our motivation/imperative to act, but the systems that are meant to process those actions and to which we direct our actions are not prepared to accept those actions as legitimate actions and we're not in a position (power-wise) to make those systems change to accept that a facebook post (for example) is an action. These are old white men (I'm exaggerating to make the point)who are watching this activity (facebooking) and they decide this activity doesn't *mean* anything because it's not that which they have traditionally defined as *activity* that says that we really, really mean it this time. They (and these systems) respond by saying: The only activity that mattered was that "you voted us into office" and that voting activity is the only one that we'll allow to be legitimate. (Not true in the case of the dictatorship, of course. In that case, it is complacency -- even if it caused by threat of death and results from oppression -- that is defined as activity that is defined as legitimate.) Part of the cultural/generational disconnect/connect now is that the *protest* has been reinvigorated as a legitimate (meaningful) activity that shows that we really mean it.
Or, I don't know, maybe we are collectively lazy as hell and can't rouse ourselves from our self-serving worlds and do anything more than tweet or update that we care.
:: rant ? :: academic questioning about mediation? :: both? ::