Procrast-Nation

Going over a stack of books from my college library regarding the history of television and communications theory has turned up, one or two very useful books, and a couple books of completely misguided or worthless nonsense. Communication studies, or media theory as its sometimes referred to, is a strange field in that it doesn’t really have any single parent discipline, or any single discipline which it would claim its predominantly a subset of (like psychology, which I would argue is as much related to literary/social criticism as it is to any scientific tradition.) It borrows freely from literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, architectural criticism, and science history (especially Thomas Kuhn) in equal doses. As such, the usefulness of any work done within the field is mostly a measure of the imaginative and perceptive qualities of the writer. I’m going to throw in a quick overview of one of these books with each of these short probes.

Hal Himmelstein’s 1981 survey of television/video criticism On the Small Screen was of limited use-he points out the basic problems of establishing a body of television criticism similar to the current body of literary criticism-television mostly ignores boundaries of careful aesthetic construction, and its voluminous output makes surveying it in its entirety or anything close nearly impossible. Issues of artistic worth are mostly besides the point in television, so a new critical language less based on evaluation of merit and more based on reading into motifs and distribution (the form of the medium as opposed to its content) must be established. Himmelstein goes over all of this in his introduction and then goes over a number of middling critics. McLuhan could and did say what Himmelstein says here in the space of a paragraph. Himmelstein also spends far too much time on the high-low culture debate, something which ceased to be useful with the advent of mass media besides as a way to keep young students from wasting all their time on post-modernist wallowing. This book was of limited use to say the least.

For today’s mass media product, I’m going to look at the front page of the popular news aggregation website Reddit. (more…)

Having finished a particularly fruitful rereading of Marshall McLuhan’s first published work, The Mechanical Bride, I felt compelled to test out some of the ideas he put forward in this work. For those unfamiliar, the book is a compendium of short one or two page essays based on print advertisements and comic strips from the early 1950s. The essays are acidic, caustic commentaries, and reading even one of them would dispell the absurd notion that McLuhan was heralding some electronic utopia; his notion of the “global village” wasn’t one of utopian togetherness but of the rolling back of individual identity and critical thought/sophistication in the era of mass communications. In order to ‘retribalize’ as McLuhan frequently called it, a certain amount of civilization must be rolled back and diminished. In an age of absolute media saturation such as the one in which we are currently entrenched, full sober awareness of the implications and roots of all cultural products we’re confronted with is simply an impossibility, and isn’t especially appealing-the most comfortable position in the retribalized culture is one of a shared and simplified opinions. We go from cliche to archetype. Art vacillates between two extremes; the art of the extremely personal and almost confessional in nature, which gives us a portrait of the artist, and the art of the purposely depersonalized which instead gives an abstract portrait of its intended audience. It is this latter type of art which I hope to explore here.

So in the spirit of Mechanical Bride, I’m going to try to do a critical dissection of a different piece of mass produced culture from recent times each day for the next month, in hopes of eventually coming to some more full understanding of what America consists of.

For my first mass media art object I chose to observe the music video for the song “OMG” by Usher, video directed by Anthony Mandler. (more…)

In Lewis Mumford’s 1934 anthropology study Technics and Civilization he underlines what he believes to be the two major categories of Technology from a social science standpoint. There’re polytechnics, or technology which integrates with other technology to create a complex framework which can solve human problems, and monotechnics, or technology strictly for its own sake that actually hurts humanity in its aggressive expansion. Also of note is another category Mumford introduced much later(1970 to be precise), that of ‘megatechnics’, which is sort of a malignant uncontrolled monotechnics. 

With Marshall Mcluhan, Neil Postman, and Lewis Mumford all dead, it seems important to catalogue some of the new technologies that have arisen since their passing. While some of these technologies were in their infancy while those three were alive, they’ve only gained a major foothold in the past 7-8 years.
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