Greetings from a friend of a friends in a bed I've never seen with a computer thats not mine.
Alright, so I was pretty excited about tomorrow's reading (or rather today since its 3:00 am). However, to preface this early morning post: the Carrollton Hall dorms flooded around 11:00pm. On my floor, 6th to be exsact, down the hall there was a accident causing the fire sprinklers to go off. The entire right side of the building is just short of destroyed. Ceiling ties, carpeting, walls, and rooms are done for. (If you think this is dramatic then you would be right. It was a scene out of Titanic.)
Students were bustling outside the emergency exits, alarms were flaring, and uniformed persons were in command. My favorite part was when, during evacuation, I passed the room that the accident occured and saw water quickly flood out into the hallway. Yikes. Even better was seeing the side of the building from the outside seep with water and spill in mass off the brick and flood the walkways.
Chaos.
Yes. Chaos.
[Never let go Jack!]
Quite the chaos - oh - and the same type of chaos in say... "The Medium is the Message."
Alright, so I'm not sure how my life will be in the next few days so I figured I would post. Janelle told me I would like McLuhan piece since I am a huge fan of "The House of Leaves." Good call. MM was pretty entertaining and definitely made 5 pages in the Moleskin.
So here we go...
I thought the break down of each social construct, such as family or education, was a great aspect in the beginning of the book. Along side the images filled with irony and propaganda, it was a intriguing rhetoric that McLuhan used. Certainly (and especially since most people know of my passion for photography) the images were all at once odd, beautiful, haunting, and amiss, dare I say, simulacras? This in and of itself was a fabulous chaotic decision on McLuhan's part. He was able to utilize photos that not only stimulated the events or people within the image, but also stimulate the sense of chaos while reading. I found myself asking where would he take me next?
Next, the quotes held their own in the piece as well. While the images and photography somewhat scream for attention, the quotes were dominant. For example, in a world of chaos, what would you say if asked, "Who are you?" Touche McLuhan.
Now, beyond the images and the curiously inserted quotes, the context of what McLuhan was saying follow through with what the class has been talking about. I'm sure most can agree that there was plenty of references to Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. Furthermore, McLuhan uses this tension of generations to explain that there is indeed a language barrier going on. This language barrier, extending out of the electric circuit (EC), is what causes the discrepancies and fissures between those who are comfortable inside the circuit and those who are not. Because correct me if I'm wrong, but McLuhan believes that whether one acknowledges it or not, we are all already in the EC.
Living in the EC is at once daunting and demanding. We are daunted by the effects of EC through media, but it cannot escape it because it demands that we participate in it. This is why Digital Immigrants, from a McLuhanian point of view, are simultaneously afraid and already within the EC. It is quite like McLuhan's notion of the ear. We are forever unable to turn off hearing, unless we are deaf. Unlike the eye, there is no lid to shut it. We have no way of shut ourselves from EC.
Alright, so I was pretty excited about tomorrow's reading (or rather today since its 3:00 am). However, to preface this early morning post: the Carrollton Hall dorms flooded around 11:00pm. On my floor, 6th to be exsact, down the hall there was a accident causing the fire sprinklers to go off. The entire right side of the building is just short of destroyed. Ceiling ties, carpeting, walls, and rooms are done for. (If you think this is dramatic then you would be right. It was a scene out of Titanic.)
Students were bustling outside the emergency exits, alarms were flaring, and uniformed persons were in command. My favorite part was when, during evacuation, I passed the room that the accident occured and saw water quickly flood out into the hallway. Yikes. Even better was seeing the side of the building from the outside seep with water and spill in mass off the brick and flood the walkways.
Chaos.
Yes. Chaos.
[Never let go Jack!]
Quite the chaos - oh - and the same type of chaos in say... "The Medium is the Message."
Alright, so I'm not sure how my life will be in the next few days so I figured I would post. Janelle told me I would like McLuhan piece since I am a huge fan of "The House of Leaves." Good call. MM was pretty entertaining and definitely made 5 pages in the Moleskin.
So here we go...
I thought the break down of each social construct, such as family or education, was a great aspect in the beginning of the book. Along side the images filled with irony and propaganda, it was a intriguing rhetoric that McLuhan used. Certainly (and especially since most people know of my passion for photography) the images were all at once odd, beautiful, haunting, and amiss, dare I say, simulacras? This in and of itself was a fabulous chaotic decision on McLuhan's part. He was able to utilize photos that not only stimulated the events or people within the image, but also stimulate the sense of chaos while reading. I found myself asking where would he take me next?
Next, the quotes held their own in the piece as well. While the images and photography somewhat scream for attention, the quotes were dominant. For example, in a world of chaos, what would you say if asked, "Who are you?" Touche McLuhan.
Now, beyond the images and the curiously inserted quotes, the context of what McLuhan was saying follow through with what the class has been talking about. I'm sure most can agree that there was plenty of references to Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. Furthermore, McLuhan uses this tension of generations to explain that there is indeed a language barrier going on. This language barrier, extending out of the electric circuit (EC), is what causes the discrepancies and fissures between those who are comfortable inside the circuit and those who are not. Because correct me if I'm wrong, but McLuhan believes that whether one acknowledges it or not, we are all already in the EC.
Living in the EC is at once daunting and demanding. We are daunted by the effects of EC through media, but it cannot escape it because it demands that we participate in it. This is why Digital Immigrants, from a McLuhanian point of view, are simultaneously afraid and already within the EC. It is quite like McLuhan's notion of the ear. We are forever unable to turn off hearing, unless we are deaf. Unlike the eye, there is no lid to shut it. We have no way of shut ourselves from EC.
[The ear is to noise as we are to media.]
However, what happens when we embrace EC? We cannot be released from it - our society is marinated in the technological age - but if we can come accept it what would that mean? Because of EC McLuhan says that children are growing up faster. True. Because of EC our news comes immediately. True. --> Everything is fast, fast, fast.
Great, well what does that mean?
If I'm Tim Morton I'd say we are in the Mesh. In a way thats very true. To a certain extent we are Meshing. However, a distinction needs to be made. Media isn't creating a Mesh for us. They are not necessarily creating these "connections". Yes, EC allows for such connections, but media and EC are perhaps only illuminating the Mesh and/or this interconnectedness. EC is the medium through which our solidarity is revealed.
This is what I can do at a close run to 4:00am now. (My apologies.) Its be a hard day, if I make to Bobet it I'll be in my PJs, wish me luck, and pray to the dorm room gods.
C
P.S. The iPad unfortunately got left behind.
Thanks for this great post, Cait! I hope that others will comment and feed into your lively reflections on MM...
ReplyDeleteCait, I was going to post a blog really similar to this one, but I just saw yours and you summed up prertty much everything I was going to say. I was also in the Carrollton flood chaos last night, and I saw a lot of parallels between the chaos of the text and the flood. It was particularly ironic for me because I was dying my hair when the flood happened, and I had conditioner and toner in my hair when everyone was evacuated. I really needed to rinse my hair, but I couldn't because the building was flooding. I needed water, but I could not have it because there was too much water. Waiting outside with all of the pissed off Carrollton residents and RAs, I felt like someone should have been suggesting a Caucus Race or reciting a Mouse's tale (tail). (Sometimes I think Alice in Wonderland relates to my life more than is normal; there were even references in The Medium is the Massage!) The flood was very unexpected and chaotic much like parts of our reading, but the thing that I kept thinking after the flood was how did it take so long for them to figure out how to turn off that water? We're living in 2011, it seems like we should be advanced enough to figure out what to do when a water sprinkler breaks. There was nothing on Wikipedia about how to stop your dorm room from flooding after a drunken game of catch? One of the lines that I've been thinking about from the reading is: "How should the environment be programmed?". I guess, after thinking about that so much when the physical environment in which I had been residing was being destroyed was a very surreal experience. (I hope your iPad is ok, Cait!)
ReplyDelete(This is the second time I'm typing this because somehow my computer deleted it the first time as I went to post it)
ReplyDeleteJust a quick addition to the discussion on the flooding of the dorm and the mayhem of the book in comparison. I was also locked out and of the few things I had on me, this book was one of them. Reading it by streetlamp while I watched water pour out of my building was actually a pretty great experience. For all it mattered, this was merely a part of McLuhan's disorienting genius. It simply added a felt dimension to what I was reading. There was one section that I questioned, however. On page 61, McLuhan goes into this brief idea that there is no private guilt anymore, that we all share it somehow. He doesn't really explain how and I wish he would have because on the night of the flooding, I really don't think anyone in that building that had nothing to do with setting the sprinklers off felt anything other than annoyance. I certainly had no sense of shared guilt with the boys who had done it. Everyone that I talked to was cozy in their innocence. So what exactly is McLuhan trying to say about this lack of private guilt?