Sturken & Thomas: Technological Visions and Griffin: Media Ecology of Marshall McLuhan

When I'm at home and I chat with my Dad about what I'm doing at college, he always describes to me how, at the time that he went to college, the experience was striking because of the new ideas he was hearing, and how his views were being challenged - and I'm always forced to respond (perhaps because I was raised in a liberal family and there's something of a liberal bias on college campuses?) that I honestly don't feel the same way - I feel college is enlightening, and intellectually challenging, but my beliefs are challenged by my professors and classes rarely.  However, to some extent, this class has been changing that fact.  I live a life engrossed in technology, and I have my own instincts about how media shapes communication.  But what if those are wrong?

Sturken & Thomas's article wasn't  that challenging to me for the most part; much of it was similar to what we have so far read in Baym regarding the different ways people react in the presence of a new technology (a sense of hope for its possibilities coupled directly with a sense of loss about what those possibilities change and take away).  The idea of a 'transportation narrative' accompanying new technologies was certainly interesting, but despite the limitations that the authors suggest this narrative imposes, I find I have trouble thinking of communication any other way.  The point is a good one, and I suppose my reaction (inability to change those thought patterns) only proves it.  At the very least, the transportation metaphor seems effective to me, although thinking in different ways might prove illuminating.  (In the end, I think it's simply that I'm not sure how else to conceptualize communication, since the transportation metaphor is so fully ingrained in my mind.)  The idea of technology as ahistorical was more striking, however.  Generally, especially when I'm talking about communication, I am a firm believer in the absolute necessity of context - nothing ever happens outside of a given situation, and even if that situation doesn't excuse what somebody said, or did, knowing the situation can help us understand why things happened the way they did.  But when I think about technology, I do indeed find myself thinking of it ahistorically, like the alphabet, the light bulb, and the computer were all just sitting in a void waiting to be discovered, instead of being invented in a specific historical context by a specific person with specific goals.  Now that I've heard the idea, it changes that pattern of thought drastically.  If I value context in communication, I must value it in invention - especially when that invention is pertinent to communication itself.

The Griffin article, for me, was harder to swallow, not for Griffin's perspective but for that of the object of his analysis, Marshal McLuhan.  I am willing to admit that the types of media constrict, to some extent, what messages they transmit.  Some stories are better told through television, some are better told through movies, and some are better told through comic books.  But the content, in my opinion, remains key.  Some media are better designed for specific tasks than others, yes; however much content can also transcend the media it takes place in.  McLuhan insists that we shouldn't complain when a movie is not like the book it's based on, because the story told by the book is inherently different than the story told by the movie.  However, when I see a film based on a book I've read, in many cases, I see what to me is the same story.  Admittedly, as he says, 'content doesn't exist outside of the way it's mediated', but the specific medium certainly isn't all.  The map he creates of ages in technology - tribal, literate, print, electronic - is compelling, but I feel it is incomplete in some respect.  Each age encourages us to think, to sense, in a certain way (hearing, then sight, then hearing and touch again), but if each age leads naturally to the other, the senses of the previous age are not lost when time moves forward.  Though McLuhan probably acknowledged this, he does not seem to have perceived it as terribly important, and as I maintain that context is of great import, I am inclined to disagree.  Likewise, I have difficulty with the moral judgements made about television by McLuhan's successor, Neil Postman.  There may be some truth in the idea that television encourages triviality over seriousness, but it is my concern that perceiving things so simplistically downplays human agency and thus absolves humans from responsibility for their actions and statements.  McLuhan's theory of media ecology is valuable, but it has gaps.

The discussion of the digital age vs. the electronic age, and its effects on a 'global village', is more compelling to me.  I've always been interested, even before beginning this class, on what exactly 'Internet culture' is, whether such a thing can even exist in an online community made of such disparate individuals in such exponentially large numbers.  The Internet is dividing into sections, websites, and personalized Google search results, and how much of this is due to the technology itself compared to how much of this is due to the people who use it is a puzzle we may never solve for certain.

Baym Chapter 2 and "It's Not the Technology, Stupid!" by Cathy Davidson

A brief introduction before I get started on my review:

Hello!  I'm a sophomore student of communication at Lewis and Clark college in lovely Portland, OR, and I am currently taking a class taught by Daena Goldsmith on interpersonal media: that is, how media, especially new technologies, effect our relationships and identities and methods of communication.  I'm a frequent internet user myself (honestly, most of my free time is spent browsing the web in one way or another) with quite a personal interest in the subject, both from an intellectual perspective and an emotional one, so I'm quite looking forward to the experience.  I'll be blogging throughout the semester on our readings and, when I find them, occasionally sharing links (videos, articles, what have you) that I find relate to the subject matter of the course, possibly including my thoughts on them, possibly not.  I'm making this blog public because I know several of my friends share an interest in this subject, and if they do, probably lots of folks online who I don't know do too!  So please feel free to peruse.

On to the reading, the article that most caught my interest - maybe because it most aligned with my own views of the 'net - was "It's Not the Technology, Stupid!  Response to NYT 'Twitter Trap'", by Cathy Davidson at HASTAC.org.  Chapter two of the Baym book suggested that there are many different ways of perceiving the influence new technologies have on us and the influence we have on new technologies, and the way that is probably the most accurate (and which I most agree with) is the ideology of 'social shaping', which is to say that the process very much goes both ways, with humans finding new and innovative ways to use the new technologies we're presented with while simultaneously having our own identities, habits, and thought processes shaped by them to some extent.  For me certainly, my constant use of and access to technology has severe effects on my day to day life and I can't imagine what I'd do, or even what life would be like, without it.  But I'm not convinced that that's a bad thing, and I'm even less convinced that computers have somehow denied me all agency!  People use the internet in unexpected means to unexpected ends that sometimes could not possibly have been achieved without the 'net's assistance (a key example: The Arab Spring).

What was most interesting to me in Davidson's article was her argument that, although technology surely was changing our lives (from our social standards to our work habits), that change is par for the course in a society where such standards and work habits never stay exactly the same for too long.  It is not exactly a positive change - the Internet may not level communication completely across gaps of status, race, gender, etc., and it may not always serve to bring us closer to those we love.  But it is not exactly a negative change either, as so many seem to advocate.  Change is a neutral force.  I will not deny, nor does Davidson, that the change we are currently undergoing with widespread use of the Internet becoming more and more the norm is a larger and stronger change than has been felt in Western society for quite some time.  But that's no reason to demonize it excessively - and besides, wallowing in nostalgia will not stop change; it never has.  (And from the perspective of an aspiring advocate of social justice, this is something of a godsend!)  To be certain, computers shape us, but we shape them too, as we have always done with technology and as technologies have always done with us.  In sum (or to use netspeak, TL;DR): just because this change is more massive than any before doesn't mean it's inherently new, or good, or bad.  Everything is situational, online, offline, and throughout the whole of human history.  As Davidson says: 

"It's NOT the Technology, Stupid!  It is about what we--you and I--do with the technology.  It always has been, it always will be."