Transcript A Sociology of the Media Introduction II

A Sociology of the Media
Introduction II
Prof. Dr. Joost van Loon
Institut für Soziologie, LMU
Nottingham Trent University, U.K.
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Outline
i.
ii.
iii.
iv.
v.
Technology as Ordering (reflections on
Martin Heidegger and Walter Ong)
Form
Historicity
Cultural Embedding
Embodiment (and Disembodiment)
Technology as Ordering
• Technologies ‘enframe’ the world; that is
they order them in the double sense of (a)
providing a structure and (b) commanding
specific actions.
• This ordering constitutes the essence of
mediation.
Technology as Ordering –
A Meeting with Heidegger
Technology as Ordering –
A Meeting with Heidegger
• Technology engenders particular
perspectives (the essence of technology is
revealing)
• Enframing: bringing forth into presence
• Presence is not ‘just there’ it is an
accomplishment of mediation (as a form of
presencing)
• Mediation is the creation of media events
• Mediation = “coming in-between”
Technology as Ordering –
A Meeting with Walter Ong
Technology as Ordering –
A Meeting with Walter Ong
• Orality and Literacy
• Orality: acoustic space: timeless, ephemeral,
unity of enunciating actor (author) and
enunciated act, ‘immediate’, active repetition as
skilful task (memory, ability to enunciate)
• Literacy: visual space, linear, objective,
separation of enunciating actor (author) and
enunciated act (the text), reification, replication
becomes a simple task, alienation
Form
• The form of mediation has significant bearing on
the way in which communication works
• Forms are the products of formatting, which can
also be seen as ‘contextual’
• Two approaches to forms of communication
(Carey, 1986)
– Communication as transmission
– Communication as ritual
Historicity
•
•
•
•
Media as ‘cause’ of historical transformations
Media-changes as ‘effects’ of historical forces
Media are not static; they evolve
Media evolutions involve changing relations
between form, matter, use and know-how
• Examples:
– Speech: the content is not just ideas but words, i.e.
language
– Writing: the content is not just speech but also the
graphs (hieroglyphs, pictograms, alphabet)
Cultural Embedding
• ‘Articulations of form through use and know how’
• The Medium is the Message (McLuhan, 1964)
• Culture is not given but ‘practiced’ (as sensemaking). Sense-making is performative;
• The practice of mediation includes ‘selectivity’ of
use
• Use affects how we perceive, think and
communicate
• All forms of mediation are motivated
Embodiment and Disembodiment
Embodiment
• Speech is the first communication medium
• It uses language = an abstract system of
symbols based on arbitrary connections
between sounds and ‘things’.
• Media are extensions of ‘man’ (McLuhan, 1964):
they are embodied.
• Bodies are (among other things) gendered.
• Gender constitutes a form of differentiation
which generates the possibility of subjectivity
and identity
and Disembodiment
• Bodies are not ‘closed’ – media extending bodies create networked
bodies. Body-boundaries are not fixed.
• Matthew Fuller: a Nietzschean concept of the body as the ‘starting
point’ for knowledge.
• this has two distinct advantages:
(1) it provides a materialist and action-based grounding of perception,
ordering, indeed mediation and
(2) it bypasses the need to impose an a-priori hierarchy of the organization
of this mediation.
 The ‘subject’ of communication is thus no longer a privileged entity (i.e.
the human being) whose status is derived from metaphysics, but
instead itself an effect of a sustained interaction between forces.
 Following Latour (1988b) we could further specify that these forces
themselves are irreducible (to interests, beliefs, moral values etc.).