Posts tagged media ecology

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Posted 3 weeks ago

Speech Without Response

The mass media are anti-mediatory and intransitive.  They fabricate non-communication - this is what characterizes them, if one agrees to define communication as an exchange, as a reciprocal space of a speech and a response, and thus of a responsibility (not a psychological or moral responsibility, but a personal, mutual correlation in exchange).  We must understand communication as something other than the simple transmission-reception of a message, whether or not the latter is considered reversible through feedback.  Now the totality of the existing architecture of the media founds itself on this latter definition: they are what always prevents response, making all processes of exchange impossible (except in the various forms of response simulation, themselves integrated in the transmission process, thus leaving the unilateral nature of the communication intact). This is the real abstraction of the media.  And the system of social control and power is rooted in it.

Jean Baudrillard - Requiem for the Media

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Posted 1 month ago
Right now in Conway, Ark., north of Little Rock, more than 23,000 computer servers are collecting, collating and analyzing consumer data for a company that, unlike Silicon Valley’s marquee names, rarely makes headlines. It’s called the Acxiom Corporation, and it’s the quiet giant of a multibillion-dollar industry known as database marketing. Few consumers have ever heard of Acxiom. But analysts say it has amassed the world’s largest commercial database on consumers — and that it wants to know much, much more. Its servers process more than 50 trillion data “transactions” a year. Company executives have said its database contains information about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person. That includes a majority of adults in the United States. Such large-scale data mining and analytics — based on information available in public records, consumer surveys and the like — are perfectly legal. Acxiom’s customers have included big banks like Wells Fargo and HSBC, investment services like E*Trade, automakers like Toyota and Ford, department stores like Macy’s — just about any major company looking for insight into its customers.
Acxiom, the Quiet Giant of Consumer Database Marketing - NYTimes.com (via infoneer-pulse)
via infoneer-pulse
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Posted 1 month ago

The Edens of Consumption

To Americans, life was something to be improved upon again and again.  The mail order catalog can be interpreted as an icon of this American ideal of boundless progress and perfectibility; a central feature of the mail order catalog was, and still is, its periodic character.  From the very beginning, Sears and Ward published new catalogs several times a year, year after year.  Each catalog was better and bigger than the last.  People expected each new catalog to have the latest in fashion, an improved selection, and better quality.  The catalog was, in this aspect, a ”quasi-religious” icon for the “indefinite perfectibility” of humanity.  Catalogs, reborn a few times each year, were an invitation for people to buy better things and consequently to improve their lives.   The catalog was an opportunity for people to perfect themselves; to make themselves more beautiful, more comfortable, more efficient.  Each new catalog, represented the possibility for a more perfect, if temporary, self.

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Posted 2 months ago

stanford prison experiment.

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Posted 3 months ago

Perception Is Prediction

4. Perception is more about controlling the environment than taking in sense stimuli.  Perception is most important as a means of predicting the probabilities within our environment.  Perception is prediction

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Posted 3 months ago

Here, I’ll Save a Spot For You

Given what has been said, we can see that our political and social systems – with its debates, voting, political parties and endless consumer-like selections of more of the same – are built on purely ideological ploys.  (Isn’t the internet precious when it reproduces this system with the fervent postings of “users” regarding “issues” such as unfair taxation, Republican shenanigans, disparity of wealth and so on, remaining forever within the system that interpellates us and constitutes us as safe, obedient users with our political opinions and little else.)  What becomes crucial are direct political actions that break the circuit of interpellation: the walkout, the strike, the occupation, all the lived acts of negation and revolutionary organizing that comprise our refusal to respond to the hailing of capitalist institutions.  These tactics are only the beginnings of a revolution that must be carried out by the working class and its allies.

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Posted 4 months ago

Secret Agent of Change

Furthermore before we start going on about how the internet has “rewired our brains” remember that our brains have been “wired” several times before we use the internet.  Speech rewires the brain of the pre-verbal infant.  Literacy rewires the brain of the speaking child.  This would be McLuhan  and Eisenstein’s point; speech and print as media ecologies recede so far into the background that the changes introduced by these media are taken for granted and become like water to a fish; an all-encompassing environment that is invisible and seldom noticed in itself yet has far-reaching effects and consequences.  Media recede into the background to become a ground where all we notice is the foregrounded figure of content; all media at one time or another sabotage a culture like a secret agent of change.  As McLuhan said media work us over chiropractically.

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Posted 5 months ago

Displaying Windows

Furthermore display windows – the most elemental pedagogy of consumption – are more like chalkboards or PowerPoint presentations that educate consumers. When we speak of the control of space by billboards, showrooms, corporate logos, commercials, and posters we are really speaking of the relentless education of the populace; not just the easily spotted propaganda of 15-second TV ads but the continual social propaganda that does not merely persuade but integrates everyone into common concerns and beliefs.  Advertising - in its most general form - is the omnipresent discourse of the other’s desire.

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Posted 7 months ago

HARD (CORE) Jonathan Beller and Marina Gržinić: DISCUSSING CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM AND THE CINEMATIC MODE OF PRODUCTION

Jonathan Beller: The formulation “the cinematic mode of production” (CMP) is meant to indicate the positing of the visual and sensual realms as production sites for capital. In saying that “cinema brings the industrial revolution to the eye,” I meant that with the origin of cinema, assembly-line strategies for the production of commodities were directed at the eye for the production of images. With Taylorism (a technique of labor discipline and workplace organization based upon supposedly scientific studies of human efficiency and incentive systems, begun around 1911), the cinema becomes an explicit tool for reorganizing prior production practices. It is possible to say that the (factory) chain montage becomes film montage – and then this montage is imposed upon the workplace. Taylor filmed multiple workers doing the same job at different times and in different locations, broke the job down into component parts and edited their movements together to assemble from all the variations “the one best way” to do a job. That “one best way” was then imposed upon workers by a managerial class that seized control of the shop floor. However, the organization of labor by cinematic processes goes much deeper than and far beyond simply affecting what we do at what used to be called work; indeed, it transforms perceptual experiences and processes into work. The cinema becomes a tool for the reorganization of the worker at every level of his or her experience and simultaneously converts this process of reorganization into an engine of value production. As I say in the CMP, in contemporary capitalism we must constantly retool ourselves, at the same time as we valorize (in the economic sense) media pathways. This retooling first posits and then presupposes a transformation in the form of value whilst simultaneously laying the groundwork for what the Italian theoreticians call “real subsumption,” the capture by capitalist production of formerly semi-autonomous processes that previously were formally outside of capitalist production. This capture extends beyond the work place into psycho-social life to the point where we confront the expropriation of what Virno calls the cognitive-linguistic capacities of humankind. In an Orwellian turn that I tried to articulate in my own work and continue to find persuasive, current thinking has it that our very utterances are merely the subroutines of capital scored by the general intellect that is at once the means and the material of our subjectification.

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Posted 9 months ago

Dreaming of Teacher

Authors like Roland Barthes, Erving Goffman and Arthur Frank have investigated the nature of the lecture in traditional classrooms.  By traditional classroom I am indicating a situation where a lecturer is engaged in delivering an informative lecture with the possibility of taking questions and comments from the students and imagine this activity occurring within a typical classroom with desks or seats, a teacher’s desk up front (with its usual paraphernalia such as overhead projectors, media, chalkboard).  These writers, especially Frank, investigate the role of lecturing not only as a pedagogical tool but as a practice that involves psychological interaction between the student and the instructor. 

 Although Roland Barthes and Erving Goffman have written insightful descriptions of the lecture as a textual and performative process, it is the work of Arthur W. Frank in his essay Lecturing and Transference that I will focus on here.  What these writers all share is the insight that the lecturer presents not only an informational text – the content of the lecture – but also a supplement that crystallizes around the presence of the lecturer.  For example Goffman describes the animator as the aspect of the lecturer that is over and beyond the mere information of the text.  The lecturer communicates not only the information of the lecture but the status and authority of his embodied presence.

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Posted 9 months ago

Vilém Flusser on the nature of the image.

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Posted 9 months ago
Radio Alice was a free radio station in Bologna from 1973-1977. Rather than attempting to objectify events in the world, they set out to create a flow of sounds, information, messages and poetry, silences and abuse. Like the manifestations of Dada, transmissions were seen as immediate cultural subversions. Bifo, who worked on Radio Alice was interviewed by Carlos Ordonez at the recent conference on Autonomy (’After Marx, April’) in London. The interview was conducted in English. Q: How did Radio Alice begin, and what experiences did it attempt to address? Radio Alice started in February 1976 with people who came from the experience of Potere Operaio, a leftist revolutionary group and people involved in the movement of Autonomia. We did not think of Radio Alice only as a political means but, first of all, as a possibility of organising the experiences of a homogenous community. We were speaking of little groups – feminists, gays, workers. I emphasize this ’little group’ character because we did not conceive of the radio as a political organisation that has to ’state decide’ who can speak or can’t speak. We considered the radio as the point of intersection of different experiences – every experience being different from the other. We did not think about attempting to homogenise these different groups and points of view. via Zoom

Radio Alice was a free radio station in Bologna from 1973-1977. Rather than attempting to objectify events in the world, they set out to create a flow of sounds, information, messages and poetry, silences and abuse. Like the manifestations of Dada, transmissions were seen as immediate cultural subversions.

Bifo, who worked on Radio Alice was interviewed by Carlos Ordonez at the recent conference on Autonomy (’After Marx, April’) in London. The interview was conducted in English.

Q: How did Radio Alice begin, and what experiences did it attempt to address?

Radio Alice started in February 1976 with people who came from the experience of Potere Operaio, a leftist revolutionary group and people involved in the movement of Autonomia. We did not think of Radio Alice only as a political means but, first of all, as a possibility of organising the experiences of a homogenous community. We were speaking of little groups – feminists, gays, workers. I emphasize this ’little group’ character because we did not conceive of the radio as a political organisation that has to ’state decide’ who can speak or can’t speak. We considered the radio as the point of intersection of different experiences – every experience being different from the other. We did not think about attempting to homogenise these different groups and points of view.

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