New Media in the 70s

1
New Media in the 70s

• 1970 -- Constituents of a Theory of the Media,
  Hans Magnus Enzensberger, pp. 259-260
• 1972 -- Requiem for the Media, Jean Baudrillard,
  pp. 277-
• 1974 -- The Technology and the Society, Raymond
  Williams, pp. 289-290
• 1974 -- From Computer Lib / Dream Machines,
  Theodor H. Nelson, pp. 301-302
• 1975 -- From Soft Architecture Machines, Nicholas
  Negroponte, pp. 353
• 1976 -- From Computer Power and Human Reason,
  Joseph Weizenbaum, pp. 367-368
• 1977 -- Responsive Environments, Myron W Krueger,
  pp. 377-378
• 1977 -- Personal Dynamic Media, Alan Kay and
  Adele Goldberg, pp. 391-392
• exercise 4

2
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Germanys most influential poet and writer
3
Constituents of a Theory of the Media

• In his essay Enzensberger is taking aim at the
  media businessthe consciousness industry.
• This industry operates to perpetuate an unjust
  society by convincing us to accept that society.
• the media is a big business where capitalists
  hope to make a lot of money
• Enzensberger argues that turning away from the
  media is a poor strategy for effecting change.
• one should work at the point of the media, where
  the unjust culture is vulnerable both in terms of
  consciousness and income and reverse the roles of
  producer and consumer (e.g., the way that the
  Internet has been used to organize and provide
  information about protests against the World
  Trade Organization.)

4
Jean Baudrillard
5
Requiem for the Media

• Jean Baudrillard's response to the previous
  selection, Enzensbergers 'Constituents of a
  Theory of the Media' is a discussion of a
  different conception of media production that
  might be called interaction.
• Baudrlard argues strongly against one position of
  Enzensherger that there is an inherent structure
  to media technologically.
• Baudrillard argues that media serve a social
  functionthe reduction of all they reproduce to
  pale models, foreclosing any possibility of
  genuine reciprocity. (It is in this sense that
  Baudrillard rereads McLuhan's maxim that "the
  medium is the message?)
• Baudrillard's position is that the situation will
  not get any better simply by making everyone a
  producera point of view that Enzensberger
  shares.
• Baudrillard goes on to say that even the
  organized reversible circuits Enzensherger
  discusses would not be enough. He
  writes.reversibility has nothing to do with
  reciprocal exchange

6
Requiem for the Media

• For Baudrillard the problem lies not in who
  transmits, or how turn-taking is arranged, but in
  our very underlying model of communicationwhich
  is reproduced in the media, in political life,
  and in economic life.
• This model, described by Ferdinand de Saussure,
  is that of "transmitter-message-receiver."
• As Baudrillard points out in this model there is
  no place for the ambiguity of true exchange,
  'This scientific' construction excludes the
  reciprocity and antagonism of interlocutors, and
  the ambivalence of their exchange"
• An alternative to this semio-linguistic concept
  ion (in which one is the transmitter and one the
  receiver, with the message always going from one
  to another) is that of joint production through
  genuine interaction.
• In this, argues Baudrrillard, lies the true
  potential for changein the refusal to accept a
  model of producers and consumers, even one in
  which these positions can be reversed.

7
Requiem for the Media

• Which brings us to more concrete questions
• How would one taking Baudrillards posit ion look
  upon the examples of media from the introduction
  to the previous selection (018?? l lov, would
  this position view Enzensherger's ideas of
  Netvorklike communications models newspaper,
  written and distributed by its readers, a video
  network of politically active groups or the uses
  of media in relation to the protests against the
  World 'Wade Organization?
• Baudrillard's reaction to Enzensbergers mass
  newspaper and video network is not to declare
  them inappropriate. he treats them somewhat
  positively. Baudrillard does not see them as
  demonstrating the reversibility of
  producer/consumer but as transgressing these
  categories.
• This might make our other examples "a start" from
  a Baudrillardian point of view as well. Yet
  examples of a phenomenon that Baudrillard
  critiquesthe absorption of response into
  meaninglessness via reversible mediaare
  significantly more plentiful. Consider how those
  who were once solely media consumers, and
  suddenly are included in production, have served
  only to cement their irrelevance on reality based
  TV on game shows, and on corporate run Web
  message boards.

8
Raymond Williams
http//sunsite.queensu.ca/memorypalace/parlour/Wil
liams02/
9
Technology and Society

• the social processes that bring technologies
  innto widespread use, as well as those embodied
  in technologies, may not always be those that are
  most admirable or just.
• None of those who worked to perfect the
  technology of television in its early years and
  few of those who brought televsion sets into
  their homes ever intended the device to become
  employed as the universal babysitter.

10
Technology and Society

• Similarly. if anyone in the 1930s had predicted
  people would eventually be watching seven hours
  of television each day the forecast would have
  been laughed away as absurd. But recent surveys
  indicate that we Americans do spend that much
  time. roughly one third of our lives staring at
  the tube.
• Those who wish to reassert freedom of choice in
  the matter sometimes observe 'You can always turn
  off your TV In a trivial sense that is true....
  But given how central television has become to
  the content of everyday life. how it has become
  the accustomed topic of conversation in
  workplaces, schools. and other social gatherings
  it is apparent that television is a phenomenon
  that, in the larger sense, cannot be "turned oft
  at all.

11
Theodor H. Nelson
12
Computer Lib

• Computer Lib /Dream Machines is the most
  important book in the history of new media
• Nelson argued that computer experiences were
  media to be designed and that this design should
  be both a creative process and undertaken with
  the audience (users) in mind.
• Nelson proposed that these new designed media
  experiences be placed in a radical, open
  publishing network

13
Exercise 4

• What do you believe are the dangers of new media?
  (Consider the ways in which the new media that
  was in development before you were born now
  presents a danger to you.)