The Effects of Media

00:00:10 do you know who funds the Helix Center what's there people who do y and psycho analysis I think really describe it yeah can you hear me yes okay I'm session of theer and uh uh before I mention today's Round

00:00:43 Table we are going to start a series on the censes that will begin in March and go through May and it will be five different sessions one of them on each sense that the associate director Jerry haritz has uh taken charge of and is organizing it um today's uh Round Table was uh the idea was proposed to us by uh John Williams who is a professor

00:01:17 associate professor of English film and media at y University and uh whose book uh art technology and the meeting of eastn West was published by Yale University press in 2014 uh he will take over and introduce the other participants thank you okay thank you Ed um it's a pleasure

00:01:50 to be here today um as Ed said my name is John Williams and I'm here as the organizer of this conversation on the effects of media I'm very excited about the five participants we have today and I will introduce them after which I'll um ask a few preliminary questions say a few things and then get the conversation started I hope that everyone can hear okay we're doing our best all right so first off we have Daniel zitr who is an ameritus professor of history on on the

00:02:22 Ford Foundation at Mount Holio College where he taught for 41 years he's the author most recently of New York exposed the Gilded Age police Scandal that launched the Progressive Era zam's previous books uh rediscovering Jacob Reese exposure journalism and photography in the turn of the century New York uh was published by new press uh co-authored with Bonnie yalon um offering a fresh look at the Progressive Era social reformer journalist and Pioneer photographer who

00:02:52 publicized the conditions of the desperately poor in New York zitr is also the author of and very relevant to our conversation today media and the American mind from Morse to mclan published by the University of North Carolina press in 1982 uh still in print today which received the history of the American people uh award now he's also the co-author of many other things has appeared in so many um documentaries and panels that I'll I'll just refer you to

00:03:23 the rest of his biography but we're very excited to have him today uh Paula McDowell is professor of English at New York University she is the author of books and essays addressing media effects from the 18th century to today including the women of grub Street Press politics and gender in London in the London literary Marketplace as well as the invention of the oral print Commerce and fugitive voices in 18th century Britain which won the John Ben snow prize of the North American Conference

00:03:54 on British studies uh known for her groundbreaking archival research her latest project is another archives based book titled mclin's women this will be the first ever focused study on the women historians literary Scholars Educators editors urban planners anthropologists family members nuns students and staff members and others who profoundly shaped this influential Canadian philosopher that we will discuss as well today um Erica Ro Anderson is an associate

00:04:27 professor of media culture and communication NYU the recipient of the 20232 2004 Lenor anenberg and Wallace anenberg Foundation our fellowship and communication at the center for advanced study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and the editor-in chief of public culture her research focuses on the role media Technologies play in the production of space in particular she concentrates on the configurations that enable a sense of public Collective or shared experience especially through the

00:04:58 structuring of visibil ility and gaze trained as both an experimental psychologist and a cultural historian she has she has employed a range of methodologies to explore the definition of media space she's currently writing a book about the 20th century transformation of protestant worship space into a highly mediated spectacular mega church under contract with yell University press uh prior to her position at NYU she was a research fellow in New Media and architect cure

00:05:30 in joint affiliation with the Department of culture and media at the humanities and Technology Laboratory um in Sweden Anna sheckman our last but not least is a claran fellow at Cornell University and will begin as an assistant professor in the Departments or the department of literatures in English in 2024 she is writing a two volume history of the media and data Concepts in the United States the first book Builds on her dissertation the media concept a genealogy which demonstrates that the

00:06:02 imperial spread of the media concept has imperiled the very values it was initially employed to defend the second data a humanistic inquiry challenges the notion that data has always been the proprietary domain of social scientists her first book to uh be published which is just coming out I think in two weeks called The Riddles of the Sphinx is about a history of the crossword puzzle on the sexual politics of wordplay and will be published by Harper one uh very soon her freelance

00:06:32 essays and reviews have appeared in art Forum the new inquiry the New Yorker the New York Review of Books slate the Yale review and the Los Angeles Review of Books where she is an editor at large so please welcome all of our conversationalists today and to get us started I would just say um as you may have noticed in the initial um site for our conversation today 60 years ago saw the publication of Marshall mcluhan's Landmark text

00:07:03 understanding media the extensions of man which argued that What mattered about media was that they have certain effects on us above and beyond content they communicate ever since the question of the effects of media has dominated discussions in everything from communication studies to literature studies from book history to electronic and digital computation today we bring together a group of people people who have devoted a great deal of time and energy thinking within and across these

00:07:33 disciplines we will allow the conversation to evolve organically but to get us started I wonder if we might begin to address the question of whether it makes sense today to continue think about of the media as having effects in these terms and what those effects are or will become in an era that mcluen could have only dreamed of where we scroll and stream and communicate with artificial intelligence so I throw this to the group to get us

00:08:05 started it's a nice slow pitch yeah that's sort of the question well I I would I would U haard to to start off by saying this that I don't think that the idea of media effects or effects research begins with mclan in fact um when I uh was writing my book you know over 40 years ago now um what was striking to me was the dominance of the U sort of Behavioral social scientific

00:08:37 approach to studying media that is to say what are the effects of media in terms of of people's behavior uh consumers uh voters and so on and it was actually my desire to get out of that that sort of bag to get out of that that uh what I thought was a very narrow perspective uh that pushed me to do media in the American mind uh um mclin's discussion of effects U it seems to me uh is was different uh it's not just about measuring audiences and the impact

00:09:07 of your Super Bowl advertisements and so on um it was more about uh the impact on the sensorium on on on the human senses so it was much broader in that respect um but effects research quote unquote uh was the dominant model for many many years and mclan is one of the people I think that that steered uh study of communication and media away from that so I'll just start with that um I have a feeling I'm the the historian here in

00:09:37 one way in that most of my work has actually been in 17th and 18th century Britain so I'm coming at these questions with a very different understanding of of media very very capacious understanding of media before long before the kinds of media that I think most of you here today are thinking in terms of um you know pre-print even prewriting um some of my work has been on the oral and gesture but in terms of thinking about

00:10:09 effects uh for me mclan is is so profoundly laid in the game um what interests me most is where he's getting his ideas but I'm sure if if I don't say it John will say it the first person to that we know of to talk about media facts is Plato right uh Socrates telling the story of of um thth introducing this marvelous invention of writing to King thus and Theus saying what you've got here is in fact a a destroyer of of

00:10:41 memory um so you know I think one of the big questions alongside effects is how does how do each of us here today define media differently um so wonderful huge question so one of the really interesting things about mclan given he's sort of you know hits he comes to the United States for a year in like 67 spends a year at forom

00:11:12 does a bunch of lectures but they're they're very interesting and they're all on YouTube um and then thinking about him today is that there's sort of two things I think about these days in terms of media effects one is that there's a big New York story to tell that has something to do with the city and that we haven't done enough to tell that story I know little pieces not very much but it feels like an opportunity to have a conversation about what his vision of effects was given the kind of sensorium that we know as part of urban life here um and why it caught on here right maybe

00:11:43 to just kind of think those things together would be really fun to do and I think about that more and more and the other piece I think about is something like in hindsight thinking of mclan we have the benefit of seeing work that wasn't published in the time when most mclan interpreters were working so we have his dissertation for example that doesn't isn't published till 2006 and it's all about Elizabethan England right and rhetoric and the Trivium and so it's grammar and logic and dialectic you know and and all these things which seem so

00:12:14 far to the side of positivist traditions of causality and modern science it's a kind of very Catholic Vision um and a broader kind of you know sensibility for humanitas that is a non linear causality and so when he's talking about effects it's a different kind of efficaciousness and I think it would be nice to go back and think about some of the metaphysics or the underlying assumptions about what it is to look at the world as if everything is mediated and how that might have made the view very different

00:12:44 than these kind of thin narrow channels that I think we've we've tightened too much today maybe in New York given how intense this place is we're actually really well equipped to think about The Cutting Edge of AI Etc yeah I I'm tempted to try to connect what Dano said about the effect school to this idea of New York because um that school really took root or flourished at Colombia during and after the war um in large part because so many uh German

00:13:15 immigrates from Frankfurt and um largely Frankfurt came to the US and were uh very generatively taking certain European ideas about sort of crowd psychology and um the mass effects of media or what would been called the communications of mass media or mass media Communications at the time um and they but they were sort of also thriving on this Behavioral Science

00:13:47 movement in in in the US um and so the kind of collision of a of a critique tradition coming from from Frankfurt emerging with or merging with this uh behavioralist right phenomenon is also weirdly a New York story as well because it's a kind of um L Island story that's embodied in the personal relationship between Paul lazel and tww adorno adorno's first job in New York

00:14:18 was at the re of Applied social research that lazel led at Colombia and of course the author authoritarian personality is a weirdly soci ific Tex but but the historian in me has to also um suggest that I hadn't thought really about the New York connection that you were making um but um you know New York City has always been the center of uh Communications in this country ever since the beginning of the publishing industry um in the early 19th century and also the penny press which also was

00:14:50 born in the United States as well as the Associated Press uh which was sort of Monopoly of news Gathering and then of course through uh the early moot picture industry which was born in New York City U and then the emergence of the broadcasting Industries um and the fact that there was so much money available um for research is directly connected to the fact that um broadcasters in particular had a problem that previous media folks did not have I mean if you have a movie theater you know how many

00:15:20 seats you have and how many tickets you sold if you have a newspaper you know what the circulation is um if you have a radio station radio network you really don't know who's out there listening and what effect uh your your uh uh shows or your advertisements are having um and so one of the things that happens is that starting in the 30s I would argue you have the growth of of what you might call demographic science that is the the the attempt to um sort of reduce human beings to these demographic

00:15:52 characteristics uh and the development of sophisticated polling techniques um you know the the the Hooper ratings and the neelon ratings um which also have an impact on politics I should add in other words um trying to measure the impact of say advertisements on people's behavior what they buy how they vote um it it was really an important um sort of engine that was driving the C you know the growth of this behavioral um social scientific approach to to understanding media pre MCL of course um so so the

00:16:26 city is where the industries are growing and also with the efforts to figure out the impact of of those Industries is happening as well yeah I mean I feel like we we've got like a we've got a story to tell about some media effects being Something New York should lay a little more claim to right like I think we don't have enough Hometown Pride actually about this topic you I I was once my I have a book project I'm working on now that is about the the

00:16:57 media concept and how it came to inform different culture Industries around mid-century um and I was I was told by someone that it's too a cell Corridor right that it's not it's a little provincialized but I am focusing on media Industries and so there's a sort of um inevitableness that it would focus in New York and then bingly Los Angeles what's the first modern use of the term media I mean this is something I try to address in in my book because it's still a very very ambiguous term that people use in all kinds of different ways

00:17:29 the first use that I found of the term media uh comes in advertising journals which are talking about Billboards advertising media um but today in sort of you know Common discourse or or whatever people use the term media still in wildly different ways some people use the term media to describe investigative journalism some people use it to differentiate print from non-print um you know and in my view this reflects some of the the the tensions the historical tensions what I

00:18:01 call dialectical tensions in media history itself um and uh you know we still don't have a a a word a a a common agreement on what the term means I don't know that we'll get one here today yeah it's complicated I there's actually a great film starring Jimmy Stewart that not a lot of people have seen called Magic Town oh yeah where he plays a one of these pollsters whose job it is to determine how the country is going to vote one way or the other and he discovers I don't know somewhere in the midwest a town that is the perfect

00:18:32 microcosmic representation of the entire United States whatever this town thinks he can reliably predict the entire nation will think and so he goes there sets up shop but there's this Scrappy beautiful reporter who wants to modernize the town they fall in love and she's trying to change the town he's trying to keep it the same way it is in order to to use it as a as a way of determining the sociological picture of the entire nation um that's one way of thinking about effects the sort of sociological study of how people behave

00:19:03 what they consume how they think about um what how they vote the the munian is also a little bit more theoretical in the sense that he he did this focus on the sensorium as we were just saying like for him the idea that we experience the world constantly with all five senses in a particular ratio of them has effects on us that we're not even aware of right we might be receiving more data visually than than through our ears and that has an effect on us or if we have if we feel things more than we see or

00:19:35 hear then that has an effect on us as well so there's this and I love that we're actually doing this conversation in you know just before the different five senses conversation at the Helix Center but I wonder if um there's something to that sensorium of what it means to live in a city like New York like part of what I think creates a a discipline like media studies is the sense that we're being bombarded in all directions by a media scape by the fact that we're we're so

00:20:07 constantly immersed in information now much more so than human beings would have been in oral times I again I think I mean just I wanted to go back to something uh just to flag it for now something Erica said about the way we think about absolutely everything is mediated now just to put that on a Todo list for discussion um I also wanted to come back to I completely agree that in terms of mclan uh the year he spent in New York has been profoundly understudied and is

00:20:38 there's a lot of potential there but the proud Canadian in me wants to also you know remind us all that he is understood now as being you know part of the Toronto school um and that if you look at who he Flags in the introductions to his book it's Harold Enis you know the the political Economist who is tracking the movement of trees in Canada's natural resources and thereby paper and thereby uh etc etc and then also Albert

00:21:11 Lord the theorist of oral culture um you know Eric havlock too Eric havlock absolutely yeah he's a little bit less effusive about havlock than he is about Lord but um so there's that that whole aspect too um but then coming back to the question question of how how modern you asked what was the first mention of Med the first use of the media concept or not you didn't say you said the term medium uh in Modern Times And I

00:21:43 immediately thought well okay modern that's Francis Bacon in the 17th century um who isn't using uh media so much as medium but you know 17th century philosophers were writing specifically about how medium functioned uh you know instead of sound being a medium it's it's air that's the medium that connects the object and the organ Etc um so to to sort of catapult from this the early moned period when there

00:22:14 all is all this thinking about Connections and mediation and the senses to now is an interesting move well there was a great phrase that I found in 1933 um 19 32 33 President Hoover had um appointed a commission to look at at various aspects of industrial life and the discussion of the media they they talked about the media of they they talked about them as agencies of

00:22:45 mass impression which is I think a great phrase and that's what I think people were concerned about what will be the impact of these agencies of mass impression whether we're talking about radio uh you know newspapers or what have you and that I think is different than you know Francis Bacon and those folks uh but uh you know I I I think that part of what I was trying to get at in terms of the word media was the way to which today it is still sort of tossed around in ways that people don't really agree on including uh and we're

00:23:16 all familiar with this I think the blaming of almost every ill in Modern Life on the media right I nobody knows what that really means but we use it all the time uh so there is a kind of you know uh I don't know imprecision about the term that as I said before I think suggests um some of the the contradictions in media history um I'll stop there just about 10 different directions I would like to go and so I guess a minute I should just quickly choose one um I so I think maybe in

00:23:52 between mass impression and this question of sensorium is a is the idea of ideology which which is strangely doesn't come up very often in in mclan despite the fact that the mechanical bride was you could say like a work of ideology critique um and so I guess I'll leave it as as a sort of open question um you know the effect school has gotten sort of flack for being um naive to ideology and to the ideological effects of media um in part because there's a

00:24:23 construction of the notion of limited media effects The Limited effects Theory sometimes called two-step flow was this idea that Paul leld and meron and Clapper all of these communication theorists developed in part to sort of say here in the US we're not actually that worried about uh mass media as a kind of totalitarian agent or even the media as a kind of menacing hegemonic Force um because based on our social scientific research whether you watch a television

00:24:55 show or listen to the radio ultimately you're your opinions are still going to be informed by face-to-face communication with your neighbors or by leaders in your community it's really reaffirming a notion of a kind of um Town Square Jeffersonian model of American Communications and that was like a great relief to everyone I think and probably a relief to those Scholars who could then sort of sell their research to TV stations and uh feel like they were still participating in in a sort of local

00:25:27 American MH project um and not have to worry too much about totalitarianism um now they've I think really justly that whole school has really justly been um criticized for not for having this very limited notion of media that that ignores I the sort of as you were saying kind of dialectical tension or the sort of recursive quality of media that it it is necessarily shaping those very Norms that apparently face to-face conversation is reinforcing

00:25:58 um now where the question of like I mean mcluen so cool and weird in part because like where on Earth does the does the idea of sensorium enter into any of that right on one hand when we're talking about face-to-face communication reinforcing or being shaped by uh mass media Communications it would be I think easy enough to uh to ignore the human body in a way

00:26:29 um to think about uh the construction of ideas as kind of abstracted from from an embodied experience and so I guess there's two parts to this MH question which I assure you it actually is um which is sort of what is the relationship between ideology and sensorium in mclin's work itself um and kind of how does mclan operate as an ideological agent um both

00:26:59 as a a thinker and as a sort of salesman of of the media concept maybe we could pull it forward a little bit to kind of think think about that question of the sensorium and ideology in mclan um towards the like another bit we all know in the room right so 60s New York he's here and then media study starts taking off as a discipline slowly 70s ' 80s 90s and then it kind of bons around the internet coming this way' 70s New York is like

00:27:31 kind of captured as a really Bleak time I mean I don't know I'll admit I I'm a 1980 child so I I I only know it cinematographically but dang right it's a graffiti on the subway it's the Midnight Cowboy it's like everything you know about gritty New York is happening in the same Taxi Driver yeah in the same moment it's the the turn to austerity right and the kind economic crisis in City's history right right so we know there has to be something that's shocking to the sensorium right at the moment that this concept though New York's been

00:28:01 a media capital for a long time is like there's a crucible of some kind and I don't exactly know what what makes the stew catalyze but I think it's worth thinking about given we've also been a place for Global Financial crises etc etc like what are these pushes and pulls of constriction and austerity doing to the sensorium that simultaneously animates this like Cambrian explosion of experiments with different mediations like what is that wish or anxiety is there something that we might want to say about I mean these are truly

00:28:34 questions I have no idea but I've always wanted to ask one one of the ideas that came up John's comment about Magic City is that uh the Jimmy Stewart character wanted the place to be the way it is and representative and yet someone else this I don't know if she's a f fatal but anyway the the woman newpaper reporter the newspaper reporter is um wants to advance wants to advance progress and it makes me think of this phrase like could

00:29:04 you please sit still like sit still would you because the idea this is the way it is but no look another minute later and it's not the way it is right and I think that may be always a part of what's going on especially when there's an explosion of the sort you just referenced well two quick things to think about it try to follow up on these points um one is that I'm glad you mentioned Harold inis because inis in many ways was a much more profound uh thinker than mclan and um inis was an economic historian who made his

00:29:35 reputation with the so-called Staples thesis of Canadian history that is he argued that you could understand the creation of the Canadian Nation by looking at a series of Staples products that came to Define Canadian economy so there was the fur trade there was um the fisheries and there was the the wood and lumber trade and he wrote interesting histories of all these things but toward the end of his his career and his life he began looking at changes in communication modes of communication as being a key way to understand historical

00:30:07 change and he talked about what he called the bias of communication that is to say some communication forms were biased toward time that is to say uh things like Papyrus and stone tablets and so on which uh lasted a long time and then there were forms of media forms of communication uh that had space bias they were portable they were easily uh spread around and they were connected to the the spread of Empire so writing paper um and later on other other

00:30:39 examples but the larger point of in seems to me is that he was most interested in the impact of changing forms of communication on the economies uh of Nations on on political economy uh on you know sort of on structures of of of societies whereas cluen is much more interested in the questions of psychology the sensorium uh and frankly things that are much more difficult to measure uh and one of the the just rereading U understanding media um you

00:31:11 know so of I didn't prepare anything but I did read that uh reread mclen uh I was struck by sort of the absurdity of some of his claims to the effect that he's in some sense a scientist right he claims he's a psychologist he's a scientist he says I'm like Louis Pastor you know uh telling people that uh what What's really causing what's happening bacteria you can't see and people didn't want to believe him and he he he puts a lot of emphasis on his own Insight uh on the Insight of artists particularly literary

00:31:44 artists right um and it's almost like a trick of vision either you see it or you don't see it U it's not a question of proving anything he's not trying to to to uh really make it a a coherent logical argument so much as he is presenting you with his insights um some of which are are I think still uh relevant some of which are are quite insightful um but the idea of mclone is some kind of a a scientific figure um somebody who is is is you know it seems to me is is fairly absurd

00:32:17 um and I curious though also about this question of mclan in New York since understanding media came out in ' 64 um and I've always thought of his later work as being not as interesting as not as insightful as understanding media Gutenberg Galaxy mechanical bride which is his first book um so I wonder if you talk a little bit more about that Eric about the New York connection the first three books are definitely the best no question and then he comes here I think I mean not to cast shade on Toronto but I think he might have been trying to

00:32:48 leave right and then something doesn't work out and he goes back and he teaches at Toronto for the rest of his time um and he is in a put in a little coach house that's been renovated behind the medieval studies Center there's never a doctoral program right I mean we all know in tenured Academia life sometimes you end up in places that don't always love you back um so I don't know what the story is but I get the feeling that there was something really possible and energizing that fit well and that somehow some pieces of that get picked

00:33:19 up and sort of transmuted into the direction you Postman will take Etc um and so something happens there and there's I think a lot of work to do to dig that out do you have thoughts sorry I know I just wanted to ask you a question um well returning to that that I think quite big question you were asking about 70s New York and why a certain media like academic media discourse would take root in this particular time because I'm the the media concept um really takes off in the middle of the 20th century so

00:33:51 a little bit earlier than that and and slightly before mclan I mean he gets a lot of credit as a popularizer of this discourse but it's pretty widespread in the in the late 50s um and I guess I'm that's informed a lot right by this European crowd psychology this idea that urbanization and massification like we're all um together in spaces and therefore more easily manipulated as a mass um and I in the image you were painting of New York I couldn't get the sense of um there was a kind of

00:34:23 isolation an anomi or something that's informing your your notion of or your sense of why a certain study of the sensorium would really take off here or media effects as as happening on the body would take off here because people are so isolated from each other or because they're so massed together and of course one of the one of I think you can just say effects of mass media is that um one can be a mass in isolation right so um but I wonder is there something particular about the 70s that

00:34:55 that reinforces that mass and isol like what what well I'll tell you what I really think okay I think we it's only on the internet um I think that story of Anna me is bunk in a lot of ways right and it's but it's it's so it onramps the study of communication so deeply that now we have to go back and do that trick like where you know there's like the Full Table of things and someone rips out the tablecloth of modernity wrting a

00:35:25 mind shaft and then hopes everything is standing right and so we have this big job which is to go back and tell the story the other way which is fully from the middle mediation all the way up and down um misol level analyses overlapping partial causalities and we got to figure out if we can let that modernity story go and what kind of sort of generative social research comes out of that because I think this is thinking from the middle is a very powerful way to get rid of thinking of the individual or the macro

00:35:55 level totality and we've just neglected it I mean wildly there's one other thing that we haven't sort of got on the table here that we need to get on the table if we're talking at all about mclan and that is the fact that he spent his entire career uh as a literature scholar and and a specialist in poetry and over and over and over again he says the the art artists are the antenna of the race you know he's he's quoting or echoing asound there um and you know I think we

00:36:28 because so many of the easy Illusions and references he makes to literary texts like Alexander Pope's dunciad or Jonathan Swift's Dale of a tub or King leer endless Shakespeare or Blake I mean look at the role of Blake in mclin's thinking po po exactly the vortex narrative CH Joy you know it goes on and on um and his 6,000 surviving books from his library now at the UFT testify to

00:37:00 the incredible amount of time he spent annotating these literary text which I think he used as a source material to understand history um so what does it mean you know we may look at uh understanding media and say okay well here he's referring to um science of reading studies in the 1950s or what have you or see him behave like a scientist but I don't think he's

00:37:31 um thinking of things as separated like that you know for him you can learn as much about how the body operates and what it means to move from an oral culture to a visual Culture by reading literary texts and hearing how poets and artists and so forth understood shifts in the human sensorium um so you know that that's not directly connected to 1970s New York but we would want to pay a lot of attention

00:38:01 to the way these shifts according to his theory would have been registered first in art 100% yeah I I think it's worth noting as well that he's a literature Professor but the most famous literature professor of the 20th century yes he was in Annie Hall the Woody Allen film he numerous appearances on television he's publishing Mass Market paperbacks that are Avant guard design the mass remember um and part of that's because he had an entire advertising

00:38:34 agency known as generalist Inc run by a very famous ad guy named Howard gosage yeah on Madison Avenue who was like very interested in promoting mclin's idea promoting him as a thinker and feeling like there's there's something to be said there I I think one of his most I think valuable ideas is precisely this question of him entering the media of entering the environment of the media and talking about artists as having the potential to initiate an anti- anti-environment yes so you know the old

00:39:05 David Fuster Wallace story where two fishes are swimming along and they pass by this older fish who says good morning boys how's the water and the two younger fish swim along and one of them turns to the other and says what the hell is water yeah and it's and mclan loved that idea because the idea is that if you get pulled out of the water you suddenly recognize the environment you were in in a way that you didn't when you saturated in it and so artists have that special ability to generate anti- environments

00:39:35 for us to take things that feel familiar and transparent and render them strange and unfamiliar and interesting I think that's I think that's a great Insight actually one of his more valuable ideas I think the Madison Avenue thing is important because um Madison Avenue in the 60s and the 70s loved having this sort of Mandarin literature Professor tell everybody how brilliant they were yeah uh and mcluhan's own own connections with Madison Avenue I think were important also the uh the do line

00:40:07 newsletter he had which um was heavily subscribed to by corporations and people in the military too um who saw mclan as some kind of Avatar of of uh you know I think Looking Back Now to me it seems clear that that mclone is very much a a a product of the 60s and and he's you know he's responsible if nothing else for the tremendous um sort of uh development and accelerated development of what I would call Media Consciousness right the idea that that that media

00:40:38 exists that they have you know so you start having newspapers running columns media criticism uh you start having U uh a a a much more popular understanding that that that the media matter um part of what I was trying to do was go further and say yes and they have a history uh because the everywear The NeverEnding the ubiquity of the mass media um you know sort of encourage this idea that they've always been this way and that they don't have a history and that they're not the product of

00:41:11 historical choices political choices economic choices um and one of the problems I have with mclu and I've always had is that he sort of evinces a kind of what I would call technological naturalism the idea that that that that the media are some in some ways the substitute or now the environment is the media you know it's no longer uh you know kids running around the woods or going swimming in the lake that's not the real environment the real environment is is television uh and of course now with the cell phones did you

00:41:42 think that's true though I mean well there's there's some truth to it and I you know I'm thinking a lot about the subtitle of um understanding media the extensions of man and man uh is the cell phone not the ultimate extension of the body I mean everywhere you go uh every 13-year-old has the entire world in his or her pocket uh and that is a kind of media penetration a new type of media form for the whole digital aspect of media which I did not write about um you

00:42:12 know is is post mclan uh and uh yet it it does seem to be relevant in terms of of the notion of the extension of the body I mean the phone is you know 2008 the the beginning of the smartphone is going to be seen as an important historical marker in my view when people look back um anyway I'm rambling I'll keep quiet here for a while I mean there's there's a number of mclin we've talked about the kind of overd determinedness of the media concept there's also an overd determinedness of the mclan concept at some level um you

00:42:45 know we have him as a as a kind of modernist critic in a way of something like a um a iner in nerdness to one's surroundings um but I think there's also you know we we also have him as a kind of I don't know sellout the iconic academic sellout um but there's also one way of thinking about him is also as a as a kind of postmodernist thinker as well the line in Annie Hall

00:43:18 that he says which is just brilliant you mean my whole my whole fallacy is wrong right and that my whole fallacy um elsewhere in his work he talks about whole fallacies as being the kind of formation of of modern thinking that he wants to bump you know push back against that's the sort of if there's any more postmodern project than that I don't know what there is but so great I'm is that he he's like obsessed with this guy called Thomas Nash I don't know anything about Thomas Nash I'm just kind of but I bet does

00:43:52 ofation but it's nothing but Thomas Nash this guy who is writing these pamphlets in defense of Bishops and is doing like this kind of like high like literary references but low vernacular leaving these amazing blank spaces in his typography so you can add your own insults like a message board you know to insult the person too and so it's so interesting it's like he's playing it such a far back past yes and present and it's so it's like what's going on there with time and he he has a mental

00:44:24 repertoire that goes back you know to classical literature and the whole history he sets out to write this thesis on to Tomas Nash and you know the war is about to break out and he has to do this thing fast and uh he sets out to write a thesis on Nash but he decides that the real fight between Nash and his opponent was all about the transformation of logic rhetoric and dialectic and that therefore he had to go all the way back

00:44:56 back to classical times and understand that whole history and if you look at his dissertation he doesn't actually get on Tash until his last chapter and he has to leave uh England because the war is breaking out he basically just puts a period behind it but I think you're so right that you know again um I feel bad because I keep pushing us back in history but mclan does it for us if we actually look not just at his you know

00:45:27 understanding media but at at his total body of writing most of it is about before the 20th century um so there's one there's one continuity that's interesting yeah his dissertation is all about this conflict of the Trivium the three things rhetoric grammar logic exactly the different Advocates of those Traditions are all fighting throughout medieval times and before yeah and he's arguing for a new ratio in which the grammar is is the grammatica the magic

00:45:57 of of language is is heightened in the tradition then he switches to electronic media and he's still talking about the ratio of things but now it's the human sensorium yeah and all about how the way that we that our our electronic environment is changing the way that we think the way that we feel because of its media not because of the content of the media um and I want to I mean I'm out on all of this mclan but I'm also

00:46:28 cognizant of our of our of everyone hearing that maybe um we could push it a little Beyond mclan to maybe follow up on something Dan was talking about with contemporary digital objects which um it is a kind of question of the ratio how much of our lives have we exteriorized into these objects what's the ratio of the self that now exists in the phone that we carry with this what are what are children you know what's what's it

00:46:58 like to be born in a time when that's do you ever think what mclen would do with a phrase like tech neck yeah right right yeah well I mean I I think it's important to remember again the historian in me that that this is not the first time where there has been a new media form that has really shaken up yeah uh the society and the culture and so one of the things I did in meeting the American mind was look at the Contemporary responses the popular responses to New Media forms so starting with the telegraph which really was the

00:47:30 first separation between transportation and communication it's also the first binary system right the morse code everything's either a DOT or a dash um and there's this tremendous utopian outpouring of U uh of um you know excitement o over what the telegraph is going to do and when the first Atlantic Cable uh was completed in 1858 you had uh you know New York City you had tens of thousands of people Marching In These parades celebrating uh uh this this

00:48:00 great thing and a lot of invoking of Christian the spread of Christianity and so on and so forth uh with Motion Pictures similarly there's a whole debate around movies that really transforms the notion of what we mean by culture um and sort of you know essentially attacks or or or or goes beyond the sort of traditional Matthew Arnold sweetness and light culture or something that can only be enjoyed by the well and the educated um radio broadcasting uh you know the importance before the networks

00:48:32 come in of the ham operators and all of these people who are fascinated with the possibilities of Wireless transmission um and of course the dialectic I was talking about before that I've seen is that you have this sort of in the emergence of New Media you have this this dialectic between these sort of utopian Progressive ideals about what the media are going to bring and then you have the flip side which of course is the use of media as instruments of domination exploitation commercialism and so on and I think that

00:49:04 dialectic is throughout um you can see it throughout media history um certainly the internet uh you know in recent years has has created the same kind of discourse uh all the great things that can and have been done with the internet uh but also the sense that um it's a nightmare uh you know in so many ways um against the secularization thesis that all of these New Media are simply taking us into some kind of disenchanted Enlightenment where you know no one has

00:49:35 yeah and I mean strange ideas the thing about mclen and you know two things about the literary criticism one is that of course he was a a student and an ad advocate of the new criticism and if you think about the idea of the medium as the message it's not all that different from some of the new critical perspectives that the text is all right it doesn't matter matter who the author is doesn't matter his or her history and all that but it's really it's about the text um but also uh mclin's Catholicism um you can read uh his theory as a kind

00:50:07 of new version of Christian myth right that there is the Eden of oral culture um which is destroyed by the fall of the alphabet and print uh but there's going to be a resurrection uh with oral culture brought in the return of oral culture brought in by television and New Media um now that's kind of simplistic but I do think there's some truth to that um and that that behind the scientist and the psychologist and all of that talk about you know

00:50:37 uh he's he's really in some ways restating a kind of Christian myth as a way of understanding media with a Twist okay I completely agree I mean that's you know for mclan and with Walter Ang it's all about cognitive shifts that different Media or different senses even affect the way our minds work um so you know the ratio of the senses hearing touch seeing taste

00:51:09 smell from mlan he clearly thought that print rebalanced the ratio of our senses that we went from orality which is this sensory all around surround sound I can hear hear what's going on in the back of my head but I can't see it to this visual linear uh rationalized form of intaking the world and here we see his biases towards alphabetic literacy

00:51:40 because not all forms of of writing if you will are are strictly visual um but when he starts saying talking in these weird phrases about the orality of the electric age you know we're going back to orality and and it will bring us together in this um Catholic communion uh you he also there's something interesting going on because he's writing in the 20th century and orality for him also means Hitler's radio

00:52:11 broadcasts you know um so there's a real violence to it uh he doesn't um he doesn't idealize he sees oral communication oral mouth face to face and the new orality if you will of of radio and so forth as having an element of violence uh and I can't claim to understand that I mean I think it's true uh that you know the voice can evoke violence um and bombardment of but I I

00:52:45 can't quite uh understand his thinking there he is very aware of this sort of violence that you know from our perspective we would see magnified 100 times yeah this goes back to something Anna was saying about the word mass in front of mass media which is always invokes something a little bit yeah um totalit totalit religious Mass right oh as well thought of that yes as well yeah yeah that's really good I mean I wonder

00:53:17 what he would think given that sort of range of all The Good the Bad and the Ugly um that come from these shifts about like just to kind of like now we're on the brink of this AI thing which we know like I think isn't going to go away even if it's snake oil because there's so much money invested at this point with such huge players like Henry Kissinger has a book so we know right there's something that's going to stick around for too long so didn't he die he did he still has that

00:53:48 book though um yeah so there's something about the balance opened up again between the production of print you know and word and also the capacity to render image or conjure things from rhetoric into like and it seems like I would be curious like what might what might be the things that having read so much of him attent make us attune to whether it's the sense ratio shifts or the kinds of figures like artists that would give us a clue or the modes of balancing living in this

00:54:20 way like is there something that feels helpful to frame this moment or to keep an eye out for certain sorts of things MH well I think it's what he didn't do um I think there is something helpful but it's um partly in the critiques that his book undertook or from the very very beginning uh I'm thinking of Raymond Williams attack on mcan's understanding of Television uh him saying that he has

00:54:52 erased the the human agents who make choices that make these Technologies what they are uh and this brings us to um you know his huge debt to Elizabeth eisenstein the printing press is an Agent of Change again the criticisms there were uh accusations which I personally think are false that she was a technological determinist you know but she doesn't focus on the human agents and their choices so much as the shifts

00:55:23 that the technology somehow seems to be bringing in by itself um so I think human agency is is something that he didn't always address um and sorry okay oh I was going to say the um the seductiveness of technological determinism as an explanatory model is definitely something that I whether or not he is a technological determinist or not I think is something that um he maybe ran with or his um there was a certain Mass

00:55:57 Appeal to this idea that these new technological agents had in fact changed everything right um that's more seductive than ever as an explanation for Modern Life when you actually have um you know inventions innovations that their their whole raise on Detra is to diminish human agency that's right um and so you know it's even in the in the reporting about about Ai and about chat

00:56:28 gbt you can see the role of human agency being diminished and diminish and diminish that that incredible New York Times story about the reporter who I don't know engaged with the chatbot and the chatbot tried to convince him to leave his wife and L him remember the story yeah the one thing that was like minimally reported as it as the story itself was remediated was that he started out his initial Gambit was asking the chatbot to perform the Yan shallow self and that's not something that's really often accounted for in

00:56:59 that in that story otherwise it's just like this sort of cyber techno romance that's also a techn dystopian romance right that what if the chapot really did want to escape the screen and fall fall in love with this user right that's a great story it's less great when he's scripted it to um or his mode of inscription his agent as a user is sort of eliminated from or is is accounted for I mean I mean two quick points one is that I don't think that that mclan

00:57:31 had the same kind of critical perspective both politically and economically that Harold inis had one of the main reasons that inis got involved with studying media was because he was concerned about the impact the growing impact of American cultural imperialism on Canada I mean you know all the major population senators in Canada were getting American TV American radio and American movies and all the rest and he was deeply concerned about that I don't find that in MCL um the the the other point to make again an historical one is

00:58:02 that you know 1960 was the moment when you had pretty much uh total penetration of of um televisions in American homes that is over 90% of Americans had a TV by 1960 3 years later 1963 we have Network news um 60s is the TV moment so to speak in terms of the new dominant medium uh and I think that's part of what's driving mclan as well um and the Vietnam war is on TV sorry and the

00:58:33 Vietnam war is on TV yeah exactly well and you know most famously he said the medium is the message which I think is worth mentioning because that's literally the idea that the I think he said the medium is so much more powerful than whatever it's communicating that it's like yeah the writing the whatever you stencil on the side of an atomic bomb before you drop it that's about how much the message matters what matters is the technology the device itself but when you get to something like AI with

00:59:04 jet gbt where it's literally um the question of agency becomes suddenly different you mentioned that the one of the first definitions in the 1930s was agents of mass impression yeah well now agencies very much on the table with the question of the words themselves are the medium and the message they become they're sort of conflated into this single entity now so it's almost like you have to take mclan for granted before you can then go on to begin to talk about AI in some

00:59:36 way but we've always needed to teach I mean this is where education comes in throughout history I me a lot of the same concerns about women getting access to books in the 18th century or to print that they will confuse reality and uh and books and endless satires on women who are you know Don kote even at the very beginning of printing he's he's confusing romance with with reality and

01:00:08 I think you know we've always had to teach new readers new users how to uh use these new technologies and presumably it's the same and I'm sort of going through this with my freshman right now the whole question question of of AI and I just simply said okay let's let's let it do a bio of me and I'll point out how many things in the bio are wrong give it a year yeah right give it a year and then I actually said that I said right now you know everything yeah

01:00:41 you got it Anna give it a year in this respect it's I think worth remembering that his first book uh 1951 the mechanical bride which is very different from all the rest of the stuff as you pointed out um really comes out of his first frustration that as a literature Professor the students are not that much interested in or sort of you know not really reading uh Joyce and pound and and all the other modernist the Yates that he championed uh but he was shocked to see how incredibly astute they were about advertisements and about what they

01:01:12 saw in the mass media and so he writes mechanical bride almost as a way to sort of recapture these students we can't get to listen to him in class about about literature but they are interested in all these images of of mass media um and so that's a kind of bridge he's he's trying to build of course then he goes off on a whole other tangent but uh mechanical bride is still really well worth reading uh and uh there's a lot of wonderful stuff in there but it's very different than the later mclen in the

01:01:43 sense that he's really trying to do what we would call content analysis I think it was a really experimental book for him I mean he was really struggling trying to feed a family of six and just you know basically if you look at the publishing history handed the uh press a box of clippings with his probes beside them and it was just a nightmare of publication um just circling back to the question I had about whether ideology is more useful or generative

01:02:14 than than necessarily the sensorium um not that they're Inseparable but but sensorium was the one he focused on as opposed to IDE when um you know a lot of other Med media Scholars or early media Scholars at the time that was their real concern um to me when thinking about AI at least it's really hard to know how one would think about the human sensorium and relationship to AI I think be really interesting question whereas ideology is all over the surface the only way that

01:02:44 the predictive algorithm can know what the next word is is what's what's the average next word right one way of saying that is like what's the hegemonic next word or something like that um so I don't know I mean maybe this is sort of an open question is there a usefulness of the sense ratios when thinking about AI maybe you already ask that question but I'd like to put it back we should always be remediating so yeah um you know maybe one of the things that that surfaces since I it's nice to have

01:03:16 the hold on ideology here is that ai's gone off on this sort of assumption that it's intelligence we're talking about and a brain model or a mind model and so we have this invitation to think about what's coming out as if it were like a person or a psyche you know individual and whole and I wonder if we thought with the sensorium if we could take a door through to another kind of model or metaphor that could then inflect back on what we think technology might be useful

01:03:48 for right so I mean we could come back to something like um being in the city right I don't know if the things that people are telling me are the best chocolate ever are true or false right and there's graffiti all over the place and there's overlapping partial understandings it's it's a lot right but I'm not asking questions about I might be asking if this is felicitous but I'm not asking if it's true right and so is there some other set of models for generativity that there's a clue

01:04:18 here we could pursue in order to kind of make an ideological critique about the idea of putting the person and the computer on the same level and then fold in something about where the agencies are that hold up that illusion of a dialogue but there's like this teing mass of social energies that are really what is the juice in the whole operation you know yeah one thing about the notion of the sensorium that I don't think you've touched on is that we usually and this again ties in nicely to our

01:04:48 upcoming talks on the senses but we use our sensorium as the basis of our knowledge yeah right it's and we think of things like we say things like you know seeing is believing it seems to be a direct access a vertical access to what's real it's not really so but anyway that's how we see it I'm just curious about how that fits in with AI and and all the rest yeah we haven't gotten you know extended mind theory on the table or you

01:05:19 know extensions of man like I I it's really promising to think of uh the sensory ratio as a way of reminding us that we are putting the human and the Comm computer screen on the same and AI on the same plane in our analysis at the same time I could see mclan or maybe some extended mind theorist saying that that's a false false division that's a

01:05:51 that's an illusion um that that the human has always been technological and this is simply another extension of the of the body or the mind I don't know I mean I'm thinking of how you interact with seeing people much younger than me interact with their phones it's like almost it is haptic it is the speed with which they can operate these things prothetic prothetic in a way right yeah prosthetic exactly becomes a

01:06:21 prosthetic there's a great uh part where um in Clark and Char Chalmers who were the guys who first wrote this essay on the extended mind and one of their colleagues likes to tell them that their essay which was written in 1996 wasn't true until 2008 when the smartphone was invented and then it became true and that we're suddenly now genuinely living in an era of extended mind and I think there's also plenty of examples in the popular culture I'm thinking most uh uh saliently about uh

01:06:55 the Terminator right the movie Terminator and the various the various I'm talking about the the Schwarzenegger movies right in which one of the basic conceits is that the machines took over right that that what happened was that you know and I think that there's a kind of fear among a lot of people about AI That's related to this that well what if these things basically get out of our control and and they take over um maybe not the way you know they did for Arnold but but still that is the dystopian fear I think that

01:07:27 that some people bring to AI along with all the all the great possibilities and so on yeah but what if what if this means the the end of human agency so to speak um I'm not saying I believe that but I think that there's a lot of that out there um that's clouding the whole AI discourse well and this is a question I I think I have for Paula is that I think the the fantasy of or the theory of extended mind I wonder how that sits with with the fantasy of extended mind divorced from the body

01:07:58 right the sort of virtual reality or meta space I'm metaverse yeah um right that um there is a fantasy that in addition to a fully liberated a subject fully liberated from labor because the chatbots are doing everything for us and maybe we'll possibly have a universal basic this is the open AI guys idea maybe right that we be liberated from labor um but there's also another Fantasy A Zucker bergian fantasy right that will

01:08:28 be liberated from our bodies and in that way it sort of renders the whole question of um sensorium and the media effects on the human sensorium mood almost I mean again it's a fantasy yeah but um rand's the moot because it changes the whole understanding of the human what it means to be human uploaded right um this is this is knowledge of abstracted from or divorced from the body which couldn't be more sort antithetical to mclin's

01:08:58 thought and it has to be ideology as you're saying because I think like this fear the question is uh will machines come to control Society like let's say we rephrase that as will billionaires invent machines that allow them to control Society well that's already happened so the difference but the difference is because we're positing some kind of agency to the mechanical to the machine that in this IDE logical fantasy allows us to imagine our total separation from machines that we that we

01:09:29 are that we become the machines by uploading Consciousness into the machine as though we're not already deeply iMed in machine systems every day can I Riff on that I just love that statement so I just like that was so generative um so I'm wondering what if we rephrased it like fish water um like how will we live given we know there are these billionaires who want to make these machines that control all you know to give themselves cover to make all the decisions right like that's the water

01:10:00 you know and then like maybe there's an abiding way of being like whoa whoa like what's that is that a media ecology th those guys I love that idea you know is that a mediation in the ideological sense yeah yeah that's a good move um and then I'm thinking of John Durham Peter's book a philosophy of Elemental media what's the the main marvelous clouds towards the philosophy of Elemental media where he makes the

01:10:30 argument that all these kinds of media we are talking about rest upon the media of air and clouds and ocean and and so forth and so um you know you hit it on the nail like who is controlling it's it it's the same with any new technology who is controlling um the the for forms of mediation just one little statistic from the 18th century I promise my last one but but you know in 169 five there were 24 legal

01:11:04 printers in all of England Hand presses one press maybe two presses per shop in all of England the law of Licensing lapsed by accident because there were you know the threat of war going on within a decade there were 75 printers printing houses in in the London area loan so that is a huge explosion of people with access to a powerful form of technology and communication that all

01:11:35 happened because of one law lapsing so you know it gives me hope that you know we we can at least identify the problems and then maybe you could restate what you just said because it was so good about can we say this is a media ecology when we start to talk about um the economics the agency the law the law which I think is is pointing at you put all of our faith in Lena Khan

01:12:05 at the moment that's where my all mine is all of our faith in Lena Khan the FTC chair the only person I have any faith in right now another way to to think about this is to look at the American Revolution um and the relationship between the New Media of the day and the American Revolution in other words Paul star has written about this and um the creation of of the of the mass media um why is it that America has the first amendment that protects uh Speech uh why

01:12:36 is it that that America the first in the American Republic created a post office that was free I mean it's largely free um why was it so important to protect the dissemination the free dissemination of ideas um in the United States and of course that has to do with the reality of the American Revolution the importance of the pamphlet literature uh the importance of new of colonial newspapers all these things were were seen in a much different light than they were in England or on the continent uh and they were kind of baked in um to the

01:13:07 American system um because in the late 18th century um the pamphlets the newspapers all of that that uh the broadsides all that stuff was seen as something that had to be protected uh and that we need to we need to make sure that we protect it in this new U this new Republic yeah um so I think that at any given moment historical moment when you have New Media forms you have this conflict uh often very complicated conflicts over exactly the question of

01:13:38 who's going to own it who's going to control it who's going to run it um you know this idea that the media developed the way they did because they had to is fundamentally false um you know and and the example I always like to use is when you look at broadcasting right um in the UK when the question of how we going to pay for broadcast programming came up the idea was well we'll create the BBC and we'll fund it with a national tax on receivers every time you buy a radio some of the money goes to support the BBC in the US radio broadcasting

01:14:09 develops in a very very different way we're going to pay for it through advertising we're going to sell time uh on broadcasting and advertisers are going to going to foot the bill and so you have two very very different uh uh developments in in radio broadcasting there's nothing natural about it um there's nothing uh uh you know determined about it it's it's the product of these complicated decisions and different political um um and economic uh uh situations really interesting thing happens in the in the 70s in DC not New York um around the

01:14:42 sort of definition of diversity in FCC uh regulations whether or not diversity is meant to be antim monopolistic in terms of doing out licenses or whether diversity is meant to promote um sort of ID identity-based diversity um there's I have a friend who talked about this particular period as being the elbow of neoliberalism and this is a particularly useful moment to think about that because among the factors or functions of this switch to um licenses

01:15:16 being uh relegated or or um assigned based on uh identity was also that there was much more corporate conglomeration that could happen as a result the role of cable is is totally involved in there too but there's so many factors going into this technological ideological um definitional right what does diversity mean it gets increasingly complex the with the machines that we interact with now I mean there's something there's a kind of lovely crudeness to defending the broadside and and having you know 70

01:15:47 presses as opposed to 20 when in fact now every interaction with your phone is a kind of pal sests of different ownerships and and your eyeballs are tracking and they're you know the Split Second divisions of your attention are now marketed in in thousands of different ways singly nostalgic for the time of just Cable packages because I'm spending so much money on different streaming devices like I think to was like a sweet spot actually having grown up at a time when there was only three television stations you know plus PBS um

01:16:20 the emergence of cable was seen by many of us is this is is a great thing this is going to you know open things up of course didn't happen the way many of us wanted it to but you know and at the same time you've got uh you know you think about I would argue that the people that most took advantage most successfully took advantage of cable and satellite technology were basically uh Evangelical Christians who created a whole network of broadcasting radio and TV stations Christian Broadcasting Network Pat

01:16:50 Robertson all those people they were they were brilliant uh in in in seeing that they could do this um but with digital seems to me that that the old distinction between certain people are producers and every we have a democracy of of of of reception and an oligarchy of production right or broadcasting now potentially everyone has their own station right everybody has got can produce their own stuff on on you know YouTube or whatever uh on their websites

01:17:21 uh and so on now again I'm not saying that large corporations and and and big money don't have a a big Capital don't have a a a a huge influence but again there is that utopian side of this thing uh that this has opened up all kinds of possibilities that were never there before uh in oldfashioned broadcasting that's I mean our level of Engagement I think in some way masks the the forms of ideological control that are constantly at work just because we're so deeply immersed in it and we feel now like the particular conversations we parti ipate

01:17:53 in the things I subscribe to the people I belong to as friends on social media that this is somehow my identity the profile of me that is in fact an algorithmic profile that companies are are selling to each other and marketing and so I think that it actually is still a question of ideological um force and economic power and what is that we keep talking about I've heard this word capitalism ne ne liberalism

01:18:24 no no we're just talking about uh capital and the attachment of different technological is in the sense that as we were just saying that there's um an environment and when you're in it it feels natural and transparent and like you're simply a fish swimming in water fish know it's in water yeah um I think the reason why using ideology more broadly especially because I was starting out talking about these um behavioralist School uh uh studies that were ostensibly divorced from ideology

01:18:54 was that the implicit uh the implicit politics of their research was that uh in the US the effects of media are basically neutral right because we live in a pluralistic society as opposed to in a totalitarian Society whether anything but no good point and of course the the famous uh acronym you know that sort of was the Bedrock of of that re behavioral research tradition who says what to whom with what effect but didn't bother to ask the question why uh right

01:19:24 uh and I mean so so uh well and also how in that situation means a formal technical means and not like who's footing the bill right but I can recall I mean you know in the 60s and 70s Congress had endless hearings about the impact of violence on kids or the impact of advertising on children and the networks and the advertising agencies would have a parade of social scientists that would all say the same thing well you really can't say that there's any direct connection between you know advertising or violence on television

01:19:56 and the behavior of children uh and at the same time of course we know that uh you know when the Super Bowl is on corporations are paying $7 million for 30 seconds of advertising I don't think they'd be doing that if it didn't have some effect and so you know there's that contradiction well you can't really point out the effects but in terms of the larger uh capitalist system there certainly is uh well I think that's the danger the human mind is very very open to being inflc MH um to use another fish story uh I

01:20:28 don't know who invented it but there was a story that if you give a child a fish it eats for a day if you teach them how to fish they eat for a lifetime and we still do have something called public education and I was at a climate change thing about a week ago and uh real sense of urgency in the room and and someone asked one of the speakers what's the single most important thing you think we can do and the speaker unhesitatingly said I think there should be a mandatory course on Earth Systems for every

01:20:59 Elemental Elementary School child um and you know I don't have children in elementary school or or high school so I don't know are children being required to te take a course on media systems or media navigation or media thinking or media critique um no and then one of the I think implications or impacts of of of all this discussion about media since

01:21:30 the 60s and 70s is understanding the difference between schooling and education right I mean people go to school but they're educated all the time outside of school by all these things that we've been talking about uh and as a pure product of public schools um I I'm I'm very sympathetic to the idea that public schools you know need to be doing more about this media literacy whatever we're calling it these days um but I'm also aware of the fact that you know as long as we have a public school system that is uh funded by local property taxes um that's probably not

01:22:01 going to happen U there's this other narrative that we've sort of touched on a little bit relating to the sort of Frankenstein monster narrative you know whether or not I mean like in Jurassic Park you know the billionaires put this park together and of course it runs a muck and I wonder how much that may be influencing our dialogue about this I um there's a political science political Theory uh writer named Hannah Pitkin who's like a Hannah Arin scholar

01:22:32 beautiful work but she's always taking a rent to task for talking about the social and she says it's like a blob it's just where is it where does it end what is this thing and so it's like we've entered a space where like media is a Blobby concept right like like you were saying like people are the media it's all the you know it's like SC it's super superstitious almost right if it touches you you might get the media like you know like it's weird so there's something and everybody over there is more susceptible to it than me you know because they're weaker somehow they're

01:23:04 so it's you know women like children whatever and so there's something about the maybe the the psycho geography of that Blobby mediation thing that I don't really know except somebody should write a history of it right uh because it it's like not a when does that fear start right in those or I I guess I'm I'm ostensively writing that history right now that's so exciting yeah tell us take us to church no I can't do that um well just to to

01:23:35 say the notion of medium right does go back to 17th 18th century at least I think one of the things about John dur Peter's work it's really interesting is that by talking about Elemental Med media and The Ether the original medium right he's really connecting them but that the idea of media as a as mass media as media of mass communications really doesn't emerge until the till the 20th century and is certainly not vernacular until the middle of the 20th century but it is like arrives Blobby right it had there's

01:24:08 there's there's um a conference in 1959 in tant at the in the Poconos um invited a ton of basically the most public of public intellectuals um only because it's 1959 is Marshall mclan not there right um but at Midway through the conference in the in the notes which are um at BST um you know James Baldwin who's who's there raises his hand and says I have no idea what we mean by media anymore you know halfway through there through the

01:24:39 proceedings now that is if any of us are you know we're all somewhat in media studies programs in any curricular meeting or introduction to media studies course we all have encountered that still right this is in 1959 but I have no idea what media means maybe it's evacuated of all meaning because it means everything um you know we're we're still there to a certain extent and part of my work is to sort of disentangle or um disambiguate this media concept by looking specifically at when it became

01:25:11 professional jargon and then vernacular across different media Industries so like when in uh curatorial practices did the idea of an artistic medium replace the idea of individual arts and how did that relate to the spread of the media concept within the larger culture so I I would push back on that I would push back on that a little bit in terms of of your your time frame because I mean so for example in in the in the in the late 19th century um there were people writing with great uh concern about uh

01:25:43 the impact of uh people reading all these newspapers um and of course the most famous book uh by the American psychologist George beard called American nervousness uh which was all about talk about the Phantom public yeah he he coined the term neurasthenia right and the idea that that America you know Americans are reading too many newspapers they're they're too caught up in the news of the day and it's affecting their nervous system and it's causing neurasthenic uh uh uh symptoms particularly in women um and so there's

01:26:15 a great you know there were some people talking about this you know before the ' 50s u in terms of the the downside right of totally I the that's no no no 100% what I'm interested in is it's precisely when a a concept is required to sort of fill the rhetorical gap of whatever this anxiety is about this thing once you have a concept to describe it um what what does that what does that concept reinforce what does that concept actually Allied cuz we all kind of think

01:26:46 we know what we mean when we're talking about media um when can you get credited for being someone who thinks think about that concept like totally well and this is the origins of my my my research is I went to grad school to study English literature and film and when I got there we said actually you're not in the film program you're in the film and media studies program now that happened actually kind of late or I went to grad school but around the same time the uh Society for Cinema studies became the society for Cinema and media studies

01:27:18 20028 I thought okay whatever um but um and when asked when we forced to have these and you know they're sometimes really exhilarating conversations about what does that mean what's what curricular changes have to happen do we have new hires guess that doesn't sound that interesting when I put it in those terms but um one Professor was candid enough and cynical enough to say like well I just think you're more likely to get a job if it says media on your

01:27:48 degree um so that is OB you know speaking of biological effects that is is fascinating to me and and allowed me to kind of reverse engineer this project of when does when does media become something with sort of um professional credential value and then when does it become a sort of popular concept that and what's the relationship between those two processes difference um when does it start having um professional Credence or what have you um but listening to Erica talk about um Pitkin

01:28:21 is that her name um critiquing a rent for having a Blobby notion of something I did a project where I was trying to trace the moment where talk about mediums um air as a medium of sound Etc hooked up with a notion of communication in our modern sense as communication across distance and interestingly almost all the earliest examples I found were about the spread thre of

01:28:52 plague uh that you communicate the plague by breathing on someone uh etc etc so it seems like a sort of tertiary stage in this history you're tracing Anna has to do with when Media or mediums hook up with the notion of communication across distance there's something even more contagious in there right it's like um the the other mediums on the table Are Spiritual inter right intercessors right who have a have a

01:29:23 different nature than the empty Channel they can do stuff to you and so there's something spooky right like spooky action at a distance feelings exactly you know but I guess this is such a mclite impulse to sort of formalize something about these various mediums and that's not unproductive by any means I mean there's definitely something about virality communication across a distance the uh opening up of distance in order to collapse it as being something sort of fundamental to

01:29:54 Media um or to a medium but there's also I think something important about when these various other terms that otherwise are supercharged and uh loadbearing like culture and um and propaganda and the Press become subsumed under the category of media and that is a particular historical inflection point that really interests me because it's not exactly that there is a single technological

01:30:25 innovation nor of a a particular change in mode of production but there's some kind of structure of feeling something that requires this New Concept to be really to to you know proliferate and I think on that uh viral note we should probably open it up for some questions great

01:31:02 how much is it consider the case that the media people or people influence the media uh some people claim that the uh great increase in incoming quality has uh been cause of riseing populous movement and what people want to read and hear confirm how they're feeling so which way does it go that's a very good qu I mean I'll say one thing I was just thinking that I

01:31:34 think coincides with this is that the reason what is the media is such a familiar refrain is that we tend to oscillate between thinking of it as a form of literacy something that you know you want kids to have media literacy to be able to read and to access information or or is it a form of like um Mass manipulation where we're being sort of controlled in some ways where the information is occurs to or or is given to us through certain channels and

01:32:04 under certain conditions and it's probably both in some way right we have media that allow us to get um information about the world and our place in it and at the same time we have we exist in siloed spaces where we can subscribe cribe to certain views that will reinforce what we believe and we're on and those are always I think offset by or Amplified may maybe by the the oral communities that we're a part of that are in the end probably just as

01:32:34 much if not more powerful than whatever media event where I mean I I I one way to think about this again historically is that if I think about if I want to think about a a an era or a moment historical moment in at least in US history where there was a tremendous amount of anxiety and questioning about New Media I would look at the 1920s because in just a few years after World War I think about this imagine yourself being an adult and then all of a sudden within a few years Hollywood film radio broadcasting

01:33:04 tabloid newspapers the phonograph industry all of the and of course the the explosion of marketing and advertising in the 20s all these things happen within a few years and World War II huh getting World War II World War II well I'm talking about just the mediate environment I'm saying that that that that the the the the proliferation explosion really of these New Media forms in a very very tight window of a few years must have had a huge impact on people uh I mean you could throw other

01:33:35 things in there too like the automobile for example but just in terms of of media forms as we're discussing them the 20s and it's in my view no accident that that there's also the 20s is also a period of tremendous um political reaction conservativism immigration restriction the KKK the rise of of uh of um fundamentalism uh prohibition uh all these things it seems to me and you know Republicans dominating the White House and the Congress it seems to me that that might be a connection there that is

01:34:05 to say that when there all these new media forms a real shift in the culture that for a lot of people um they want to hold on to what they know and that they become more conservative and that that it's you know it's something that that that's frightening to people uh not saying the same thing is happening today although I do think there are some interesting parallels there there one big patch from investor says that whenever inquality is got just bad things never really well he goes back through history yeah I was having like just this

01:34:37 argument with someone this morning on text it was very productive right where we you know where it's like is is there a need to con put so much effort into thinking about how to manage media given it always seems to mask exactly the conversation of what are the confirmatory conditions of the real that seem to validate the repetitions that you're getting from a certain set of players and that feels like it forces us out of linear causality and that seems extremely exciting for something that people who are committed to the humanities could Champion as a reason

01:35:09 why we affirmatively really need to be at the Forefront of thinking with not just Science Tech but like what is it to read the world at that level of interconnectedness in a kind of nonlinear way that gives a more robust account for how we're going to do this kind of ideally long Global present in a pluralistic fashion right and that seems like that we need like a thousand books just opening up that question in some new way with new language I want to go back to something

01:35:40 Anna did and also to a play I saw last night um I'm unan analyst and when I think his name is Kevin Roose he was the New York Times Reporter and he follows what's going on behind the scenes in the Silicon Valley and the tech world so I think when he was asking what's yung's theory of the Shadow or definition of the Shadow he was talking about the field what's the shadow of the field but

01:36:13 the the associative line of the the uh computer was it a computer with the program was personal Shadow right and so he immediately came out and said you want to see Shadow I'll show you Shadow divorce your wife and marry me but so that's very amusing he was looking for the institutional Shadow and then what happened there right but last night I saw corruption which is at the loln

01:36:44 center theater and it's the story of the Murdoch Rebecca Brooks J verock yeah the government the police uh conspiracy really in England about what happened with the hacking of people's phones going and their personal lives and going after and destroying human beings in the name of circulation and it's beautifully produced with all kinds of media in it

01:37:15 so if you want to see the shadow side and the weaponization of the media I think that's just an incredible reminder of what could happen which we need reminding of obviously because we're faced with it every day I think we should all see it sounds interesting just to quickly say that um that confle that the the chat poot did

01:37:45 between the sort of in institutional infrastructural Shadow and the um inter personal I don't know shadow of Desire or something right um has also kind of always been there with the media concept too in this notion of of um in that conference I was talking about um from 1959 it was republished in book form and there's this very strange image on the cover um that has a big

01:38:17 sort of symbol of masculinity that uh that I think maybe stands in for like media man or the kind of um man in the great flannel suit the mass man this is a sort of subject who's been drained of all agency and then but weirdly there's like all of these other gender symbols for you know women woman and man in in in in the middle and I think there's always weirdly a kind of gendered anxiety about um sort of media

01:38:49 running running away with itself um that there maybe the the controlling the means of production and reproduction in this sort of technical infrastructural way is always going to be the shadow side of that is always going to be about controlling the means of reproduction of the race in some way well I know I'm not I'm not in the mic but I can hear you there's a whole other thing going on which is that in the tech world they're talking about the end of the human

01:39:20 species with the digital species right and there's also a very strange talk about Shadow Link Between the misuse of psychedelics and the whole Silicon Valley relationship to that world so I think that's something that really for sure yeah I mean this may be the question of the moment but I'm wondering also about everything that you've talked about and thought about in terms of you know again the generative

01:39:52 AI or the new technology I mean to me it seems like suddenly in the past you know few months we're seeing that we're on the precipice of certain technology that suddenly may have been in a lab and now it's released and it's being implemented in some way and I think one thing that's interesting to me as well is that in the past when I was a child I kind of thought of the media as being controlled in a way like people would say oh these negative messages really play Let's you

01:40:23 know put out you know pictures of war and you know protests and civil rights and all these different things were happening um I'm thinking that with geni you could even have unintentional things that come out like it may not that it has its own mind yet but that it may be doing things or generating things that are not true or that are manipulations based on formulaic um predictions like that people react to these things in a

01:40:54 certain way and we'll just keep focusing on those anyway I guess my question is you know do you see certain things that are probably likely patterns to happen or needs of controls that might happen in this new paradigm well as long as Nidia stock keeps skyrocketing uh I think you probably will I for one have no idea what algorithm they're referring to and they show me what they show me I mean some of them I get but others it's pretty

01:41:25 mysterious you it almost makes it seem Sinister like how did you come up or random but Sinister and random I always love that feeling of like alienated digital labor or something like I'm sure I I did something to generate that I'm you know that I'm seeing this but I feel a kind of estrangement from that this doesn't I shouldn't be seeing this this isn't what I want to see so at some level there's estrangement from yeah where is is that my unconscious or right there's always there's always that that's always that anxiety that's the I

01:41:56 I have you know I taught English in China for a while and I remember talking to some older people who said you know the state media you could read between the lines you always knew what actually happened you know we saw the state version we read it we knew what was really going on but it's gotten to a point where the complexity is so dense that we don't know if we've done it ourselves have I generated this image to appear on my phone or is it is it coming from some other you know entity some agency is it unintentionally algorithmically generated by AI there's

01:42:27 all kinds of ways in which it becomes increasingly difficult to draw that distinction between you know the light and the shadow but that's going back to I'll just go back to something that Dan said about the kinds of historical continuity that I think are just really important to continue to be drawing at all times is that um you know the kind of I I don't really want to see this but someone think I want to see this like that's also advertising so there's this is a very the scale is very different

01:42:58 the the mode of address is sort of addressed to you as you as you have been right as opposed to you as a kind of demographic we have demography really rebranded as subjectivity here but it is a Rebrand it's still advertising you know and so I think thinking about it in those terms can actually be useful just to like slow the heart rate um but also um in terms of understanding how to read it how to perceive it um and how to understand it as dare I say ideological that's clarifying that I mean sorry

01:43:30 there's a moment in a Shakespeare play where he depicts uh two lower class characters and one of them uh there's a ballad seller who's handing them a ballad and one says to the other do you really believe that you know that there's a woman with the head of a pig or something and the other says of course it's in print everything in print is true and so for Shakespeare mocking that notion uh so long ago it's suggests that we're simultaneously aware but note

01:44:01 that he puts that silliness in the mouths of the two lower class characters the marginalized characters I think we all have a sense of somehow we can manipulate things we can understand but the flip side of that is what access to New Media whether your new media is writing or print or cell phone or what has done for marginalized groups and you know women and uh that just we haven't

01:44:33 talked about the the optimistic aspects at all yeah I love this Shakespeare line it's it's perfect because it it gives us that um overhearing third party quality right like anyone can say the lines in someone's mouth and that's rhetorical but everybody gets the joke right and that everybody that gets it is the people right some populousness and it sort of brings us to a mode of critique for the kind of generative AI moment that's like wait this isn't about the

01:45:04 dialogic relationship between two beings but this kind of circulatory everybody knows and doesn't know that is like ineluctably generative right and that's the potency that is being precisely kind of hidden in a shell game that like that's the stuff you know the city so rich in that way yeah I would like to to thank you for this like great and exciting like random walk down the um you know the historical the philosophical you know the phenomenological aspect of media but um you know I'm feeling a

01:45:37 little bit that we don't have a direction towards kind of like the normative and kind of like the policy aspect I mean I thought that the First Amendment like would have solved everything but apparently that's that's not the case and I want to bring forth like two main like legal cases which refer to Media one is about net neutrality and the other is the the recent lawsuit of the New York State or

01:46:07 the New York City I think the the New York State against the the big five social media uh platforms for uh basically uh predating you know their predator assault on children and creating all these like behavioral and psychological you know disorders and I want your opinion on what would you prescribe if you were a judge in that case would you side with

01:46:39 the children would you side with the with the with with the right of the med the social media companies to perform as the way they uh they wish and how we can counter Veil any negative uh After Effects who's going to pay for the negative After Effects and also the the issue about net neutrality and and Free Speech uh because we can have Free Speech but then if you if one side can dominate or can can control what goes out into the

01:47:11 media then we don't really have a free speech I would like your opinions on these two aspects thank you those are great questions Dan we're looking at you well you know I'm reminded of the great press critic AJ leeling who famously said that you know freedom of the press belongs only to those who own one uh and and and you know the part of my response to what you're talking about is this that uh I would like to see a

01:47:42 Revival of the great sort of anti-monopoly tradition in American politics and culture which has largely faded in other words if you look at American history s really since the early 19th century and the rise of Corporations you will find a powerful tradition that questions um you know the power and the right um of these corporations to control things and these kinds of legal battles that you're talking about do have certain um uh uh uh you know precedents uh whether it was

01:48:12 battles against Western Union the Associated Press for their Monopoly of the news um whether it was the attempt to break up the Hollywood studio in the 1940s U whether it was the battles over how to best regulate broadcasting um there there are antecedents to these things um again the media are different and one might argue that the threat posed by the internet or cell phones and so on is greater I I I'm not sure I where I am on that but um just a way of saying that that these things don't didn't just come up today

01:48:44 recently that there's a history of this stuff um but I think that that one of the the um unfortunate things in American political culture these days is the decline almost the evaporation of the very powerful very important anti-monopoly anti-corporate uh politics um so that's not really much of an answer to your question no I think it's I think it's a great answer to his question I'm going to double down on it um which is why I mean I made some off-handed comment about how the only person I have any faith in is Lena KH the FTC chair and and her work sort of

01:49:17 um redefining uh anti anti-monopoly uh law or reinterpreting antimonopoly law not in terms of consumer protection but actually in terms of um the sort of distribution of of power across many different corporations and not Consolidated in the hands of few is I think a really encouraging path forward in terms of trying to um actually ultimately protect not just consumers but all of you know not not

01:49:49 just us as consumers but us as humans with agency with privacy right these are our biggest concerns about media effects today the thing that really concerns me about these this other tact of protecting us from social media these laws that are not just in New York they started in Utah um and they are now or in I don't know more than half of of of of um of US state courts is that they're all done on behalf of children um and they all are looking at I

01:50:21 isolating particular pricious effects of particular apps and so that that ends up being some leading us to some really strange questions like what are the addictive features of Instagram and how to isolate those to me seems like a really fool hearty task it also seems to me to be really um ideologically fraught to say we're doing this on to protect children in particular um when

01:50:52 I think that there's reason to to think that like first of all all of us even those of us who are not invested in sort of reproductive Futurity or whatever all of us deserve protections uh from the P the powers of these few um these few media corporations and I generally don't think that sort of um paternalism is a place to put a lot of our sort of optimism politically question um hello I'm the assistant librarian

01:51:22 here at the Institute and I I just have a question because I hear a lot of these lectures all the time and I just have to say that I don't know how you can talk about the effects of media without talking about race in an entire lecture I don't know how you can do it but you have successfully done it yeah um and I do say that because the power of media and whether it's literal whether it's visual is something that you simply have not given enough weight to with regard

01:51:53 to race U my grandfather was in the 82nd regiment in World War II and he went to Milan and so he's marching down the street uh on his way to protect musolini and his girlfriend um Pachi who were hanging in the square and kids were running behind him lifting up his jacket trying to find his tale because they had saw the film The

01:52:23 Birth of a Nation so if you don't understand the power of media then I really don't know where you've been um and if we're going to just talk about that or moving forward to men spitting on kids going into school in Arkansas in the 1960 I mean I can go on and on but I don't know or or whether it's Rodney King being surrounded by these men with billy club beating him whether or not whatever he did prior or post

01:52:55 so hopefully at some point you're going to get to the point where you can give the weight to race that it deserves with respect to American culture because there is no culture without culture in terms of American descendants of African slaves but hopefully at some point you'll get there but the weight of race has to be accounted for if you're going to talk about the effect of media I would just say briefly that I appreciate that that that institutional

01:53:25 racism has been a uh feature of American Media all media from the very get-go well I'm just talking about this discussion oh this discussion okay well I I I didn't specifically talk about race it's true but the use of the use of media for exploitation domination including racial domination is is very clearly a big part of the story um and uh you know uh I wouldn't know that okay if I were to listen to this lecture I would I would come away with it thinking

01:53:57 that you simply just don't care or that it doesn't matter and that's you know what though that's your right you have every right to talk about whatever you wish but I'm a citizen so I'm going to tell you what's important to me and what's important what should be important to you and it should have enormous weight yeah enormous weight if you're talking about media if even if you're going to talk about the 60s and 70s in terms of black exportation film in terms of seeing a man of African descent in sensual situations with his

01:54:28 shirt off right having uh uh relations with another woman whether she be a woman of African descent or a woman of European descent which was never seen before so the weight of media is so heavy with regard to race and people of African descent in the United States of America as well as the world um and so some improvement is certainly needed so I think that's a great question and one of the things I love about it is

01:54:59 that it pulls us into the question of who's it who's at what consented ring of the conversation right so as a Latina in a first generation whatever like it's it's implicit in the rhetorical position from one perspective that you go into media to say certain things without having to always be marked right from the position of the public librarian at the New York psycho anal I institute I bet you have thoughts about institutionally what what one would want marked or not marked in a space like this or the city etc etc so there's it's an inescapable question right I don't

01:55:31 think um right I think it's always it's always the the how would I put this there's no way you would know unless you read all of our work right what where we come from there's no way right and so all you can know is what's in the conversation and I think the question might be something like like how do we shift the many concentric rings of what's happening so that all of those kind of mediations right can become Central as ideological aspects of what is being seen and not seen in every

01:56:02 scene right and if we just do the conversation like in a closed room if you're not here it's it's possible that the voices that we come from never make it right so what are we going to do to the frame to guarantee that that isn't like repeated well I think I can't hold it you're going to have to answer that internally yourself I can't do that work for you you are doing it though right for us well but it also depends on what you value so if you value it if it has value to you then you're going to talk about it but if you're afraid of it or

01:56:32 if you really don't care then you're not it's very the other way right it's not really hard you could say I value it so much I don't want it on display at all times it's my license to speak coming from a position like that right so I don't always want to use the biographical currency to use ebony ketu's language about this problem to have to to validate the fact that like I want that seat at the table sometimes to have the talk about something that sounds awfully abstract but grounds precisely in this question yeah but it always it it has validation it just needs to be discussed so it absolutely

01:57:03 it has weight and it has value it just depends upon whether the individuals who were talking about it want to acknowledge that value yeah excellent I think in that context it's worth noting that there's quite a lot of really good uh media studies um discourse on on race and racism so that's worth it's worth looking into as well um should we just load out some names like Arman towns

01:57:35 as Kelly Moore yeah I mean whole histories of the way in which for example the Kodak um film company specifically tailored its chemicals to make light skin appear vibrant and beautiful and dark skin to appear less so I mean it's just like a a reality of like media history that there's it's deeply interwoven with racial history so um but I think I think we're about done so thank you so much for all of your participation and for everyone for listening in thank

01:58:09 you should we this this way okay then