Networked Media – Page 2

Making ‘Making Legible’ Legible: Part 1

Making 'Making Legible' Legible, Networked Media

When looking at a large corpus of text, containing documents that were merged, split, duplicated and edited, how can dominate tendancies and thematic pre-occupations be extracted and identified? This project asserts that these latent relationships can only be unearthed by removing the constraining ‘document boundary’ but rather looks at the text though atomizing the content into sentences.

The new relationships across the corpus are found either through the lens of ‘content’ (the words and sentences themselves and their similar counterparts), or through the lens of ‘context’ (the words and sentences around other entities).

The shape of the project is still a bit nebulous, but the images and video recording below explain the conceptual underpins of where the project is headed.

On Neil Postman’s “The Medium is the Metaphor”

Networked Media

How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language.

– Postman, 1985: 10

While provocative, Postman in effect summarizes McLuhan’s original proposition that “the medium is the message” but loads it with a value proposition, failing to present any evidence to support this subjective self-described “lamentation”. (Postman, 1985: 8). Rather than present an analysis of society’s current media landscape, Postman presents an “end-of-society” point of view in which he sees the rise of one media over another. This position presents an “either/or” scenario in which both typography (print, speech) cannot exist concurrently with television (image, sound, video). In discussing how his argument originates from studying the Bible, he writes, “The God of the Hews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture.” (Postman, 1985: 9). However, this restriction to word over image is a method of controlling the distribution of the message. In this way, religion could be diseminent only to and through the literate and educated. However, image does not require this same level of literacy and its production was more widespread. As Postman places value of word over image, he attempts to continue this control over communication to a selected group and protect this position over power, effectively gatekeeping “the message”.

Postman’s distain for image-based communication is driven by his notion that this medium itself cannot reflect an “elevated” level of discourse. He writes, “You cannot do political philosphy on television. Its form works against the content.” (Postman, 1985: 7), Yet his examples of this are troublesome and dismissive: Las Vegas as a model for future cities in which public discourse is through the form of entertainment; the presentation of news is only by ‘the beautiful’ who disregard their scripts and research; and “fat people are effectively excluded from running for high political office.” (Postman, 1985: 4) He even admits that these examples are clichés! This lack of substaintial evidence for his argument is explict in his blasé approach to citing references. Without bothering to find the original source, he writes, “We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators” (Postman, 1985: 6). Unfortunately, this approach is common throughout the entire chapter and leads to an antedotal argument.

This is not to say that Postman does not present valuable thoughts. The idea that what tools a culture uses to communicate fundamentally influence “the formation of the culture’s intellectual and social preoccupations” is insightful (Postman, 1985: 9). Yet, McLuhan, and later Langdon Winner in “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” (1980) both discuss this point without placing value judgements or declaring “end of the world” scenarios. Key to meaningful discussions of the media landscape and its effects is the decoupling of analysis from value judgement, something Postman fails to do in “The Medium is the Metaphor.”

Retaining Context, Part 2

Networked Media

Building on last week’s exercise, I expanded on the idea of a context-additive interface for navigating content. Rather than load a series of iframes with content from Wikipedia, as I did previously, I’ve created two arrays of data: one for ‘viewed content’ (the links clicked) and one for ‘potential data’ (the links that can be clicked). Ideally, this is content the user has added themselves (i.e. a database of blog posts) but for now I’ve pulled text from Wikipedia.

When a user clicks a link within an article, the corresponding content from the Potential Data array is added to the Viewed Data array, which populates the HTML page seen by the user. Rather than navigating away from the current block of content, the additional content is added horizontally in a set of increasingly-narrow columns.

Link to Prototype

Server Code

Retaining Context

Networked Media

What if when clicking links didn’t take you away from a page but layered on new information, creating a sense of trails or context?

Horizontal sections increase as more traces are added

Although a very rudimentary version of this idea, a slider is used to toggle between a single article and a number of linked articles from the first post. A series of iframes load content from Wikipedia.

In another iteration, static data is used to test the concept. Two arrays maintain the content: one for ‘viewed content’ (the links clicked) and one for ‘potential content’ (the links that can be clicked). Ideally, this is content is pulled dynamically (i.e. a database of blog posts, etc) but for now Wikipedia is sufficient. When a user clicks a link within an article, the corresponding content from the Potential Data array is added to the Viewed Data array, which populates the HTML page seen by the user. Rather than navigating away from the current block of content, the additional content is added horizontally in a set of increasingly-narrow columns.

(code)

Further Questions:

Is there a hierarchy of related content? Are certain links of a primary relation, secondary relation, and so on.
How extensive could the related content be before it becomes illegible? At what point are related links or content entire articles vs excerpts vs images and media?
How can a website network be zoomable and spatialized to show the connections. See Joni Korpi’s Zoomable UI)

On McLuhan’s ‘The Medium is the Message’

Networked Media

Originally published in 1964, Marshall McLuhan’s sentiment that ‘the medium is the message’ is widely misunderstood as message as content. Note: perhaps this misreading is inevitable as McLuhan’s writing is laced with personalized jargon and somewhat lacks an easy-to-follow structure. As pointed out by W. Terrence Gordon in the 2003 critical edition imprint, McLuhan in fact dictated his text rather than wrote it.

McLuhan argues that the “message” of a technological extension is actually the resulting change in human relationships, not how that technology is used. He distinguishes the “message”, or change associated with technology, from its “content”, or use, by describing the transition from the lineal connections of the mechanical age to the instant configurations of the electronic. He distinguishes the “message”, or change associated with technology, from its “content”, or use, by describing the transition from the lineal connections of the mechanical age to the instant configurations of the electronic. This distinction, however, has been mistaken because our literacy of a particular mechanical technology — typography — has been conflated with rationality; and thus, the “message” has been conflated with “content”. Instead, McLuhan asserts, the “content” of any technology is actually another technology.

Recognizing the Message

McLuhan argued that De Tocqueville is able to understand the grammar of typography (the medium and the message) because he stood outside of the structures being dismantled and the technology (print and typography) by “which their undoing occurred and could then see the ‘lines of force’ being discerned.” (McLuhan 2003:##) But, knowing that we are living within the constrains and associations introduced by a previous medium, is it possible to recognize the message of new media and change a technology introduces into society? Or, can it only be understood through an examination of the past?

If print and typography resulted in conflating reason with sequential and uniform – and thus inhibited an understanding of simultaneous configurations with obscured sequence, what is our current hinderance? Perhaps this is the challenge of discussing VR/AR/MR. Our understanding of its message–if it even has a message?–is frustrated by our current real-time-communication-informational(?) cultural bias. We are likely not yet far enough out of current media to understand its change of scale of relationships, let alone decipher the message of a potential future media.

Key Citations

“In terms of the ways in which the machine altered our relations to one another and to ourselves, it mattered not in the least whether it turned out cornflakes or Cadillacs.” (McLuhan 2003:19)

“The American stake in literacy as a technology or uniformity applied to every level of education, government, industry, and social life is totally threatened by the electric technology.” (McLuhan 2003:20)

“Cotton and oil, like radio and TV, become “fixed charges” on the entire psychic life of the community. And this pervasive fact creates the unique cultural flavor of any society. It pays through the nose and all its other sense for each stable that shapes its life.” (McLuhan 2003:35)

McLuhan, Marshall. “The Medium Is the Message.” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Ed. W. Terrence Gordon. Berkeley: Gingko, 2003. 17-35. Print.