Humans like to believe they control the tools they use, even if Socrates, Marshall McLuhan and Ivan Illich are among those who have argued that often they do not. From the alphabet to clocks and printing, every major new technology has profoundly altered the way in which humans think. The digital gadgets on which we now depend, Mr Carr explains, have already begun rewiring our brains.
✖ Via The Economist: “Fast forward. Fear of a fried future” book review for Nicholas Carr’s essay The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, Norton, 2010, 276 pages

An excerpt from this book was published in Wired magazine back in May:

There’s nothing wrong with absorbing information quickly and in bits and pieces. We’ve always skimmed newspapers more than we’ve read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading. The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis. (Wired: “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains” by Nicholas Carr, May 24th, 2010)

About Nicholas Carr:

Nicholas Carr writes on the social, economic, and business implications of technology. He is the author of the 2008 Wall Street Journal bestseller The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, which is “widely considered to be the most influential book so far on the cloud computing movement,” according the Christian Science Monitor. His earlier book, Does IT Matter?, published in 2004, “lays out the simple truths of the economics of information technology in a lucid way, with cogent examples and clear analysis,” said the New York Times. He is working on a new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, which will be published in 2010. Carr’s books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. (Bio)

Three things: 1) It’s yet another good reason to try and differentiate between information and knowledge (one could say that information is to knowledge what grapes are to wine : its raw material); 2) It would be a mistake to think that gadgets or the Internet are changing our brain configuration. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s an incomplete statement. What then, should one ask, caused the gadgets to change? What caused the Internet? 3) The form of this post can be understand as an illustration of what the content of the post is about.



↳Share Aug 25  link  notes technology  communication  gadget  Internet  epistemology  order  medium  media  tool  McLuhan  apparatus  brain  knowledge  information  determinism  cause  effect  book  author 

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. […] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And, again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled, and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
✖ Via The Washington Post: “Sen. Stevens, the tubes salute you” by Alexandra Petri, August 10th, 2010

Sen. Ted Stevens who died in a plane crash last Monday is known, among other things, for having coined the phrase “a series of tubes”

“The internet is a series of tubes!” This was the gaffe heard round the ‘net, igniting a response that spanned every news outlet from Fark to the New York Times. The phrase became a badge of pride. Stevens’s quote showed up on the Colbert Report and the Daily Show. Experts confirmed it. People remixed his speech. The “tubes” even have their own Wikipedia page. Google briefly incorporated them into a program as an easter egg. They took on a life of their own, ensconcing themselves in online lore. The Internet was not a big truck! It was a series of tubes! And it was proud. (more)


↳Share Aug 12  link  notes technology  metaphor  tube  medium  media  Internet  container  content  representation  analogy  form  epistemology  communication 
art design poster repetition sameness technology network social internet content medium message culture meme mainstream conformism
↳Share Aug 04  link  notes art  design  poster  repetition  sameness  technology  network  social  Internet  content  medium  message  culture  meme  mainstream  conformism 

But is it a collectible work of art? Those who own it are trying to find out. In an unusual twist even for a picture outside the norms — its Oscar-winning lead, William Hurt, paused his red-hot career to play a film-struck homosexual for almost no fee when that still seemed more suicidal than savvy — David Weisman, the movie’s producer, and David S. Phillips, who joined him later in acquiring its rights, are planning in coming weeks to offer “Kiss of the Spider Woman” for sale as an artwork. By that, they mean an object of beauty. The film is now available in its entirety — its copyright, negatives, prints, digital video masters and more — along with a carefully preserved archive that includes 313 boxes of 35-millimeter outtakes, five drafts of the screenplay by Leonard Schrader and a stack of rejection letters from studio executives who were sure that the movie would never work.
✖ Via The New York Times: “Movie’s Owners Want to Know if a Film Is Fit for Framing” by Michael Cieply, July 9th, 2010

First spotted via Bifurcations, Sarah Choukah’s research blog. Learn more about her work here.



↳Share Jul 18  link  notes art  communication  technology  medium  cinema  film  social  status  collector  original  origin  truth  copyright  product  consumption  studio 
art illustration communication vintage hermes medium media angel religion mythology symbol
✖ Via Symbolicarum quaestionum de universo genere by Achille Bocchi, 1574 edition, third book, symbole no 62, p. 138 (PDF)
“Hermes as Harpocrates, the God of mystical silence, portrayed as the mystagogue accompanying the souls on their return to the Monad. ‘Silentium deum cole - monas manet in se’; worship God through silence - the Oneness remains in itself.” (more)

“Achille Bocchi (Achilles Bocchius) (1488-1562) of Bologna was an Italian humanist writer, administrator and teacher of law at the University of Bologna. He is best known for his emblem book Symbolicarum quaestionum de universo genere from 1555, which “takes as its subject the whole of universal knowledge: physics, metaphysics, theology, dialectic, Love, Life and Death, packaging them under the veil of fables and myths.” (wikipedia)

↳Share Apr 17  link  notes art  illustration  communication  vintage  Hermes  medium  media  angel  religion  mythology  symbol 

Contrary to “primitive” peoples, who endow everything that moves with personal expression ―or even the first Greeks, who deified every aspect and force of nature―modern humans are obsessed by the need to depersonalize (or impersonalize) all that they most admire. There are two reasons for this tendency. The first is analysis―that marvelous instrument of scientific research to which we owe all our advances, yet which allows the soul to escape from one undone synthesis after another, until we are left facing a pile of disassembled parts and evanescent particles. The second is the discovery of the sidereal world―which is such a vast subject that it seems to destroy all proposition between our own existence and the dimensions of the cosmos around us. A single reality appears to subsist that is capable of covering both the infinitesimal and the immense at once: energy, that universal floating entity from which everything emerges and into which everything falls back, as if into an ocean. Energy is the new spirit, the new god. The impersonal is at the Omega of the world as well as its Alpha.
✖ Via The Human Phenomenon by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, tr. by Sarah Appleton Weber, Sussex Academic Press, [1956]1999, p. 183

Here’s the original French version:

“A l’inverse des « primitifs » qui donnent un visage à tout ce qui bouge, — ou même des premiers Grecs, qui divinisaient toutes les faces et toutes les forces de la Nature, l’Homme moderne est obsédé par le besoin de dépersonnaliser (ou d’impersonnaliser) ce qu’il admire le plus. Deux raisons à cette tendance. La première est l’Analyse, — ce merveilleux instrument de recherche scientifique, auquel nous devons tous nos progrès, mais qui, de synthèse en synthèse dénouées, laisse échapper l’une après l’autre toutes les âmes, et finit par nous laisser en présence d’une pile de rouages démontés et de particules évanescentes. — Et la seconde est la découverte du monde sidéral, objet tellement vaste que toute proportion paraît abolie entre notre être et les dimensions du Cosmos autour de nous. — Capable de réussir et de couvrir à la fois cet Infime et cet Immense, une seule réalité semble subsister : l’Énergie, entité flottante universelle, d’où tout émerge, et où tout retombe, comme dans un Océan. L’Énergie, le nouvel Esprit. L’Énergie, le nouveau Dieu. A l’Oméga du Monde, comme à son Alpha, l’Impersonnel.”

Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1956, p. 177. PDF.

Previously on Skandalon: Point Omega.



↳Share Apr 11  link  notes technology  communication  energy  God  philosophy  ecology  media  medium  world  space  infinity  community  fragment  separation  analysis 

Photorealist painting cannot exist without the photograph. In Photorealism, change and movement must be frozen in time which must then be accurately represented by the artist. Photorealists gather their imagery and information with the camera and photograph. Once the photograph is developed (usually onto a photographic slide) the artist will systematically transfer the image from the photographic slide onto canvases. Usually this is done either by projecting the slide onto the canvas or by using traditional grid techniques. The resulting images are often direct copies of the original photograph but are usually larger than the original photograph or slide. This results in the photorealist style being tight and precise, often with an emphasis on imagery that requires a high level of technical prowess and virtuosity to simulate, such as reflections in specular surfaces and the geometric rigor of man-made environ.
✖ Via “Photorealism” article on wikipedia

↳Share Apr 09  link  notes art  technology  photo  photograph  painting  reality  realism  artefact  medium 

A medium is a medium is a medium. Therefore it cannot be translated. To transfer message from one medium to another always involves reshaping them to conform to new standards and materials. In a discourse network that requires an “awarness of the abysses which divide the one order of sense experience from the other,” transposition necessarily takes the place of translation.
✖ Via Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 by Friedrich A. Kittler, Stanford University Press, [1985]1992, p. 265 [Amazon]
“Friedrich A. Kittler (born 1943 in Rochlitz, Saxony) is a literary scholar and a media theorist. His works relate to media, technology, and the military.” (wikipedia)

Derrida offers a similar analysis in his essay “Freud and the scene of writing” (1966)



↳Share Mar 28  link  notes communication  technology  theory  medium  media  translation  book  author 

An empirical test of ideas proposed by Martin Heidegger shows the great German philosopher to be correct: Everyday tools really do become part of ourselves. The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn’t superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition. “The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. “The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.” Chemero’s experiment, published March 9 in Public Library of Science, was designed to test one of Heidegger’s fundamental concepts: that people don’t notice familiar, functional tools, but instead “see through” them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn’t think of one’s fingers while tying shoelaces. The tools are us.
✖ Via Wired Science: “Your Computer Really Is a Part of You” by Brandon Keim, March 9, 2010

The study “A Demonstration of the Transition from Ready-to-Hand to Unready-to-Hand” by Dobromir G. Dotov, Lin Nie, Anthony Chemero is available online (PDF).

The “fondamental concept” to which Chemero is referring is the concept of “readiness-to-hand”. Heidegger explains this concept in section 15 of his book Being and Time : “The Being of the Entities Encountered in the Environment” (see Google Books). To understand this concept, one can get help from Wikipedia, from an online Glossary of Terms in Being and Time (edited by Roderick Munday, last updated in March 2009) and from Dean Heckles’ blog (Heckle “is a social–cognitive scientist and a PhD student at Stanford” and he specifically chose to name his blog… “Ready-to-hand” : great introduction to the concept if you’re into technology or communication or media studies).

For a good overview of what’s at stakes today when it comes to our relationship to technology, one should read the “General Introduction” of the first book of the Technics and Time trilogy by Bernard Stiegler. The book has been translated from French by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. The “General Introduction” which run from page 1 to 18 is available via Google Books.

Previously on Skandalon: cognition and media ecology.



↳Share Mar 10  link  notes reblogged from Christopher Butler technology  communication  medium  media  philosophy  cognition  Heidegger  theory  Stiegler  author  book  ecology 

SO: ARE PRINTED BOOKS DEAD? Not quite. The rules for iPad content are still ambiguous. None of us has had enough time with the device to confidently define them. I have, however, spent six years thinking about materials, form, physicality and content and — to the best of my humble abilities — producing printed books. So, for now, here’s my take on the print side of things moving forward. Ask yourself, “Is your work disposable?” For me, in asking myself this, I only see one obvious ruleset:
- Formless Content goes digital.
- Definite Content gets divided between the iPad and printing.
Of the books we do print — the books we make — they need rigor. They need to be books where the object is embraced as a canvas by designer, publisher and writer. This is the only way these books as physical objects will carry any meaning moving forward.
✖ Via Craig Mod: “Books in the Age of the iPad” March 2010

Craig Mod is a “developer; writer; book designer; publisher; professional world-wide digital hobo”. Here’s what he has to say about books:

“I’ve always loved books. I’ve always loved computers. We are currently experiencing a very unique convergence point for things digital and analog. Because of this, I think that right now is a very exciting time to be involved with storytelling. The world is smaller than ever and the stories hidden in data and hitherto inaccessible cultures are just a few keystrokes or a plane ride away. I’m interested in engaging these stories, developing sustainable businesses that evoke thoughtful communities and finding ways to bridge cultures.” (more)

Check out the books he designed.



↳Share Mar 08  link  notes technology  communication  ipad  book  design  media  medium  design 

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