The Digital Media chapter introduces some core concepts from the field of media studies as they relate to the module readings. Bolter and Grusin's essay "Immediacy, Hypermedicay and Remediation" draws on the ideas of Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan to explain how any new media copies, improves upon and/or critiques the content of previous media. Manovich's "Principles of New Media" lays out the characteristics of digital media based on an examination of its underyling code structure. This chapter concludes with a hands-on exercise using a popular digital form, the internet meme, to explore how the nature of digital code affects the message and messaging.
There is no consensus about the positive and/or negative long-term effects of digital media on human beings and society, but there is change and plenty of debate and speculation about this change. One of the core concepts in the field of media studies is that the unique conditions and materialities of human communication shape thinking, behavior and culture. Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan were two visionary thinkers about the individual and societal effects of 20th century mass media ‐ radio, film and television. Each thinker, in his own way, was cautiously optimistic about the effects of mass media. But neither Benjamin nor McLuhan could have anticapted how digital media would transform all aspects of life in the 21st century.
“…that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”
Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish cultural critic and essayist who’s perceptions and thinking about the then emerging 20th century mass media have been very influential to understanding 21st digital media. In the mechanical reproduction of books, newspapers, music, voice, photographs and particularly film, he saw a revolutionary and democratic potential to free individuals from politically dominant systems and hierarchies. He also saw the potential dangers of mass media to influence, manipulate and control the masses….human destruction as an aesthetic pleasure… Benjamin witnessed the swift rise of Nazism in Germany during the 1930s through its effective use of mass propaganda and ritualized violence: flyers and posters, staged events for the news and emotionally manipulative films. During this time, Benjamin lived in Paris as an exile and tried to escape to the U.S. when the Nazis invaded France in 1940 . Unable to leave the country, and fearing his fate as a Jew, he committed suicide with an overdose of morphine tablets
Walter Benjamin’s "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1930) is one of his most influential essays and one that is particularly relevant to understanding digital media today. With this essay, he said he wanted to produce a theory that would be “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art.” In other words, he wanted people to wake up to a world changed by mass media and to use the “new” media rather than be used by it. A central concept in the essay is what Benjamin calls the aura of a work of art. While there has always been some form of reproduction of art works - a student copying the painting of a master, for example - in the age of mass production, the speed and accuracy of reproduction, Benjamin argued, annihilates distances of space and time which in turn diminishes the authenticity, the cult value and the aura of the original.
“even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”
An effect of mechanical reproduction, besides its weakening of the original’s uniqueness in time and space, is in the emancipation of “the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.” Fine arts had aways been a domain of the elite and powerful, those who owned the objects and sites of cultural heritage. Folk arts, often defined by geographical region, were embedded in distinct historical traditions and rituals. With the mechanical reproduction of movies, books, comics and music, art becomes available for public consumption on a massive scale. Fine art and folk art become popular and secular. The culture industry is born.
What Benjamin did not anticipate is the role of mass media in creating new types of aura through the amplification of attention to replicated images. For example, the aura of movie stars. Social media sharing intensifies rather than diminishes the auras of sites or works of art.
In the "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", Benjamin explore many important ideas about the democratic possibilities as well as authoritarian dangers that result from mechanical reproduction. But what is particularly prescient for today’s digital media environment is his anticipation of technologies that free the author and the artist from the constraints of reaching an audience. In the 21st century, everyone with a social media account is a writer and producer of images and sounds. These technologies of reproduction, Benjamin observed, also generates new methods and styles of writing: multimodal, collective, fragmentary and combinatory. The annihilation of time and space not only changes how human share experiences, it changes experience itself.
Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian academic and public intellectual, became famous (and controversial) for his phrase “the medium is the message.” First introduced in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, the phrase condenses into a pithy meme many of McLuhan’s ideas about how human beings are changed by their technologies. The phrase, on its surface, asserts that it is the medium of communication itself, not the content it carries, that has the greatest impact on the individual and society. This implies that media act on our bodies in ways that sometimes bypass direct understanding. McLuhan felt that Modern art most clearly expressed this idea. A Cubist painting is about its sensory effect rather than the subject depicted. Film, a technology that builds wholes out of temporal fragments, transforms "the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure.” A family who gathers to watch a television sitcom may appear to be just having a laugh together. But the medium itself introduces into the home a ritualized, continuous and immersive space that connects to other homes involved in the same ritual.
“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior, especially in collective matters of media and technology, where the individual is almost inevitably unaware of their effects upon him.”
"The Medium is the Message", Part 1
"The Medium is the Message", Part 2
Media have such an impact on thought and behavior because, according to McLuhan, they are extensions of the body and the senses. All human technologies extend some function of the body. A wheel is an extension of the foot. The hammer is an extension of the hand. The camera is an extension of the eye. And electronic media is an extension of the nervous system. Each major human transformation can be attributed to a new technology extending the human domain. The Oral Age experienced the mysteries and fears of living in acoustic space, a state of unknowing. This “tyranny of the ear” was liberated by the Writing Age which “abolished mystery and created architecture and towns and brought roads and armies.” The Print Age experienced an “exhaustion of the eye” and the fragmentation from clocks, punch-cards, assembly lines and bureaucracies until the emancipation of the Electronic Age. McLuhan argued that the new electronic age of connectivity, nonlinearity, simultaneity and sensory plentitude was “paradise regained,” returning human culture to the sense of wholeness and surrounding acoustic space that had been lost with writing and print.
When the proof of McLuan's new book "The Medium is the Message" returned from the printer, the title read instead "The Medium is the Massage." This typo agreed with McLuahn because it expressed his central idea that the medium acts on the body."
“The Medium is the Massage is a look-around to see what’s happening. It is a collide-oscope of interfaced situations.” — Marshall McLuhan
McLuhan conducted his research during the 1950’s and 1960’s, a period of great cultural transformation in the way people related to and were shaped by media. The expansion of broadcast television with its live coverage of events, such as the moon landing, created the sense of what McLuhan called a “global village.” Rock & roll music on the radio, freed popular music from fixed genres and became a vehicle for counter-cultural ideas that spread across the globe. McLuhan was not around for the emergence of personal computers and the internet, but his ideas, contested during his time, have become central to the field of media studies seeking to makes sense of the rapid changes in the Digital Age.
“Not every new media object obeys these principles. They should be considered not as absolute laws, but rather as general tendencies of a culture undergoing computerization.”
- Lev Manovich
Explore below to see Manovich's 5 principles demonstrated with this digital photograph.
“for our visual culture there is nothing prior to mediation. Any act of mediation is dependent upon another, indeed many other, acts of mediation and is therefore remediation” (346)
“Remediation is the mediation of reality because media themselves are real and the experience of media is the subject of remediation” (350).
Immediacy: a sense, an illusion, of reality, immersiveness, and immediacy....desire to experience something real and direct without the mediation of a technological apparatus. As a result of this logic, we can discern a tendency to disguise or erase the apparatus so as to give the illusion of transparency and immediacy of content, despite the fact that it is being delivered to us through mediation.
“a transparent interface … one that erases itself, so that the user would no longer be aware of confronting a medium, but instead would stand in an immediate relationship with the contents of the medium” (318).
A meme is. The internet meme
All text by Will Luers.
All animation by Liliya Truderung.
All images and video are in the public domain or labled for non-commercial use.