Who is Online

We have 107 guests and no members online

 

 

Most commentators expect that traditional print media will be replaced in the very near future by electronic devices similar to the Kindle, pads and phones.  Some believe, as a consequence, that the very utility of traditional books and media will change irrevocably as our ability to appreciate them changes.  At least one of them is profoundly unsettled by this prospect; that he argues is already under way. 

Today we see new technologies come and go within a few decades.  Where has our local CD shop gone?  Where do you buy a music cassette?  When was the last time you saw a typewriter?  Books as we know them have been around for almost two millennia. But they had little practical utility for the average person until movable type printing was invented, lowering their price and encouraging many more people to learn to read. 

Newspapers have been around for less than 400 years; magazines containing illustrations a century less; and those with quality photographs (rotogravure and its successors) less than a lifetime.  The time frame is narrowing.  Now it is their turn to be replaced.

 

 

What have you done to my brain ma?

 

Jordan recently gave me a very interesting book to read: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr.  Carr is a post-McLuhanite; although he would probably dispute this label. He argues, as did Marshall McLuhan in the nineteen sixties,  that human beings have a 'plastic' brain that responds physically to its technological environment. 

As I have pointed out elsewhere on this website [Read more…] when we learn a new thing our brain and nervous system stores this knowledge as new connections between neurones.  Thus our physical body structure subtly changes. 

As a baby grows the neurons in their brain and nervous system multiply and make new connections.  This is directly analogous to the growth of their arms and legs and other body parts; except that neurones connect and multiply according to the baby’s experience.  We call this physically encoded memory: learning; experience; skill; and habit.

It is this physical structure of cells and their connections that records what we can do, know and believe. This, more than the cells in our other organs, defines us as a person. 

McLuhan extended this observation by considering a range of the tools that we learn to use; like learning to drive a car; or to read. 

He examined a range of tools (media) from a light bulb to comics and the degree to which we relate to each.  He employed the beatnik ‘jive talk’ of the mid 20th century to classify the tools with which we engage deeply, either intellectually or in terms of the senses engaged, as ‘cool’.   Conversely the ones that we often ignore, with little personal engagement, he rather confusingly classified as ‘hot’. 

Thus television, that requires us to use two senses, is ‘cooler’ than radio.

 

 image002

 

At the hot end of the scale he argued that a light bulb, encapsulates no other medium or message.

For McLuhan it was this engagement, that makes changes to our brain, that was the most important feature of our relationship to our tools (the media).  Our physical bodies actually change in response to the media; according to how ‘cool’ they are.  He disregarded the fact that the content too changes our brain.  If you memorise Hamlet's soliloquy, you change the structure of your brain.

But McLuhan argued that the actual message carried is less important or perhaps irrelevant.  Hence his famous aphorism:  ‘The medium is the message’.

 

image004

 

Today, in the light of our modern understanding of brain function, many regard McLuhan’s re-framing of our relationship to our tools as being no more than stating the obvious. 

Elsewhere on this website I have described how one’s car can come to feel like one’s body; how we extend our perceptions to encompass our tools; our family and our extended environment [Read more…].

But McLuhan became a cult figure; pivotal to many of the revolutionary aspects of the nineteen sixties and seventies, influencing a wide range of thinkers and artists from Andy Warhol to Timothy Leary.   It is said that he also revolutionised advertising; and was the father of today’s ‘media studies’.  His unusual re-framing allowed many new ideas to develop and formed a jumping-off point for some that were quite crazy - like crazy, man!

McLuhan was prescient.  When imagining something that would be cooler than television he foresaw and described: the personal computer; and the World Wide Web.  He coined the terms ‘The Global Village’ and media ‘surfing’.  He had no knowledge of how these might be implemented technically but argued that their advent was a technological inevitability.

Nicholas Carr restates many of McLuhan’s arguments.  He in turn, asserts that compared to television, our interaction with computers and personal electronic devices is a big step on the cool side.  And correspondingly the changes these tools make to our brains are much more significant.  People who engage with computers and the World Wide Web become physically dissimilar to those who do not.

It's worth noting that similar criticisms of newspapers were made by the authors of books in the early 20th century as newspaper and magazine sales exploded with increasing literacy and the invention of celebrity and notoriety.  The terms 'yellow press' and 'yellow journalism' were coined and writers like Aldus Huxley and DH Lawrence condemned popular newspapers as mere 'gossip sheets' that were likely to be harming their readers. 

The preeminence of gossip and celebrity, including that around sport, as a means of selling media might be seen to have reached its ultimate conclusion in the recent scandals and demise of the 'News (Screws) of the World' in London.

 

 

No comments

Travel

Israel

 

 

 

 

 

2024 Addendum

 

It's shocking that another Addendum to this article is necessary.

Yet, we are no nearer to a peaceful resolution like the, internationally called for, 'Two state solution', or some workable version thereof.

Indeed, the situation, particularly for Palestinians, has gone from bad to worse.

At the same time, Israeli losses are mounting as the war drags on.  Yet, Hamas remains undefeated and Bibi remains recalcitrant.

Comments:

 On Wed, 4 Sep 2024, at 1:23 PM, Barry Cross wrote:
> There seems to be no resolution to the problem of the disputed land of Israel. You consider Gaza to have been put under siege, but I wonder if that and the other Israeli acts you mention are themselves responses to a response by them of being under siege, or at least being seriously threatened, by hostile forces who do not recognise the legitimacy of the state of Israel? Hamas’s claim and stated intention of establishing a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea” and periodic acts of aggression need to be taken into account I suggest, when judging the actions of the Israeli’s. In addition, there is the menace coming from Iranian proxies in Southern Lebanon and Yemen, and from Iran itself.
>
> Whatever the merits of the respective claims to the contended territory might be, it seems reasonable to accept that Israeli’s to consider they are a constant threat to their very survival. Naturally, this must influence their actions, particularly in response to the many acts of aggression they have been subjected to over many decades. By way of contrast, how lucky are we!
>
> These are my off the cuff comments for what they are worth.
>
> Regards
> Barry Cross
>
> Sent from my iPhone

 

 

 

2023 Addendum

 

It's a decade since this visit to Israel in September 2014.

From July until just a month before we arrived, Israeli troops had been conducting an 'operation' against Hamas in the Gaza strip, in the course of which 469 Israeli soldiers lost their lives.  The country was still reeling. 

17,200 Garzan homes were totally destroyed and three times that number were seriously damaged.  An estimated 2,000 (who keeps count) civilians died in the destruction.  'Bibi' Netanyahu, who had ordered the Operation, declared it a victory.

This time it's on a grander scale: a 'War', and Bibi has vowed to wipe-out Hamas.

Pundits have been moved to speculate on the Hamas strategy, that was obviously premeditated. In addition to taking hostages, it involving sickening brutality against obvious innocents, with many of the worst images made and published by themselves. 

It seemed to be deliberate provocation, with a highly predictable outcome.

Martyrdom?  

Historically, Hamas have done Bibi no harm.  See: 'For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces' in the Israel Times.

Thinking about our visit, I've been moved to wonder how many of today's terrorists were children a decade ago?  How many saw their loved ones: buried alive; blown apart; maimed for life; then dismissed by Bibi as: 'collateral damage'? 

And how many of the children, now stumbling in the rubble, will, in their turn, become terrorists against the hated oppressor across the barrier?

Is Bibi's present purge a good strategy for assuring future harmony?

I commend my decade old analysis to you: A Brief Modern History and Is there a solution?

Comments: 
Since posting the above I've been sent the following article, implicating religious belief, with which I substantially agree, save for its disregarding the Jewish fundamentalists'/extremists' complicity; amplifying the present horrors: The Bright Line Between Good and Evil 

Another reader has provided a link to a perspective similar to my own by Australian 'Elder Statesman' John MenadueHamas, Gaza and the continuing Zionist project.  His Pearls and Irritations site provides a number of articles relating to the current Gaza situation. Worth a read.

The Economist has since reported and unusual spate of short-selling immediately preceding the attacks: Who made millions trading the October 7th attacks?  

Money-making by someone in the know? If so, it's beyond evil.

 

 

A Little Background

The land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea, known as Palestine, is one of the most fought over in human history.  Anthropologists believe that the first humans to leave Africa lived in and around this region and that all non-African humans are related to these common ancestors who lived perhaps 70,000 years ago.  At first glance this interest seems odd, because as bits of territory go it's nothing special.  These days it's mostly desert and semi-desert.  Somewhere back-o-Bourke might look similar, if a bit redder. 

Yet since humans have kept written records, Egyptians, Canaanites, Philistines, Ancient Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, early Muslims, Christian Crusaders, Ottomans (and other later Muslims), British and Zionists, have all fought to control this land.  This has sometimes been for strategic reasons alone but often partly for affairs of the heart, because this land is steeped in history and myth. 

Read more: Israel

Fiction, Recollections & News

The Greatest Aviation Mystery of All Time

 

 

The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was finally called off in the first week of June 2018.

The flight's disappearance on the morning of 8 March 2014 has been described as the greatest aviation mystery of all time, surpassing the disappearance of Amelia Earhart in 1937.  Whether or no it now holds that record, the fruitless four year search for the missing plane is certainly the most costly in aviation history and MH370 has already spawned more conspiracy theories than the assassination of JFK; the disappearance of Australian PM Harold Holt; and the death of the former Princess Diana of Wales; combined.

Read more: The Greatest Aviation Mystery of All Time

Opinions and Philosophy

The Hydrogen Economy

 

 

 

 

Since I first published an article on this subject I've been taken to task by a young family member for being too negative about the prospects of a Hydrogen Economy, mainly because I failed to mention 'clean green hydrogen' generated from surplus electricity, employing electrolysis.

Back in 1874 Jules Verne had a similar vision but failed to identify the source of the energy, 'doubtless electricity', required to disassociate the hydrogen and oxygen. 

Coal; oil and gas; peat; wood; bagasse; wind; waves; solar radiation; uranium; and so on; are sources of energy.  But electricity is not. 

Electricity (and hydrogen derived from it) is simply a means of transporting and utilising energy - see How does electricity work? on this website.

Read more: The Hydrogen Economy

Terms of Use

Terms of Use                                                                    Copyright