a sociology of the media introduction ii prof. dr. joost van loon institut für soziologie, lmu...

A Sociology of the Media Introduction II

Prof. Dr. Joost van Loon

Institut für Soziologie, LMU

Nottingham Trent University, U.K.

Details

• Sprechstunde: Di 10-12,

• Konradstraße 6, Zi. 205

• Email: joost.vanloon@soziologie.uni-muenchen.de

Outline

i. Technology as Ordering (reflections on Martin Heidegger and Walter Ong)

ii. Form

iii. Historicity

iv. Cultural Embedding

v. Embodiment (and Disembodiment)

Technology as Ordering

• Technologies ‘enframe’ the world; that is they order them in the double sense of (a) providing a structure and (b) commanding specific actions.

• This ordering constitutes the essence of mediation.

Technology as Ordering –

A Meeting with Heidegger

Technology as Ordering –

A Meeting with Heidegger• Technology engenders particular

perspectives (the essence of technology is revealing)

• Enframing: bringing forth into presence• Presence is not ‘just there’ it is an

accomplishment of mediation (as a form of presencing)

• Mediation is the creation of media events• Mediation = “coming in-between”

Technology as Ordering –

A Meeting with Walter Ong

Technology as Ordering –

A Meeting with Walter Ong• Orality and Literacy• Orality: acoustic space: timeless, ephemeral,

unity of enunciating actor (author) and enunciated act, ‘immediate’, active repetition as skilful task (memory, ability to enunciate)

• Literacy: visual space, linear, objective, separation of enunciating actor (author) and enunciated act (the text), reification, replication becomes a simple task, alienation

Form

• The form of mediation has significant bearing on the way in which communication works

• Forms are the products of formatting, which can also be seen as ‘contextual’

• Two approaches to forms of communication (Carey, 1986)– Communication as transmission– Communication as ritual

Historicity

• Media as ‘cause’ of historical transformations• Media-changes as ‘effects’ of historical forces• Media are not static; they evolve• Media evolutions involve changing relations

between form, matter, use and know-how• Examples:

– Speech: the content is not just ideas but words, i.e. language

– Writing: the content is not just speech but also the graphs (hieroglyphs, pictograms, alphabet)

Cultural Embedding

• ‘Articulations of form through use and know how’• The Medium is the Message (McLuhan, 1964)• Culture is not given but ‘practiced’ (as sense-

making). Sense-making is performative;• The practice of mediation includes ‘selectivity’ of

use• Use affects how we perceive, think and

communicate• All forms of mediation are motivated

Embodiment and Disembodiment

Embodiment

• Speech is the first communication medium• It uses language = an abstract system of

symbols based on arbitrary connections between sounds and ‘things’.

• Media are extensions of ‘man’ (McLuhan, 1964): they are embodied.

• Bodies are (among other things) gendered.• Gender constitutes a form of differentiation

which generates the possibility of subjectivity and identity

and Disembodiment• Bodies are not ‘closed’ – media extending bodies create networked

bodies. Body-boundaries are not fixed.• Matthew Fuller: a Nietzschean concept of the body as the ‘starting

point’ for knowledge. • this has two distinct advantages:

(1) it provides a materialist and action-based grounding of perception, ordering, indeed mediation and

(2) it bypasses the need to impose an a-priori hierarchy of the organization of this mediation.

The ‘subject’ of communication is thus no longer a privileged entity (i.e. the human being) whose status is derived from metaphysics, but instead itself an effect of a sustained interaction between forces.

Following Latour (1988b) we could further specify that these forces themselves are irreducible (to interests, beliefs, moral values etc.).