[end of procrastination]

Fairly speaking I’m doing much better with this book (than, of couse, Ong’s Orality and Literacy, I never post my response yet since I haven’t finished. It’s sad but I’m sure I would finish some day before the end of this semester ), and I really appreciated the chapter of “Media Hot and Cold”.

The “medium is the message” idea is like widely accepted these days. It feels like tendency that the medium itself becomes the point and (some) people are tending not to care about the “content”. Now we have an explanation fair enough that this is the message itself. Several years back almost all governmental departments are setting up websites just to follow the hype of “e-government”. So did education instititions with e-education thing. It’s more like a fashion to toss everything online and they made their point. But one thing I’m not sure about is that while the medium becomes the message, where should we look for the real/traditional content other than the manipulated message? Maybe have to be in a traditional medium?

The categorizing of media into cold and hot looks surprisingly practical. I’m totally in with the definition that “hot medium is one that extends one single sense in ‘high definition’ … the state of being well filled with data”. It’s interesting that radio was categorized as the hot media maybe it’s just “cooling” down after 60s.

While I’m thinking of categorizing the Web 2.0 hype and traditional Web 1.0 era online mediums, it’s becoming hard to get to a conclusion. The old school websites are static and scattered, and they required the visitors to “look into depths” and to compile the information themselves. It fulfills the definition of “cool media” of being low-fi and participation-required. Web 2.0 seems to be a bit confusing. The core value being collaboration and share, the Web 2.0 online services are looking for much more participation from their users, are they cool media then? My answer is no. The seemingly participation takes place at the production end of the media, at the broadcasting end these medias are definitely hi-fi and overwhelming for the perceivers. That’s why we are more and more bugged by the “information overload” and have to find a way out of there.

I especially like the ending statement of the chapter that:

So the hotting-up of one sense tends to effect hypnosis, and the cooling of all senses tends to result in hallucination.

I started a website in early 2007 for people to share their dreams. With the other cofounder we set up some basic principles of the website that 1) we moderate all submissions other than completely open sharing, 2) we do not encourage people to interprete the dreams in any form of “sign reading” or whatever. It now seems that we created a super “cold” media back then, and it would be wonderful if people get hallucination from our site.

I always feel that art is related to skills, and definition of skill varies through time. We tend to worship artworks that represent both artists’ great ideas and spectacular skills, sometimes even labors put in the work as well. Like different forms of art have different purposes to serve and different ideas to express, masters of different skills would have their own audience and appreciators (we have even martial “arts”, bad example?). Being written over 70 years ago while the film is still young, the essay compared films (silent and sound) to theatres that stated different circumstances that actors and audience might face.

Today it’s not questionable that mechanical reproduction is everywhere in our life. However people do adapt to keep up with the changes. Not only the way we create art changes (which is not to say we abandon traditional and primary ways of art, like drawing and sculpture), our interest and ability to appreciate different “aura” emitted by new forms of artwork advances as well. We see beauty in maths and software source codes, and also feel emotion in drawings and films. We appreciate efforts contributed in architectures, and also ideas expressed in performance arts.

However if the definition of “aura” stays as “unique phenomenon of a distance however close it may be”, it does seem that we have fewer art out of the mass quantity of ideas produced easily nowadays. Given the handy tools of inmitating previous artworks easily, we face the problem of even harder to dig and express the inner mental power. We do not have to spend years carving the stones or paint on the walls any more. While the tools are easy to use, they mean to ease the efforts for a certain work. This makes people ignore the ideas that drive the artwork and shortens the distance between artwork and its audience hence weakens/destroys the aura (that was used to be).

Even so, greater ideas would still find chance to emerge and more sophisticated skills would always be preferred, they are now just, closer.

I’ve always been enjoying science fictions regarding man-machine relationship, in most cases through movies though. It’s undoubtedly amazing experience to read a story from 1909 which ironically indicated a real problem nowadays, that people are tied so much to the internet that traditional concept of privacy, relationship and trust are dramatically changing. Fortunately we are not yet under the circumstances that we have to live underground and rely on the machine/computer to survive. We are thus not yet that desperate to trust machine more than human beings, most of the time we’re just using it to connect to people (and forget that we could physically contact them too).

The idea of machine ruling the world is nothing new now but I’m not sure whether it’s origining from this 1909 story. Strictly speaking in this story the machine is not even ruling the world. The “Central Committee” keeps being mentioned that it feels like it’s still managed by men. It’s just in this story people love machines so much that they accept it as dictator or even the divine. “The (Whatever) Committee” becomes an abstract concept.

I do believe this situation is in some way a Stockholm Syndrome, that people develop this complex feeling of the machine that helps them survive however restricts their mind and body (infants showing undue strength get killed) as well. This paradox could be a problem that we’ll all facing while we have to make decision to keep mankind survive with extremely restricted resources (which might not be the case in the novel, but I suppose it did happen while the machine initially took over the housekeeping work for men). This is why when I was reading I keep thinking of the anime “Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagaan” which show lots of similarity in the concept. While in the novel Kuno dug his way along out to the surface of the earth, I feel exactly the same excitement when I saw the scene in the anime that Simon, Kamina and Yoko fought their way to the surface (The still image I posted at the beginning of the entry).

It’s interesting that in the story, money was never mentioned. It’s likely that the worldwide disaster helped to form a centralized society where capitalism was perished. “The Commitee” could be a small group of humen elites or maybe the machine itself. It leveraged resources all over the globe after the disaster and as described in the novel, the resource shortage seemed to be already over and people did look for higher level of spiritual intercourse.

But why would the machine stop? How could that happen?

Technically speaking, I believe that the maintenance of such large scale of machinery is out of human beings control. That is, the machine must be self-maintaining (see the mending apparatus?) and possibly has already developed its own will and somehow keeps doing its job to babysitting the human beings (otherwise it’s gonna lose its raison d’etre, this is also typically the reason why I do not wish to talk about The Matrix, for machines in that movie is “evil-minded” and totally against men, which I believe is not the case here). However inhuman it could be (i.e. killing babies) it’s executing the already-made decision according to its preset programs to protect the mankind from extinction. So why would the machine let this happen? Is it really doing everything it can (like at least send out the alert)? Apparenly not. It’s not even showing much intelligence in the novel, the “committee” is the only channel between the machine and ordinary people, and what the committee shows, is exactly human bureaucracy. Maybe it’s just way too smart. Anyway the Answer is not revealed in the novel, and Forster actually did really well in predicting the situation that the internet distracts people from their real life, make them believe that they are more spiritual and have too much more important things to do to spare time for a face-to-face talk.

So far we are still lucky. We can unplug the cable and walk out of the room for fresh air (yeah, instead of changing the air in the room).

It crashed downwards, exploding as it went, rending gallery after gallery with its wings of steel. For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky.

However sad story it is, the ending is really … really beautiful.

Links:

• The Machine Stops. by E. M. Forster, 1909 (Wiki, Amazon)
• Stockholm syndrome
• 天元突破グレンラガン