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Electrically Ubiquitous

Electrically Ubiquitous. OR How Electricity Surrounds Us in Plain Sight.

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Electrically Ubiquitous

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  1. Electrically Ubiquitous OR How Electricity Surrounds Us in Plain Sight

  2. Really, have you ever thought about how all this electricity got here and where it comes from? It runs the appliances we all live on, yet we give little thought to how electricity completely surrounds us. This is evident in these bundles which are found in nearly every household.

  3. It seems that cords and plug-ins run rampant everywhere. The electrical grid is a very real and obvious box that we all live in.

  4. But why does this even matter? Well, the media torrent that we have learned about has to come from somewhere, and while electricity is not the source of it, it is the engine that makes it go. And it is fast. “Speed is not incidental to the modern world-… but its essence” (Gitlin, pg. 72).

  5. These familiar faces border on what McCloud would call “iconic”. They are everywhere, inside and out.

  6. Look around you next time you find yourself outside in a neighborhood. If you look specifically for these green boxes, you might be amazed at how many of them there are. These boxes are simply a way for those selling electricity to know how much you used, and to change the current into an acceptable household level.

  7. In reality, these boxes are just another step in the long chain of events that are necessary to bring electrical power to the masses. Is all this energized metal really as unassuming and passive as it seems? Probably, but electricity seems like a pretty potent force completely surrounding us. But the ubiquitous nature of all the equipment needed for this process is the real reason for this essay. We are surrounded by electrical equipment, it is in the very walls of our homes, occupies space in everyone’s yard or lot, silently powering everything from a toaster to the television.

  8. The grid seems like something out of science fiction, especially in, say my apartment building, where all the residents are living in cubes of wires that are pulsing constantly with power. But even with the leaps in technology that we have achieved, we are still forced to use our aging electrical grid.

  9. This picture says more than I ever could. Maybe Mother Nature will forcibly take back what is hers.

  10. Now, the Electricity Monster will zap you if it catches you playing on green transformers. Not really, but the effect remains; scare those who would be playing on the box (kids) with a cartoonish and iconic monster ambiguously attacking a child. But the warning label says nothing of staying off or away from the box. Interesting. What the rationale behind the color of these boxes? If they were truly dangerous, wouldn’t it warrant painting it orange, the standard official warning color? Yet there were probably some people who objected, due to them being eyesores. Regardless, the dull green has rendered the boxes basically invisible.

  11. But now it is more than just electrical boxes. These plastic broadband boxes line many of the streets of north Fargo, complete with a little orange flag attached, for what I am assuming is for flood purposes.

  12. All of this seems to be pointing at an interesting idea: that we selectively perceive what we pay attention to. “Perception is not automatic, then. It may be a bit of an exaggeration, but in many cases, we have to look for something in order to see it.”

  13. “Capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, sex. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers).”

  14. “…the prospect of unending, out-of-control acceleration is unnerving. Can all this clutter and haste really be good for us? Some who accept the inevitability of ever-increasing speed wonder whether the acceleration will someday-perhaps soon- crash against barriers of nature or psyche. How fast can a montage go without leaving perception behind?”

  15. Looking to the future, maybe mankind will find a new system, one that requires less intrusion and is maybe modeled on something more organic, say a human body. “Our “Age of Anxiety” is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools- with yesterday’s concepts.”

  16. “The wheel is an extension of the foot…the book is an extension of the eye…clothing, an extension of the skin…electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.”

  17. Works Cited • Berger, Asa. Seeing is Believing: An Introduction to Visual Communication. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Publishing, 3rd edition. 2008. • Gitlin, Todd. Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelming Our Lives. New York, NY: Holt Paperbacks, 1st edition. 2002, 2007. • McLuhan, Marshall and Fiore, Quentin. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Corte Madera, CA: Ginko Press Inc. 1967. • McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1st edition. 1993. • All Photos taken by Josh Rants

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