A Sociology of the Media Introduction II

1. A Sociology of the MediaIntroduction II Prof. Dr. Joost van Loon Institut für Soziologie, LMU Nottingham Trent University, U.K.

2. Details • Sprechstunde: Di 10-12, • Konradstraße 6, Zi. 205 • Email: joost.vanloon@soziologie.uni-muenchen.de

3. Outline • Technology as Ordering (reflections on Martin Heidegger and Walter Ong) • Form • Historicity • Cultural Embedding • Embodiment (and Disembodiment)

4. 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.

5. Technology as Ordering – A Meeting with Heidegger

6. 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”

7. Technology as Ordering – A Meeting with Walter Ong

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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)

11. 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

12. Embodiment and Disembodiment

13. 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

14. 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.).