McLuhan and Media Future

            The cigarette ads shown in class were terrible, and it amazed me how cigars were shown in such an accepting and good light. I hate cigars, cigarettes, pipes, really anything that makes smoke. I am highly allergic to smoke, whether that be cigarette or fire. My throat will slowly close the longer I am exposed to it, I have even gone to the hospital after I had stopped breathing 3 times. I just cannot understand why people still smoke today, I find it idiotic, rude, and completely poisoning to them and those around them. Then again they will die sooner, so hopefully everyone who continues to smoke will die out and cigarettes will be a thing of the past.

            The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects is 160 pages in length and composed in an experimental, collage style with text superimposed on visual elements and vice versa. Some pages are printed backwards and are meant to be read in a mirror. Some are intentionally left blank. Most contain photograph and images both modern and historic, juxtaposed in startling ways. The book was intended to make McLuhan's philosophy of media and communication, considered by some incomprehensible and esoteric, more accessible to a wider readership through the use of visual metaphor and sparse text. Marshall McLuhan argues that technologies, from clothing to the wheel to the book, and beyond, are the messages themselves, not the content of the communication. In essence, The Medium is the Massage is a graphical and creative representation of his "medium is the message" thesis seen in Understanding Media.

            By playing on words and utilizing the term "massage," McLuhan is suggesting that modern audiences have found current media to be soothing, enjoyable, and relaxing; however, the pleasure we find in new media is deceiving, as the changes between society and technology are incongruent and are perpetuating an Age of Anxiety. The Medium is the Massage demonstrates how modern media are extensions of human senses; they ground us in physicality, but expand our ability to perceive our world to an extent that would be impossible without the media. These extensions of perception contribute to McLuhan’s theory of the Global Village, which would bring humanity full circle to an industrial analogue of tribal mentality.

Curate Yourself

1) What is your reaction to the text you just read?
          I was not really interested in what I was reading. I am not a huge fan of Bob Dylan, so I had really no desire to really hold onto what I was reading. The history and story behind the song was a but interesting, but the overall short story could have been written shorter or more concise. I enjoy reading graphic novel or dialogue formatted stories, but I not a big reader more of a movie or audio book kind of person. I kept getting distracted when reading, it took too much effort to keep my attention on the text compared to other stories we have read in class, like the Goose Father, I found that story to be much more interesting. Same with some of the out of class reading, I enjoyed reading the Wonder Woman book the most, but also the graphic novels and Pride and Prejudice (that being my favorite movie to watch in class). I was not a fan of the fill that went with this reading either, maybe because I never listened to Bob Dylan, but I found movies like The East, Austin Land, the gamer one, Dead Man, and Amelia to be much more fascinating; I had also never seen or heard of most of those films and loved watching them in class.

2) What connections did you make with the story and discuss the elements of the work in which you were able to connect?
          I did not really connect with any of the story, but there was one line that stood out to me, "Every piece of gravel is unique, like snowflakes." I love snow, the cold, winter, and especially snowflakes. My senior year of high school, a family donated a couple of giant canvases, and being in AP Art I got to take one and make anything I wanted to be the center piece of the senior show. I took the saying, people are like snowflakes, each is unique, and for 2 months cut out over 100 paper snowflakes. I had to lay them all out and put books on them to make sure they are flat. I took removable adhesive spray and sprayed all the snowflakes, then meticulously laid them all over the canvas. I got a mixture of blues and purple spray paints and sprayed the entire canvas. Once dry I peeled of all the snowflakes and threw glitter all over. I titled the piece "You Are Unique" and it is still hanging in my home.

3) What changes would you make to adapt the story to another medium, what medium would you use, and what changes would you make?

          I would make it have either more dialogue and make it a movie portrayal or make is a more documentary styled piece. I would try to make it more about all of his music than one song and find out more about his life. I found the story to be boring and difficult to read, but I would not want to make the film fiction. I am a big fan of documentaries, and I love feeling like I learned something new by the end of one. Yet, I have also seen a lot of great movies that are non-fiction that are not in documentary form.

          Like the film 42, one of my favorite sport films of all time, I learned so much about the life and struggles of Jackie Robinson, but I was also entertaining and interesting to watch.I am not much of a reader but I always recommend films that reflect a true story, documentary or not. I love learning about events that have happened throughout history, about people who made a difference in the world, whether it is a bid or small difference. Saving Mr. Banks is another film I had re watched recently that fits into this genre. It is a beautiful film about the making of the Walt Disney film Mary Poppins, and I never knew how hard it was for Disney to convince the writer of the book to let him make the beloved film. I loved seeing what the studios, the merchandise and the technologies they had at that time, and I also love Tom Hanks and he played Walt Disney beautifully. There are many other films like this that I would recommend everyone see.

Games as a Medium

          Existenze is an interesting movie, from what was shown in class, I don't think I would want a bio-port in me. I did find how the gaming consuls are basically made up of organs and living tissue to be clever, but from what I have seen the movie is a bit confusing. It reminds me of Inception mixed with Alien mixed with Sword Art Online. I appreciated the take on how the movie portrayed the progression of gaming and technology, basically fusing into people. I feel that this could totally happen for I could see phones being implanted into our heads or contacts being able to record our lives. Gaming is already addicting to a point, I could imagine when gaming reaches this level people will become so dependent on technology that they will fuse it with their being to some point.

          With the reading on Tetris, I was amazed at how the game came about. Alexey made this for fun, on a computer that was extremely archaic, and in a Soviet Computer Science facility. He made this in his free time, basing it off an puzzle gam he use to play. The simplicity of the game and the overall goal is so easily universally understood that the game had to be successful. I enjoyed reading the back story of how games were coming together before Tetris was invented, which gave the story a nice structure. I also liked how Alexey made up the name for his game by fusing "tetra" meaning numbers and "Tennis" which is his favorite sport. I'm not a big gamer, but I do believe that all games are an art. I believe that anything that takes a special mind or a special practice is an art, whether that is gaming, movies, surgery, accounting, really anything the average person could not do without practice. I did use to play the one of the original Mario games on the Nintendo 64, and people had to create the game. They had to create the characters, create the world, the story, and through that art is made.

Long Form Media

          The East, deals with a span of eco terrorists and undercover agent "Sarah" goes to eradicate them yet becomes sympathetic towards her captor's cause. I wanted to finish the film in class, and plan to at some point. It reminded me of long form television with the music and fast passage of time, and with the amount we saw in class,  could see this film being 8 to 12 episodes long. My favorite part about these series is the story arcs I sometimes feel that feature films are either too long or too short and it can be difficult to find a happy medium in the amount of information given in a film. In long form television it is a lot easier to hold long complicated stories, and one can show multiple story lines with equal complexity.

          Stranger Things is the series I decided to watch, mainly because I haven't watched it since it came out and season 2 is coming out Halloween. I love the series, I find the way they set up the characters and the time the series has to let the audience gets to know the characters and really sympathize with them. My favorite character was Eleven and she isn't even really featured till a few episodes in, and I also love Will mom for she does such a great job in her role. The audience truly sympathizes with her, and I can't imagine how a mother must relate and I still can feel the pain of her character without having kids. I do have a cat though, that I love very much and thats how I related to her relentless work in finding Will. The main kids in the series are amazing too, not only the acting, but how relatable they are. I cannot think of another show that shows a group of kids so well, to the point where we understand how they think, what they believe in, their priorities, and to truly care about them in the series.