[bytz] "Dobbs: You know, Sue, I have a theory. I think color television has a psyched..."

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 04:18:54 GMT

"Dobbs: You know, Sue, I have a theory. I think color television has a psychedelic effect on people. And when you take color television away from people who have been used to a steady diet of it, they need to continue having the psychedelic effects. So they turn to drugs. The most vulnerable segment of the population for this is young people, especially students, when they leave their homes where they had watched TV regularly. The semi-isolation of the student ghettos creates this craving."

–Android Meme Xenochrony Diaries - Bob Dobbs

[bytz] "The Old Town is a place of paradox - a project of the Communist Party, it is ..."

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 03:29:30 GMT

"The Old Town is a place of paradox - a project of the Communist Party, it is loved by nationalists; the only 'authentically Polish' part of Warsaw, it is anything but authentic. Here, you can see every one of the four orders of simulation described by Jean Baudrillard in 1981, occurring in Stalinist Poland between 1946 and 1976. It is the sheer inauthenticity, and the only Soviet trimmings that are visible only slightly below the surface, which stop it from being merely cute. Although cute it undoubtedly is. Well, mostly."

–sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy: Reconstruction Time Again

[bytz] M¢Lµhan's Wake

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 22:13:55 GMT

M¢Lµhan's Wake

[Reposted from m0m]

[bytz] "As a closeted McLuhan sympathizer, I was especially psyched by Peters’s “Two ..."

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 03:51:12 GMT

As a closeted McLuhan sympathizer, I was especially psyched by Peters’s “Two Cheers” polemic. Peters traced the history of “technological determinism” — particularly its use as an insult (calling someone a technological determinist, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young says, is akin to saying they like to strangle puppies!) or its invocation as a preemptive disclaimer (“Of course I do not mean to lapse here into technological determinism!”). He traces the concept through Thorstein Veblen’s use of the German technik (see also this), to 20s and 30s debates about economic history, to Lucian Febvre, to Mumford’s technic, to McLuhan, to SCOT and actor-network theory. Peters argues that fear of technological determinism rests in part on a “suspicious subject/object distinction,” a failure to recognize that human are “always-already technical beings.” We often fail to realize that “to say that technology creates possibilities is not to say that it causes them.” Fear of technological determinism “hinders big thoughts.” Media studies is necessarily interested in media shape, form, delivery, etc., and to resist exploring and arguing for these factors’ potential roles in influencing social change or shaping history, is to “giv[e] up critique.”

An immensely inspiring talk.

Redeeming McLuhan?

–The History of Universality, Technological Determinism, and Other Deep Thoughts | Words in Space - Shannon Mattern

[bytz] allatonceness

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 17:58:19 GMT

[bytz] (Quote)

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 22:19:33 GMT