James Kendrick, Ph.D.

Ivan Illich’s call to deschool society is certainly a challenging one, and even if I have a hard time imagining many of his propositions  coming to fruition given the stacked deck against which such endeavors would have to be mounted, I can’t help but feel that his fundamental sense of how the educational system doesn’t work is quite right. It is less scary to me to understand the ways in which schools fail students than it is to realize just how monumental and possibly impossible the task of correcting those deficiencies would be because their answers are so far removed from the typical surface solutions of throwing more money at the system or making classes smaller or bringing in more technology. In essence, Illich suggests that such moves are little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and the only question is whether or not we have already hit the iceberg.

Reading Illich made me think of a YouTube video I watched earlier this week that was sent to me by one of my Media & Society students. He had been part of a group presentation on media and education, and I am sure that he discovered this video as a part of his research. I include it here not just because it is directly relevant to the points that Illich is making and illustrates many of this thoughts in a graphically intriguing way, but also because my student having sent it to me of his own accord is a small, but compelling bit of evidence of how students will seek out that which they want to learn about on their own and the means by which modern communication technology make it so easy to share.

Near the beginning of Sherry Turkel’s chapter “Video Games and Computer Holding Power,” she makes a curious statement that resonates with many of my own experiences regarding the media. Writing about the  controversy and debate that surrounded (and continues to surround) video games, she notes, “the debate is charged with feelings about a lot more than the games themselves” (34). She goes on to note that the debate about video games is really a debate about computers, the role of computers in our culture, our relationship to computers, and so on. In other words, it is all about the inherent tensions and anxieties that many (if not most) people feel about the interrelationship of the human and the technological.

We have mentioned this in our discussions before, but I think it is absolutely crucial to remember in any debate about a technological medium—whether it be movies, or video games, or the Internet—that every new medium is always seen as dangerous and received with caution, regardless of the benefits it may proffer. We saw this with the invention of the printing press and the widespread availability of the written word; we saw it with the subsequent development of the penny press and the associated “penny dreadfuls”; we saw it with the invention and widespread popularity of movies, and then television … and now video games and the World Wide Web. All of these developments have their pluses and minuses: The printing press allows almost everyone to have access to the Bible and Shakespeare, but it also allows for the proliferation of pornography. The same is true of video games, and one thing that I most appreciated about Turkle’s approach to the material was her clear-eyed assessment of how video games can benefit us, but also the dangers they pose. She notes how they encourage new ways of thinking, strengthen our intellect, perform social functions, contribute to psychological well-being, and so forth. But, at the same time, the “hold” she describes, in which players are drawn into simulated worlds created and sustained by computer programming, can become addictive and potentially debilitating if they ultimately supersede our relationships outside that world.

Like all other technological developments, video games are what we make of them, and as we have seen over the past several decades, their possibilities are limited only to the human imagination and its capacities for both greatness and depravity.

Marshall McLuhan broke into the world of communication theory in 1964 with his equally heralded and deplored third book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In a single brilliant, maddening work, McLuhan, a Toronto-based English professor, tried to capture the entirety of mankind’s history and every major development in communication and media, which to McLuhan represents everything from spoken language to the electric light bulb. In McLuhan’s world, development doesn’t come quietly, but in the forms of explosions that rock the world and carry humans toward more change.

Subtlety is not one of McLuhan’s strong suits–on this both his celebrants and detractors can certainly agree. To him, everything is an explosion, and even the smallest, most seemingly insignificant things are of great importance. One of  McLuhan;s most profound observations is that all our inventions and media technologies are “extensions of man” that not only change the old world order, but also interact and conflict with each other. To me, that seems an interesting summation of the underlying premise of this seminar and most writing on media: That they are not just inorganic tools, but rather means of expanding our nervous systems and thought processes beyond our immediate physical space and creating the possibility of previously unimagined connections.

Of course, as the passages we read today from Understanding Media and The Gutenberg Galaxy amply demonstrate, reading McLuhan and understand his arguments is no easy task (hence his jokey cameo in Annie Hall, which had audiences in 1977 rolling but flies right over the heads of my students today). McLuhan writes in a kind of rampant, flowing prose that is filled with endless technical jargon, repetition, and contradictions. Although his writing has a nice, rhythmic flow to it, the words contained in the sentences often make little or no sense. His style of writing (and confusing the reader, some would say) is so unique that it has garnered its own term: “McLuhanese.” His jargon, which contains words and phrases such as “overheated media,” “configuration,” “detribalization,” and “cross-fertilization,” have come to be known as “McLuhanisms.”

The basic premise of Understanding Media is the constant development of new media — especially electronic media — and how those affect man. Because McLuhan sees these media as extensions of man, they have great and lasting effects, not only on mankind himself, but also on the environment he lives in. The bottom line, though, is that  “The medium is the message.” To McLuhan, what is said and how it is said is not nearly as important as what medium carries that message. As he puts it, “This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, an extension of ourselves — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology” (203). A few paragraphs later, he writes, “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium” (203). This would seem to suggest that there really is no actual content, just media within media, a concept of the utmost importance because the media are our inventions, which we cannot separate from ourselves because they are merely extensions of our own bodies.

In some ways, this assertion makes sense; in other ways it doesn’t. Every media scholar will admit that the medium has a profound impact on the message it carries. The same message carried through a newspaper and a television screen can often have much different effects. Reading about a horribly violent event is never as affecting as actually watching it, yet it is the same content. But, this is not far enough for McLuhan. To him, the medium is everything because media creates new environments which change man’s perceptions. History is nothing but a series of technological revolutions that constantly add more extensions to man and transform his life.

Sorry–I just couldn’t help including this clip.

This isn’t related to probably anything we will discuss in class regarding Computer Lib / Dream Machines, but in my routine background research on Theodor H. Nelson I discovered that he is the son of Ralph Nelson, a Hollywood filmmaker with a tendency toward rebelling against the system, a trait he seems to have passed down to his son. Ralph Nelson’s cinematic career began in they heyday of television in the 1950s, where he directed live anthology dramas, the best being 1956′s Requiem for a Heavyweight, before moving into feature films. In 1970 he directed Soldier Blue, a now largely forgotten western (or, more specifically, anti-western) that used the genre as a thin metaphor for the situation in Vietnam, especially the recently reported My Lai massacre. At the time, Soldier Blue was excoriated for its graphic levels of violence, although more to the point it was feared because it inverted the conventional moral spectrum of the genre by turning the cavalry into a bloodthirsty mob and depicting Native Americans as peaceful victims betrayed by the stars and stripes.

Of course, that all has little or nothing to do with Theodor Nelson’s work, except that his father’s rebellion against cinematic codes and traditional historical narratives is reflective of the son’s visceral sense of liberation and populism when it comes to the computer. In the age of personal computers–where many of us walk around with a more powerful personal computer in our pocket than we had on our desktop a decade ago–Nelson’s plea to free the machine from the clutches of computer scientists and engineers and put it in the hands of the masses is a no-brainer. But Nelson was writing in a different era, one in which the social, professional, and personal roles the computer would play were hardly set. His ideas about how computers can be used pedagogically reflect in many ways the current uses to which machines are put in the classroom, although his fears about their becoming another cog in a lock-step form of teaching still seems to happen.

As I read these pieces, there was part of me that just kept thinking, “He gets it.” And what is amazing is that he “got it” so much earlier than so many others. Probably the most pertinent point he makes is early in Computer Lib when he rhetorically asks why any of this matters, to which he answers: “It matters because we live in media, as fish live in water.” All I can say is … exactly.

I’ll be honest–I had no end of difficult in making my way through Douglas Engelbart‘s “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” This is not to say that the essay, which is actually a report he filed for the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), was entirely lost on me or did not speak to me at times. In fact, I found Englebart’s fundamental thesis that computers essentially augment what we already do to be extremely fascinating and quite provocative in the way it suggests great potential for these technologies, yet also humanizes them by focusing on how they increase–and are therefore a part of–human potential.

Although only a few weeks into the reading, I am seeing a strong trend in these visionaries’ thinking: At the core they want to solve problems. Interestingly, this is a facet of computer and technology development that I think is often lost in the popular imaginary, especially since Steve Jobs ascended to the rank of celebrity guru. The focus on new technologies, whether they be iPads or Droids or iPhones or Kindles, seems to lean toward their “cool” factor; that is, they give the bearer of these technologies a certain social status that becomes the envy of others. This is not to say that these technologies do not offer amazing functionality that contributes to the endeavor that Englebart proclaimed back in 1963, namely “increasing the capability of a man [sic] to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems.” Rather, it is that our first inclination seems to be an abstract fascination with technology as a new toy, rather than a tool to expand our intellects. It is almost as if these technologies succeed in spite of us.

Vannevar Buch’s 1945 essay “As We May Think” is amazing in its forward-thinking approach to the nature of content management–essentially how we store information, retrieve it, make use of it, and develop knowledge as a result. His vision of a “memex,” a desk-like structure that could house a mechanism that would aid in the fast retrieval of information via microfilm, never became a reality as originally envisioned, but the idea of it is embedded in so much modern computer technology. Rather than the speed of retrieval, what fascinated me about the device was his concept of how it would help us organize and use information via association, rather than traditional indexical approaches relying on alphabetizing or numbering. The ability to connect together disparate pieces of information into a “trail” that was then saved and could be revisited later is a remarkable concept and one that, in many ways, still eludes us today, even with all of our advanced software and computing power.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I have to admit that reading Bush’s essay stoked some of my more Luddite tendencies, particularly my love of the tangible nature of books and other physical media. My wife, who is completing her doctorate in psychology, once gave me an aptitude test, the results of which indicated that I was well suited to be a librarian–not a particularly surprising finding given my love of libraries. Beyond the abstract idea of the library as a repository for human knowledge, for me there is an aesthetic thrill to seeing all the books lined up in the stacks as a kind of visual representation of humankind’s accumulated intellectual achievements. I recognize that this is a purely aesthetic appreciation and one that is not necessarily conducive to efficient scholarship (as Bush makes abundantly clear), but it is something that I can’t quite shake. In fact, part of the reason I requested a Kindle for this course was to challenge myself to shake loose from my attachment to the old-fashioned bound book and more fully embrace the possibilities that Bush’s memex first envisioned.

This lavish CinemaScope epic is a fitting testament to the enormity of Ophuls’ vision even though it was a commercial and critical disaster that was unceremoniously butchered by its producers to try to recoup their money, all to no avail. The film in replete with Ophuls’ elegant sense of style, which adorns the first-rate costume and production design with fluid, sweeping camera movements that pull us into each moment with grace and beauty. However, the casting of French “sex siren” Martine Carol as Lola is a dud, as she should compel our attention, but instead merely toys with it. (DVD)

Eisner maintains the underlying themes—distrust of those around us, the thin line between sanity and insanity, the complementary terrors of organized versus hysterical violence—of Romero’s original film while also remedying its fundamental budgetary problems and wooden acting. Of course, there are a few elements that veer off-course, particularly its confused depiction of the infected as unnecessarily zombie-ish ghouls, which undercuts the original’s most potent source of horror: the difficulty distinguishing monsters from normal people. Still, it works surprisingly well, in terms of both its extended tension and its deployment of genuinely unsettling images and situations that linger in the mind long after it’s over.

At his core, in his soul, Scorsese is a genre filmmaker, and from that perspective, Shutter Island is the perfect Scorsese vehicle, as it allows him to take a well-worn genre (the psychological thriller with a crucial narrative twist) and remake it to his own strengths, which in this case involves atmosphere, tension, paranoia, and guilt, guilt, and more guilt. He plays the material with a precise mixture of Hitchcockian suspense and Buñuelian surrealism, elevating what could have been a rote bit of narrative trickery into something not quite profound, but intensely engaging and quite moving. (Starplex 16, Waco, TX)

With a complete lack of both sentimentality and judgment, this touching, deeply moving drama pursues the hard-edged truths about the physical and emotional dispersion of the modern American family and the way in which different generations are all but incapable of sharing the same space. McCarey asks us to see the characters as human and flawed, rather than as right or wrong, good or bad. Thus, when it comes to the uncompromised ending, which flies in the face of typical Hollywood uplift, the film has earned its tears and hopefully made us think a little bit more about the people around us and how we treat them. (DVD)