Extreme Mediation
These are two images depicting extreme technological mediation that I’m hoping to include in the final book on this topic.
The first I found in a book called Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation (Aperture, 1996) edited by Timothy Druckery. It’s called “We’ll All Be Happy Then” by Harry Grant Dart, and it ran in Life magazine in 1911. It shows a man completely immersed in media:
The next, a similar piece, is from Jeff Nicholson’s Through the Habitrails (Bad Habit, 1994). It depicts Jeff in an all-encompassing, technology-induced weekend binge:
Just short of what has been called “The Moravec Process,” whereby one’s consciousness is uploaded into the machine (or the character in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash [Bantam Spectra, 1992] whose van and half-functional body have become one), these two pictures illustrate the extremes to which one could take technological mediation.
Cautionary tales abound when it comes to technology and control, and these two images certainly give caution.
Further Posting:
I’m currently reading Voyage to the End of the Room by Tibor Fischer (one of my favorite fiction authors — highly recommended), which explores many of the same themes of extreme mediation depicted above.
[...] off-world aboard its all-inclusive space community — the “Axiom” — where our every need is provided by machines (e.g., hoverchairs, ubiquitous screens, meals in cups eaten through straws, [...]
You’ve hit the ball out the park! Incerbidle!
Respond / React:
I am currently an Assistant Instructor corrupting the youth at The University of Texas at Austin, where I am also pursuing a Ph.D. in Communication Studies. My main interests are figurative language use and the social impacts of technology. My main goal as a writer is to entertain and as a scientist is to find novelty. I’m more of the former than the latter and more of a fan than a critic. This site is where all of these things play out. It’s where I think aloud about all of the above.
I’m an aging BMX/skateboard 'zine kid. That’s where I learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. The pages and staples have long since given way to links and scrollbars, but the rest is basically the same. I still ride bikes, and I still skateboard. I do still commit quite a bit to actual pages, too. Read on »
