Tag: Media Theory

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Blanks for the Memories

“The tape cassette is a liberating force…” proclaimed Malcolm McLaren thirty years ago. “Taping has produced a new lifestyle.” Cassettes made recording and customization possible. Cassette players made listening on the go possible.

Tom Waits by iri5

More than any other subset of culture, youth culture was created — and is enabled — by technology. The telephone supposedly created the Teenager, and even if it didn’t, those formative years of the socialization process wouldn’t be the same without the dialtone (even metaphorically), and for my generation, the same could be said for the cassette tape.

“Home taping is killing music.” It sounds funny now, but the British Phonographic Industry — sister of the RIAA — was incensed. Their attitude was that every blank tape sold was a record stolen. “BPI  says that home taping costs the industry £228 billion a year in lost revenue,” McLaren said in 1979, “so they’re not happy that Bow Wow Wow have already reached No. 25 on the singles chart… ” The home-taping controversy was handcrafted for McLaren. He was managing Bow Wow Wow who had a hit with a song celebrating home-taping called “C-30! C-60! C-90! Go!”  “In fact,” adds McLaren, “it’s the classic story of the 80s. It’s about a girl who finds it cheaper and easier to tape her favorite discs off the radio… which is why the record companies are so petrified.”

“The other big advantage of cassettes, of course, were that they were recordable,” elaborates Steven Levy in a recent Gizmodo piece celebrating the thirty-year anniversary of the Walkman.

You’d buy blank 90-minute cassettes (chrome high bias, if you were an audio nut) and tape one album on each side. (Since most records were shorter than 45 minutes, you’d grab a song or two from another album to avoid a long dead spot before the tape reversed.) And you’d borrow albums from friends and tape your own. You could also tape from other cassettes, but the quality degraded each time you made a copy made from a copy. It was like an organic form of DRM. Everybody had a box with hand-labeled cassettes and before you went on a car trip you’d dig in the box to find the tunes that would soundtrack your journey.

TapeThe magnetic tape was as much a part of the journey as the road. The portability and recordability of cassettes, which all sounds so very labor intensive now, were the precursor to today’s MP3s and iPods. Just as the book individualized the exchange of stories and information, the cassette tape and its attendant technologies individualized music listening.

Seeing the iconic cassette tapes on the shirts of the teens these days, like some technological Che Guevera, confirms Heraclitus’s conjecture that generations cycle on thirty-year intervals. You’re not likely to see the same thing come of the compact disc (it’s more of a RuPaul than a Che), so here’s to the cassette tape, the 3.5″ disc of the stereo.

[Tom Waits cassette art by iri5]

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You Will

In the early 90s, AT&T ran a series of commercials that posed some futuristic, technologically enabled task (e.g., “Have you ever borrowed a book from thousands of miles away?”), and then answered it emphatically (“You will.”), claiming they’d be the company to technologically enable such a task. I believe they’ve all come to pass except one. As Stewart Brand once said, “Technology marches on, over you or through you, take your pick.”

You Will

I can’t help but think that many of the technological advances we debate and marvel about were downright inevitable. In 1982, when I first got a computer, one of my main intentions was to get a modem and connect to databases. My eleven-year-old self wasn’t as hungry for information — I could’ve gotten the same stuff from the “database”  down the street known as “the library.” I was hungry for the idea of connectivity. The idea that I could connect my computer to other computers and exchange information. The idea was exhilarating.

Doesn’t that feeling, one that I shared with plenty of people by then, make the internet inevitable?

Didn’t your first unassisted ride on a bike feel like flying? Riding that two-wheeled bridge of balance is like taking off on wings of your own. In more sober tones, Marshall McLuhan (1964) aligned the two activities as well, writing,

It was the tandem alignment of wheels that created the velocipede and then the bicycle, for with the acceleration of wheel by linkage to the visual principle of mobile lineality, the wheel acquired a new degree of intensity. The bicycle lifted the wheel onto the plane of aerodynamic balance, and not too indirectly created the airplane. It was no accident that the Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics, or that early planes seemed in some ways like bicycles (p. 182).

Supposedly birds evolved the same way. Dinosaurs became bipedal via their large, counterbalancing tails. Eventually the same concept morphed wings.

Karl Popper (1968) called it “exosomatic evolution” (p. 238), adding that now we don’t grow faster legs, we grow bicycles and cars; we don’t grow bigger brains or memories, we grow computers. McLuhan continues, writing, “The transformations of technology have the character of organic evolution because all technologies are extensions of our physical being” (p. 182). Software and city blocks are as natural as ant hills and broccoli.

The argument that technology is organic begs the question of what to do about it: How do we maintain control over our contrivances?

The argument that technology is organic answers the question as well: We maintain control over our contrivances in the same way that we maintain control over our lawns. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t.

References:

Brand, S. (1988). The media lab: Inventing the future at MIT. New York: Penguin.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Popper, K. (1968). Objective knowledge: An evolutionary approach. New York: Oxford University Press.

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And here they are, the AT&T “You Will” commercials from 1993:

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“Disconnecting the Dots” on Reality Sandwich

For my latest piece for Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordan’s web publication, Reality Sandwich, I poached and updated a few things I’d written about here. Here’s an excerpt:

Technology curates culture. As such, the alienation we feel from our technologically mediated “all-at-once-ness” (as McLuhan called it) comes from a disconnection between physical goals and technology’s “help” in easing our workload.

“For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life,” Alice Kahn once quipped, “please press three.”  I’m not anti-technology, but I have been trying to grasp what our devices are doing to us, as well as the relationship between technology, culture, and people. Our devices are often divisive.

Read the full article here.

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Dreaming Out Loud: Transubstantiation

Dreaming Out LoudIn 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006),* Daniel Pinchbeck extends Heisenberg’s idea that observation influences the observed into a Hegelian wordview that consciousness constitutes the core of reality, as if the physical world and our perception of it are merely two sides of the same phenomenon. Taken wholesale, it’s not quite solipsism, but it’s close. Either way, the veneer between the two is definitely permeable, but one needn’t believe in magic to see how.

The world is inseparable from the observing subject and is accordingly not objectifiable.
— Arthur March

I’ve written before about the Burkian designation of literature as “equipment for living.” As Richard Rorty puts it, “the point of reading a great many books is to become aware of a great number of alternative purposes, and the point of that is to become an autonomous self.” Virtual reality started with the first story told. Literature is a workout for your mind.

The prosifications of the greats are no more use than dumb bells under the bed if you don’t pump them. — Eddie Coffin in Tibor Fischer’s ‘The Thought Gang’

When different situations exist in your world, your brain is different. New knowledge and new stuff physically and chemically changes the make up of what’s in your head. Howard Bloom uses the example of bags used to carry things. In his “Jack the Pelican presents” lecture from 2003, he explains transubstantiation (i.e., things moving between the spiritual realm and the material world) by saying that our brains are different when different inventions exist. That is, we have different thoughts and dreams after certain ideas and innovations exist in our world (the material to the spiritual). Before bags were invented, one could only carry what would fit in one’s hands. After bags, well, it depends on the bag and one’s fortitude for carrying.

Looking down on empty streets, all she can see
Are the dreams all made solid
Are the dreams all made real

All of the buildings, all of the cars
Were once just a dream
In somebody’s head
— Peter Gabriel, “Mercy Street”

Howard also explains a dream invention that he’s had since he was a boy and how a computer company set out to make it, saying that one of his lifelong dreams will be a reality (the spiritual to the material). It’s not What the Bleep Do We Know? or The Secret, but it can be powerful — if not magical — stuff.

My first memory of something passing through the spirit/world barrier was one of my moms’ friends telling me she had a dream about a balloon tree. She managed to remember the idea and executed a version of it for her daughter’s birthday party to great effect. The next time I paid attention to the idea was when I first met Paul Barman.

Paul takes his dreams very seriously. “I always try to make my dreams come true,” he told me. “When I dream about something, if I can possibly make it happen… I mean, what better instructions could you be given?”

References:

Fischer, T. (1997). The Thought Gang. New York: Scribner.

Gabriel, P. (1986). So. Geffen Records.

Kain, P. J. (2005). Hegel and the Other: A Study of the Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: SUNY Press.

Pinchbeck, D. (2006). 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. New York: Tarcher/Penguin.

Rorty, R. (November 2, 2000). “The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture.” Retrieved from Richard Rorty’s Homepage.

* I’m finished reading it, so this is the last post about this book, I promise. Also, his is sort of a companion piece to the last post, Pumping Irony: Technology and Disconnectivity, albeit from the opposite extreme.

[“Ballon Tree” drawing by Roy Christopher]

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Pumping Irony: Technology and Disconnectivity

Since I started riding a fixed-gear bicycle, people often ask me why? What’s the appeal? Well, one of the reasons that fixed-gears are so seductive is the direct connection one has to the distance traveled and the control of the motion. No matter the terrain or conditions, your body is always at work negotiating the ride. You are directly connected to your environment. Continue reading “Pumping Irony: Technology and Disconnectivity”

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Behind Enemy Lines

I just returned to Austin from San Diego, where I was head-deep in the world of five-gallon buckets, toolbelts, aluminum ladders, and drooling paint cans. Yes, construction. You see, my friend Josh Beagle and his partners Ray and Albert are starting a meat-curing business, and I spent the last several days helping them build out their new warehouse facility. Continue reading “Behind Enemy Lines”