zestinpeace

Another animal on the computer

  • he/him

Call me Zest. :3 Internet furry, fan of art, computers, and overthinking. Sydney, Australia. Born '98.


merzboat
@merzboat

Fittingly for the beginning of a new platform, my first installment of the Album of the Day is a piece by media theorist Marshall McLuhan.


The Medium is the Massage (1962) is a 42 minutes long audio recording of the book of the same name, and cosisting of an audio collage (mainly McLuhan talking about his theories of communication) with spoken word, samples, and incidental music.

Something that caught my attention was the conversation surrounding this album on the internet, together with its related media. It tends to focus on how contemporary the comments on media control, data broking, ubiquitous computing, etc. appear, seemingly despite the distance in time of more than half a century. The first thing I thought when I started to write this was how his statement that "the new medium contains the previous media" reflects the way that, by being understood as a replacement for twitter, cohost is approached by a large portion of the userbase not so much as a new twitter but as a channel for twitter as content. By being semiotically dependant on a previous social media, the new one is seen as a conduit and its unique characteristics fly under the user's radar.

That use of McLuhan's theory is well and good but I want to focus on one aspect: was this "predicted"? Marshall McLuhan wrote his best known pieces during the 60s. This seems like a long time ago and it's easy to point at things that have changed and claim that we live in a completely different era. But I wouldn't be so hasty, and in fact I'd argue that the strength in McLuhan's ideas come from the fact that their subjects haven't changed. Media is still media, communication is still communication. Online social platforms may appear radically novel compared to the telephone or the tv but the underlying mechanisms (and their relationships to hegemonic structures) remain the same. This is why I say this album did not "predict" anything, there was no writing on the wall. The scary thing is not that someone could see into the future, but that in this future we inhabit nothing has changed,

This is the first installment of a series of semi-regular reviews/​recommendations/​commentaries on music I'll make titled "Album of the Day". I do not plan to do this daily, however I think I will be able to keep it up somewhat. No promises.


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