September 7 2017

Kathaleen McDonald

Dr. Wielgos

Senior Seminar

7 September 2017

Response 3: Understanding Mediums and Media

            I am not going to lie, this subject material is hard for me to understand. I definitely have my opinions about digital media, but after reading these articles, I find myself more confused and my eyes glazing over. Overall I think the authors make very good points that I definitely took away from their arguments, but overall I found the materials we have been reading lately difficult to follow, comprehend, and retain.

            I think without a doubt digital literacy is extremely important. As we march even farther into the twenty-first century, learning to navigate computers and databases has become vital information. I think McLuhan (and Fliore) in his book The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, make some very good and worthwhile statements, such as “Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media” (8). I think in this day and age, it is impossible to be a functioning member of this society without having proper knowledge of media. Look at how we can stay in touch so easily thanks to Facebook and texting. Getting involved in something you care about is so easy now—just make an event on Facebook and say you can go, and you instantly have the information right in front of your eyes. I also thought it was interesting what McLuhan had to say about how media has changed our family dynamics, “The family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by electric media…surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world's a sage” (14). Children used to think their parents were a goldmine and primary source of information, but nowadays children, including my generation, soon find out that technology can answer their questions a lot better than dear old ma and pa can. Whereas McLuhan seemed a little fearful of the way technology is shaping our coming world, Hayles sees digital literacy as quite the advantage.

            I found Hayles’s article “Print is Flat, Code is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis” very challenging and difficult to get through. Hayles makes some amazing points and arguments, but the language he uses is a bit over my head. When Hayles argues that “Electronic Hypertexts Include Both Analogue Resemblance and Digital Coding,” her second of nine points, she says “At the most basic level of the computer are electronic polarities, which are related to the bit stream through the analogue correspondence of morphological resemblance” (75). I have no idea what a majority of the words in that sentence mean, so I had a very hard time trying to comprehend the meaning of this sentence, and thus I felt defeated and stressed trying to get through the rest of the article. Some statements, though, I found very easily said, such as her concluding statement, “Books are not going the way of the dinosaur but the way of the human, changing as we change, mutating and evolving in ways that will continue, as a book lover said long ago, to teach and delight” (87). I absolutely love and agree with this statement. Books are never going to go away, at least not anytime soon, but the way we read them and access them will change. Although I am someone who prefers having a physical book in my hand and will go out of my way to print out an article rather than read it off a screen, I do think the ease of having so much information at your fingertips is incredible, and knowing how to use these types of technologies and medias can only help us in the future.

            Although I only really found McLuhan’s and Hayles’s pieces striking and relevant to me, I think that Gitelman makes a good point in saying that we produce what society wants, and if what society wants is something such as, say, a phonograph, the community will come together and make it happen, just as McLuhan said we would.