«Media Communication» is an hendiadys; but for today we live it in a certain manner. It simply signifies: no communication (i.e. … happens, … is possible) without a medium, and also: «the medium is the message», as McLuhan wrote («It was not until the advent of the telegraph that messages could travel faster than a messenger. Before this, roads and the written word were closely interrelated»[1]). Then in that locution the stress falls on the first word, according to the strength of philosophy of the means, which in general impose themselves.
That meaning can be so divided into two meanings: (1) the communication is daughter of the modern media, which only made possible and developed the idea itself of communication («Before the electric speed and total field - McLuhan says -, it was not obvious that the medium is the message»[2]); and/or (2) ab antiquo every notice, every information (in the nature, in the society), every movement, was due to a medium.
According to that second meaning (writing perhaps - and I say: psychologically - anticipates facebook, even if different times are no comparable), media communication (like memory) would not belong to our age but concerns every age and every medium in order to any possible knowledge of «how it happens» or «how we have to do to obtain …», or any technical notion and information.
Then we have not to ask simply: «what would happen to my life if I could not, without my cell phone, communicate my dangerous state?» But also: «what it would have been of Aristotle’s works without Carthusians?».
If the first meaning generally ties much itself to the importance of machines, devices and media, discovered in the modern age, from Shickard Pascal and Leibniz - through telegraph, photography, television and cybernetics - up to our days, or to the fact that media became important but in a consumer and capitalistic society (so called «second life» in internet), the thinking and meaning must generally go back to the past, when - I suppose - in fact media were important not less than today, not although but because technique was considered as a minor art and like a sort of slavish stuff; for then the diffusion of media was minor. This, which seems a paradox, is on the contrary an important aspect of the media theory, according to concepts - I think - of its founding father, Marshall McLuhan.
At this point - putting now aside its slavish character or role - a double aspect arises from the same property: (1) an essentiality or necessity of technique and (2) its indubitable relativism.
Essential and unquestionably historical was the paper medium because of the perpetuation in written form of Aristotle’s works; but subjective was its transcription - and of course we must understand in what meaning we talk about subjectivity. Essential and unquestionably historical was in the ancient times the use of wagon to carry men and things - but different the possibility, the ability and the responsibility of the carter and so on: nor the paper neither the wagon are equal to themselves.
Where if the subjectivity of the user conditions and qualifies the function itself of the medium, not for this decreases or ends the objective value of the thing, its necessity, its utility, its being-in-itself too: without user, there is no utility.
Now, to pay attention to the media concerning the communication of the thinking, we must add that the relativism of the writing follows that of the word in the oral societies, like an ancient root. Whereby, there is a rhetoric of the word, a rhetoric of writing, of the printing and finally of the electronic communication - and that not in an optics of the differentiation between naturalness and art making.
Then we must suppose there’s a strong analogous link: if it seems that our age, but living immersed in a great rhetoric, by electricity have raised the medium up to goal (H. Gadamer said: Essence is the being itself of the Medium), if that happened and happens - as if it could give reason to Heidegger’s «Essence of Technique» theory -, then we cannot exclude that it happened in the ancient times too, with different culture and mode but in a manner mostly unconfessed. If medium is reducible to an idea and better to a philosophical category of thinking, and the idea is equal to itself, then ….
In other words, if today we live media in a growing role, the human psychology is - I think - more important than the question itself about the importance and conscious use of importance of media in the various ages. If we cannot affirm that the use of a medium requires in the user a perfect scientific or technical knowledge, and rather we cannot raise this exact aspect of the question to a rule level, then nothing inhibits us to juxtapose unconsciousness of today to that of yesterday. And that deposes paradoxically in favor of McLuhan’s theory.
We have supposed too, in a recent article, that the electric and electronic media (radio, television, computers, cell phones, tablets etc.) producing an information movement, brought man and civility to a point in which they live always in a distance, where the distance becomes a condition and structural part of the communication and of the individual psychology: «General characteristic of transport and communication but - why not, looking into the essence of the question? - of photography, cinema, television, informatics and telematics (because in them there are birth and evolution of double of himself - perhaps a fate, awakened by technique), is and was breaking down territorial boundaries of the countries as cultural factor, changing relationship between mankind and geography, World-Earth and mankind. Not only in the sense of winning distance conceiving media increasingly fast but of producing an anthropological culture of distance. Something in which distance, dominated, ruled, imposes itself, for an irony-principle - like what happens to the objects of Baudrillard - and is introjected. Or in which feeling of distance becomes the pre-condition to win material distance (space-and-time) and to get governance of it, so joining what otherwise could split only. McLuhan would have declared: “Each form of transport not only carries, but translates and transforms, the sender, the receiver, and the message”.
Therefore, greater will be the power and velocity of transport or communication medium, greater the distance between an A point - Rome, for instance - and a B point - Paris for instance -; greater will be the space we must go through (in a shortest possible time), stronger generally in the projecting and psychology of use will be the sense and value of distance»[3].
Shortly: if men live to win the distance, that signifies that the distance has been introjected, necessarily, historically, humanly. And in that aspect it’s very important calculation or computation, that aspect or attitude of the human mind - before than of the machines - to which Th. Hobbes first gave theory status, considering them inherent in the nature itself of thinking. And that at a certain moment of the occidental history (we can remember the «mathematical navigation» in the seventeenth century) the calculation became a principle of action and better of industry and technology. Man discovered realistically the nature of thinking, or the nature of himself as a thinking being, as if his fate would depend on the technology, and began to act consequently. A principle more active for instance than that of ancient Egyptian scribes.
In that perspective, it seems that geography (better: relationship mankind-geography) or space-time, drives the game; and that I say as regard of the difference between the ancient and medieval ages and the modern and postmodern one.
So if the wagon precedes the ship and the airways and the radio and the television and the computer, if the trend is the same, we can affirm the characteristic of the media (in the oral cultures, in the writing, in the book too) is the struggle of man against the distance, or space-time.
The culture of distance is a progressive culture: the culture of the victory against the distance, of challenging distance, creating distance imagining we can win it; but if always men struggled against distance or space-and-time, the modern age as «information movement» age, as McLuhan taught, begins only with the advent of the telegraph (1834, or so): then the message became faster than the messenger («It is only since the telegraph that information has detached itself from such solid commodities as stone and papyrus, much as money had earlier detached itself from hides, bullion, and metals, and has ended as paper» and then: «The term “communication” has had an extensive use in connection with roads and bridges, sea routes, rivers, and canals, even before it became transformed into "information movement" in the electric age. Perhaps there is no more suitable way of defining the character of the electric age than by first studying the rise of the idea of transportation as communication, and then the transition of the idea from transport to information by means of electricity»[4]), where the messenger like the paper like the road equally became not decisive. Then the man (and Heidegger, like an «anti-Hobbes», splits a «calculating thought» from a «thinking thought») begins a calculating man.
Not willing or not canning judge at the bottom about the different importance of media in the ancient and in the modern societies, and only canning talk about the importance «de jure» and «de facto» in those ages, we so can talk about the distance as the characteristic that the modern society gradually reaches as an electric-and-electronic age; a new psychological condition in an age of psychological transformation.
Then the culture of media, for its characteristic of modernity, is definable as the culture «of distance». And here work two forces: the struggle against distance (geographic distance, space-and-time) and the birth - in the sense of the Age of the Mechanical Reproduction of the Work of Art but not only of the Work of Art - of double of man[5] and of reality, that are deeply related.
Regarding this second aspect, man accepts a principle of likelihood and plausibility when photography, cinema and computer reveal and put in front of him a new surprising (similar) reality («the real is not only that which can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: the hyperreal»: so Baudrillard, in an almost (nearly) platonic style, enunciating, with regard of a realistic sensibility, a kind of «effectiveness principle» and promoting a strong approaching or quasi-identification between media theory and simulation theory) and in that at the same time an appearance that seems the double of himself. That’s technique and that’s psychology: it’s difficult to distinguish or to separate them. What we can affirm is that perhaps there is a lot of psychology in the essence of object as an object (which is not simply the flat thing which lies in front of us, if it is that, in seeing, touching and using, we are in front of it) and that the new apparent, similar reality and double of man causes a separation, the same that reverses and translates itself in the culture of distance, as if that was the necessary conclusion.
The man of the culture of distance so presents himself as a divided man; simulation but realism require division.
And we can say «simulation» for instance in the same moment we go mentally to the Turing test: place a machine and an human being in two different rooms and put to them questions from a third room, waiting for answers, in a typewritten form or in an anonymous one. In the test it’s decisive to identify answers given by the machine... Where the object and the appearance are very important, but clearly it’s the distance which drives the game.
[1]M. McLuhan, Understanding Media, Ch. 10.
[2]Understanding Media, Ch. 1.
[3]P.P., La cultura della distanza; but see also Id., Ancora sulla cultura della distanza; and generally Id., Crepuscolo dell’uomo di Gutenberg.
[4] McLuhan, Understanding Media, Ch. 10. See also J. Derrida’s theory of the “not semantic movements”.
[5]W. Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit.
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