CAT 1: Media Seductions
Mind and Machine
Elizabeth Losh
http://losh.ucsd.edu
How’s My Driving?
Please CAPE This Course!
A link should have been sent to your .ucsd account
Mixtape Madness!
Advice Moving Forward
Reach out and make contact with your professors
Take advantage of being a Sixth College student!
Plan ahead!
Tackle projects in stages (with the Writing Studio
if need be)
Know that original arguments don’t have to be
hard to defend as you become researchers
yourselves!
Writing Studio Pizza Party Tonight!
5:30-7:30 Writing Studio Finale for the Quarter!
You can talk about how to apply the last rubric!
Suggestions from Kyle Wilson
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2009/
feb/11/satanic-verses-rushdie-fatwa-khomeini
Sections like
2:54-3:32
5:20-5:46
7:45-8:12
The Final Paper
Reflections from Classmate Zuhayr Haq
General Feelings about the Book I:
As a Muslim student in Media Seductions, I felt that reading The
Satanic Verses was difficult but necessary. I believe it is important
to understand and consider one’s arguments before condemning
and speaking out against the arguments of others. While I do agree
with Rushdie’s views regarding racism against immigrants and the
forgetting of one’s culture, I disagree with the medium used to
communicate them.
I guess in this case, I side with the McLuhan argument about the
importance of the vessel of the information over the directly
communicated concepts; to me, the vessel had a much more
powerful impact than the message itself. I understand that it may
be difficult for non-Muslims to understand why the book is
offensive; there don’t seem to be explicit attacks on the
fundamental concepts of Islam itself.
The Final Paper
Reflections from Classmate Zuhayr Haq
General Feelings about the Book II:
There are plenty of subtleties that disturb me as a reader,
however. Saladin, who is considered a very noble figure
amongst Muslims, is undermined as submissive to British
culture. Many readers probably wouldn’t catch on to the
fact that while his last name, Chamcha, means “spoon” in
Hindi/Urdu, it is also slang for “lackey.”
Gibreel Farishta (Farishta means “angel” in Hindi/Urdu) is
an allusion to Angel Jibreel in Islam. His role as a Bollywood
actor completely undermines the angel’s role in Islam, as
one who is consistent subservient to God.
The Final Paper
Reflections from Classmate Zuhayr Haq
General Feelings about the Book III:
One of the most offensive fabrications is the story
of Muhammad. There are several instances in
the novel where Mahound does things that are
inconsistent with what we are taught as Muslims.
It struck me when Mahound compared “writers”
to “whores,” because in the Quran we are taught
that we should should strive to gain and spread
knowledge.
The Final Paper
Reflections from Classmate Zuhayr Haq
About the Controversy:
I disagree with Khomeini’s fatwa against
Rushdie. Islam does not endorse vigilantes;
Muslim must respect the laws of the religions
in which they reside. Also we are taught as
Muslims that the Prophet himself loved those
who were opposed to him.
The Final Paper
Reflections from Classmate Zuhayr Haq
Other Thoughts:
I feel that just because it may be in one’s power to use
media to depict controversial things, they do not have
to be depicted. The Satanic Verses and Piss Christ deal
with the very sensitive issue of religion and have the
potential to incite violence.
Although they are within legal bounds, they may be the
cause of that which is not within legal bounds. Religion
is a sensitive thing. Still though, I feel that it is
necessary to understand these works before expressing
opposition to them.
Charting Out Works
Synthesizing Information for the Final Exam
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Losh Thesis/Theses
Medium/Media . . . about Medium/Media
Level of vividness and interactivity
Genre(s)
Historical Context (especially with regard to culture, art, and
technology)
Scholarly disciplines weighing in on media influence
Moral panics, censorship, or prohibitions on what can be
represented
Physical impact of media on the body or on the senses (how do
horror, melodrama, etc. work physiologically)
What does this work say about questions of audience? Who is
vulnerable to a particular kind of media experience?
Attitudes about nurture vs. nature (including race and gender)
Narrative Features (captivity, conversion, etc.)
Theories of Media Influence
History
Communication
Philosophy
Literary and Film Theory
Art History and Aesthetics
Psychology
Social Psychology
Behaviorism
Neuroscience
The Biology of Reading
What travels at 30 miles per hour?
We’ll come back to vision tracking in the next
lecture.
Ask Dr. Stella Debode of UCLA
about brain plasticity.
What is a hemispherectomy?
UCSD’s V.S. Ramachandran
(1951-)
Pages 29-30 of The Shallows
In addition to studying phantom limb
syndrome, he also studies Capgras delusion,
synesthesia, and how mirror neurons might
explain autism.
Nurture vs. Nature
(Carr 28)
John Locke
Tabula Rasa
Immanuel Kant
Mental Templates
How do we try to design the the world?
How do our technologies design us?
• How can we think about the ethics of
technology? (45)
• How do we understand the relationship
between determinism and instrumentalism?
(46)
Carr’s Anxieties about the Internet
• Internet access may actually constrict the
scope of our memory
• Internet habits of reading may cause our
attention to become more superficial
The Five Canons of Classical Rhetoric
Invention
Arrangement
Style
Memory
Delivery
What have you memorized?
CAT Important Questions
How can you apply them to reading Carr?
In the twenty-first century, how do we shape the world,
and how does the world shape us?
What ethical questions are raised by designed objects,
environments, and interactions?
How do cultures manage change?
Why does the historical context of a given technology or
commodity matter? How far back in time should we
look? Which factors should we weigh most heavily?
How do we understand media on a global scale?
How is sensory experience mediated?
What forms of production and consumption do we take for
granted in contemporary life?
How do new solutions sometimes create new problems?
What is the book as a medium?
Why is genre not important? (72)
Would the Thorpes and the Tilneys agree?
Back to Plato and
Writing as a Technology
Carr 53-57
Greeks invented the
phonetic alphabet
relatively recently
The shift from oral culture
to literary culture
Plato’s arguments about
“implanting forgetfulness
in our souls” if we rely on
“external marks”
Why are hyperlinks different from
other finding aids?
Page 90: “Links are in one sense a variation on the textual
allusions, citations, and footnotes that have long been
common elements of documents. But their effect on us as
we read is not at all the same. Links don’t just point us to
related or supplemental works; they propel us toward them.”
The Concept of Deep Reading
“In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged,
undistracted reading of a book, people made up their
own associations, drew their own inferences and
analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply
as they read deeply” (65)
Obviously I think reading challenging
books is important . . .
Did you spend Thanksgiving with a 500-page
plus book?
. . . and I accept that technology often
has unintended consequences
Do text readers for the blind have unintended
consequences? Are we losing Braille literacy?
Plus Nicholas Carr seems like a nice
enough guy . . .
Remember his e-mail from the beginning of
class?
“fuller context of intellectual history” (115)
Thesis of the Week
Although Nicholas Carr makes a more
compelling argument about the decline of
reading than Mark Bauerlein, author of The
Dumbest Generation, Carr doesn’t always
accurately represent arguments from the
historical past about media influence or
current findings about the intersection of
culture, art, and technology in contemporary
neuroscience.
Print Culture and Social Media
Robert Darnton
Print Culture: Copyright, Piracy, and
the Instability of Truth and Authorship
Adrian Johns
Misreading
What does it mean to use Marshall McLuhan
and Walter J. Ong in an argument critical of
electronic media and secondary orality?
Overreaching
Is his description of the death of Alan Turing
on page 81 accurate?
Why might two distinguished Duke
professors disagree with Carr?
Katherine Hayles
Cathy Davidson
They would agree that Carr’s
arguments have some merits
Davidson agrees about brain plasticity
Hayles agrees about technogenesis
Hayles Questions the Science
The chain of assumptions that led Small, for example, to conclude that brain
function changed as a result of Google searches can go wrong in several
different ways (see Sanders (2009) for a summary of these criticisms). First,
researchers assume that the correlation between activity in a given brain area is
caused by a particular stimulus; however, most areas of the brain respond
similarly to several different kinds of stimuli, so another stimulus could be
activating the change rather than the targeted one. Second, fMRI data sets
typically have a lot of noise, and if the experiment is not repeated, the observed
phenomenon may be a chimera rather than a genuine result (in Small’s case,
the experiment was repeated later with eighteen additional volunteers).
Because the data sets are large and unwieldy, researchers may resort to using
sophisticated statistical software packages they do not entirely understand. In
addition, the choice of colors used to visualize the statistical data is arbitrary,
and different color contrasts may cause the images to be interpreted differently.
Finally, researchers may be using a circular methodology in which the
hypothesis affects how the data is seen (an effect called nonindependence).
When checkers went back through fMRI research that had been published in
the premier journals Nature, Science, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron and the
Journal of Neuroscience, they found interpretive errors resulting from
nonindependence in 42 percent of the papers (cited in Sanders 2009:16).
Hayles Goes Back to the Primary Sources
Relying on summaries of research in books such as Carr’s creates
additional hazards. I mentioned earlier a review of hypertext experiments
(DeStefano and LeFevre 2007) cited by Carr, which he uses to buttress his
claim that hypertext reading is not as good as linear reading. Consulting
the review itself reveals that Carr has tilted the evidence to support his
view. The authors state, for example, that “[t]here may be cases in which
enrichment or complexity of the hypertext experience is more desirable
than maximizing comprehension and ease of navigation,” remarking that
this may be especially true for students who already read well. They argue
not for abandoning hypertext but rather for “good hypertext design” that
takes cognitive load into account “to ensure hypermedia provide at least
as good a learning environment as more traditional text” (DeStefano and
LeFevre 2007:1636; emphasis added). Having read through most of Carr’s
primary sources, I can testify that he is generally conscientious in
reporting research results; nevertheless, the example illustrates the
unsurprising fact that reading someone else’s synthesis does not give as
detailed or precise a picture as reading the primary sources themselves.
Hayles
Hyperattention
How might this have been a survival mechanism?
Davidson
Attention Blindness
How many basketball passes can you count?