Welcome to the Global Village

Here is Part I of the presentation, by project partner Jen Hanson





A word about the photoshopped images from McLuhan's "neighborhood" scenes ... the preceding screenshots were altered through photoshop to show some more differences in living spaces that followers of McLuhan's philosophies and theories would potentially employ. Tools used during the photoshop insertion include, but are not limited to: paths, layers, scale, warp, skew, rasterizing, lighting, shadows, eyedropper, history brush, pen, and perspective.

1. The Living Room – This urban living room features soft, unobtrusive lighting that corresponds with humankind's singular attachment to "nature." The laptop on the counter not only signifies the brochure's claim to provide every citizen with a laptop, but it pokes fun at the advertisement—a symbol reminiscent of the "glyph," which is the foundation of all archived data, and a direct descendent of the digital age. The magazine on the couch is an old copy of Time, featuring Bill Gates holding an old floppy disk on the cover. The poster of McLuhan shows him holding a portable television—an object of fascination and personal rejection.

2. The Shower – There may be a television screen in here, but it's for digitized archives of the news, and for continuous feed of educational and communications material.

3. The Kitchen – Featured here are two symbols that attach the global village to an acceptable form of visual media, which is film and cinema. Film is considered a "hot" form of media, while television, radio, and telephones are "cold." There is also another copy of print media on the counter (news is better than art; it is "artifact"), and the sign in the corner is a joke that plays off of McLuhan's quote, "An advertisement is an advertisement of an advertisement."


Informatics, UIUC, Final Project from Aaron Geiger on Vimeo.



“Welcome to the Global Village”
Lecture II by: Aaron Geiger
Project partner: Jen Hanson
Final Project / INFO 390
Jon Stone, University of Illinois

“The Neighborhood”

McLuhan’s “neighborhood” is really no different from the “frontier.” A car isn’t a car—it’s an extension of the foot. It walks from building to building, as you would walk from sink to refrigerator to bathroom. It is a part of you.

Traffic lights could be considered doors, and each road a hallway, or a footpath in the terrain. McLuhan said, “The road is our major architectural form. The road is a flattened out wheel, rolled up in the belly of an airplane.”

The buildings are extensions of simpler living. They are fractals of technology. Small businesses prevail in the ideal Global Village. The idea of big business was distasteful to McLuhan, even though he died in 1980, just as companies like Wal-Mart were beginning to take foot.

He said, “In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once.” Small businesses promote intimacy and personal interaction. In the Global Village small business architecture grants access to nature through large window openings, grassy rooftops, and comfortable winding interiors.

The most intimate part of McLuhan’s “neighborhood” is the home. Like the frontier home, accessibility to nature and community is paramount. Unlike homes you are used to, here they observe the rules of artifact, archive, and education. McLuhan used to echo the line, “Tomorrow is our permanent address.”

Welcome to tomorrow.

Living spaces are simple and refined, there is no television, there are no phones or radios, and print media is just as important as the Internet.

The balcony is a parapet from which to observe the actuality of living things, of neon lights that represent the foot of man.

The living room demonstrates minimalist settings, “wired” communication through laptops, sculptures and posters vs. television, and print media, which is a source of archived history. The large windows are transparent portals that connect human and nature. Notice the absence of “entertainment centers,” radios, and telephones.

Even the shower can be a source for news and education: “With TV it is not so much the message as the sender that is ‘sent’” (McLuhan, Media is the Massage, 113).

The kitchen shows the natural style of lighting. Soft, relaxing, and replicating the waning rays of the sun, light is a prominent fixture. Like the skylight in the shower stall, humans need the light for health. Also in this kitchen we see the connection to film and cinema—acceptable forms of media.

And with the launch of a folded piece of print media, the metaphorical McLuhan artifact takes flight, taking a viewpoint that crosses “frontier” and “neighborhood,” the terms of “hot” and “cold” media, the accessibility to nature, and the defining creations of humankind.

Thank you.

Yes We Can (Obama's victory speech)

I want to share a part of history with anyone who believes in our new President-Elect. Here is Barack Obama's Grant Park victory speech in its entirety. It was a privilege to be in the middle of a defining moment in history.

Obama’s Grant Park victory speech as heard from the audience

Push button, get bacon

Final Project Proposal (Jen and Aaron)

New Media Theory and Marshall McLuhan

Our remediation of Marshall McLuhan's New Media theory will be by representation of a hypothetical city that has been started by committed supporters of McLuhan's theory. The societal and physical system will be structured after the core values set forth by McLuhan such as the global village, hot and cold media, electronic media and ultimately the town motto of "the media is the massage". The benefits of living in such a society will be highlighted via a photo slideshow with both video clips and photos of various aspects of the city. The housing accommodations along with technology availability within both the urban and rural settings. Also technological innovations which are present throughout the city will be touched on along with their purpose and benefits to the residents.

Handing out tactile material to the audience, such as brochures, have garnered consideration and will be included if they contribute to the overall project's message. The purpose of our final project is to have viable model of a thriving city based on the foundational New Media theory of Marshall McLuhan. Our main considerations will be the city setup and internal structure of the living quarters. Also to focus on how educational, legislation, and community systems would be structured and how they would function. The presentation style will be similar to a development meeting of a potential addition to a city with a voiceover to again highlight the benefits of choosing to live there.

To create an example of such a society, different aspects of the assumed public must be examined. In the case of children and education, for instance, students at "McLuhan Elementary" would quickly learn the concepts of hieroglyphics and ideograms and electronic media at the same pace "outside" children would learn phonetics and the alphabet. In terms of hot and cold media, the citizens will not watch television (a "cold" media), but settle for watching cinematic sequences on their laptops ("hot" media). Radios and newsprint adorn the households. Citizens are enamored with lectures, and attend them daily, however seminars are disdained and physically do not exist.

Due to everyone in this hypothetical city following McLuhan's New Media theory, McLuhan's "Global Village" theory is upheld in a manner reflecting a self-induced paradox. It is also possible that by utilizing the mantra "the media is the massage," citizens are perpetually experimenting with their sources of media. For example, one person takes pictures of the newspaper headline story, and emails the news to a friend, who then prints out the email and creates a silkscreen of the print image and puts it onto a t-shirt that he gives his wife. His wife won't wear the shirt, instead she uses it in place of the American flag. This type of process is prominent within the city and helps to tie together the "global village".

Final project outline

INFO 390 Final Project Proposal
Jen Hanson & Aaron Geiger

Purpose: To challenge the notion of a specific portion of McLuhan's theory as it translates into today's technological society.

Content Options:
*p.9
Indeed, it is only too typical that the "content" of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.

*p.15
And it is only on those terms, standing aside from any structure or medium, that its pinciples and lines of force can be discerned. For any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary. Prediction and control consist in avoiding this ubliminal state of Narcissus trance. But the greatest aid to this end is simply in knowing that the spell can occur immediately upon contact..

*p.17
...literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat pathetic. Especially the child, the cripple, the woman, and the colored person appear in a world of visual and typographic technology as victims of injustice.

*p.24
Specialist technologies detribalize. The nonspecialist electric technology retribalizes.

*p.26
However, backward countries that have experienced little permeation with our own mechanical and specialist culture are much better able to confront and to understand electric technology. Not only have backward and nonindustrial cultures no specialist habits to overcome in their encournter with electromagnetism, but they have still much of their traditional oral culture that has the total unified "field" character of our new electromagnetism. Our old industrialized areas, having eroded their oral tradiitons automatically, are in the position of having to rediscover them in order to cope with the electric age.

*p.38
The new magnetic or world city will be static and iconic or inclusive.

*p.46
To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it.

*p.46
Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology....The machine world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.

*p.49
In other words, the greatest school had been put out for human use before it has been thought out. Now, this is especially true of our media. They are put out long before they are thought out. In fact, their being put outside us tends to cancel the possibility of their being thought of at all.

*p.51
For the fate of implosion and interdependence is more terrible for Western man than the fate of explosion and independence for tribal man...On the other hand, since consciousness and awareness seem to be a human privilege, may it not be desirable to extend this condition to our hidden conflicts, both private and social?

*p.58
Under electric technology the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing.

*p.59
Perhaps there is a key to some of these problems in the Freudian idea that when we fail to translate some natural event or experience into conscious art we "repress" it.

*p. 64
The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics. If the operations are needed, the inevitability of infecting the whole system during the operation has to be considered.

*p.68
Electric technology is directly related to our central nervous systems, so it is ridiculous to talk of "what the public wants" played over its own nerves.

Batdog

Tribute to Jon Stone: Photoshop projects that people probably got fired for

This is in response to Jon Stone's fascination with photoshop mistakes. Just the other day I was looking the photoshopped image of Kim Jong-Il that was released by BBC News. He must have smelled the photoshop, because he instantly came over and was intrigued. Apparently Dictator Kim had a stroke, and there's a speculated succession crisis going on. Weird blurry photos have been popping up of the dictator at public events. The picture I posted has three photoshop flaws: the shadow on his legs, the line on the wall behind him disappeared, and his left shoe (on your right) has some color left over from whatever scene he was cut from.

The Craigslist clipping is from PD's blog (which stands for photoshop disasters). The remaining photos were pulled from Oddee.