Before I landed on "media," I tried and failed in two other units of reading. They were science and Cormac McCarthy Books. For science, it's visible on the page that I made it through a few books, but I found the majority of the books on my list boring or too complex for me. I can't remember most of them at the moment, but I remember one was Energy and Civilization, by Vaclav Smil. Maybe just not the right time. Maybe I am just not that interested in reading about science. For Cormac McCarthy, I loved All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, but I could not get through Cities of the Plain or Blood Meridian. So I moved to the next category on my list, media, and I wanted to do it in chronological order to cover the last century of media studies as technology advanced.
This is what I read (with failures crossed out):
- The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
- Published 1935, originally in German
- The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan
- Published in 1962
- Cue the Sun! by Emily Nussbaum
- Published in 2024 (I went out of order here)
- Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan
- Published in 1964
The Society of the SpectaclePublished in 1967, originally in FrenchWithin the Context of No ContextPublished in 1980 in The New Yorker- Simulacra and Simulacrum by Jean Baudrillard
- Published in 1981, originally in French
- Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
- Published in 1985
- The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
- Published in 2024
- The Siren's Call by Chris Hayes
- Published in 2025
- Essays by Derek Thompson
In October, I also watched Ways of Seeing, a TV show hosted by John Berger, which aired in 1972 on BBC. I had actually read the book a couple years ago and had always been interesting in watching the show, since it talked about so much visual material. The show was excellent. I think it is a masterwork, using the history of European oil painting, 1500-1900, as a Trojan Horse to deliver an argument about capitalism and commercial society. He starts with painting, and end with advertising, and shows how the same techniques in painting have been applied to modern ads. But in the modern day, these works of art don't seek to enhance the prestige of the owner of the art, but to sell goods and services to the viewers of the art via publicity, creating feelings of envy and desire. Those feelings wouldn't exist to the same extent in a society without social mobility like Renaissance Europe, but are widespread today. Something I hadn't picked up on in the book was the other side of it--that oil paintings were a way to make art a moveable commodity in Europe, whereas much previous art was sculpture, architecture, mural, or mosaic, attached to a place. And in the case of religious art, which dominated Europe in the Middle Ages, it was meant to glorify God, not man. The Renaissance changed that.
For this post, I think I will address a couple of the themes that came up in my readings and my thoughts on them.
Reproduction of Art and Letters
This came up again and again. One of the most important innovations in the last six centuries is the ability to reproduce through "copying machines." The first of these machines was the printing press, invented by Gutenberg in the 15th century, initiating an era of copied letters. It was followed by photography four centuries later, used to copy images. Film allowed for the reproduction of actions in moving images as well. Television and the internet allowed for mass communication of copied letters and images.
Walter Benjamin is the main thinker on the effects of reproduction on art, and McLuhan is the main thinker about the effect of reproduction on letters. John Berger does excellent synthesis of both their ideas in Ways of Seeing. Reproduction ended the long tradition of Western painting that emphasized realistic depictions of individuals, especially in portraits of the rich, as ways to immortalize them and display status. Once photography was possible, there wasn't much point in painting realistic portraits since photographers could do it much quicker and cheaper. Religious art and architecture retained their value since there was more to their value than their authenticity, which would be diminished in copies. For literature, once copyists were no longer necessary, the authorship of a work was emphasized much more, along with citations and references to earlier works. That also helped give rise to religious literalism. Whereas literalism doesn't make a lot of sense when you read a Bible that you copied with your own hands or was copied by someone else in your monastery whose mistakes were still visible, printed copies of the Bible inspire more belief in their infallibility as standardized texts.
The Effects of Changes in Media on Politics and Society
Almost all the authors I read, but most of all McLuhan, were concerned about the effects of different media on politics and society. They all analyzed how manuscripts, print, painting, photography, television, radio, film, or social media have affected and are affecting our minds. I won't go into that more here since I've covered it so much in my posts except to say that it is clear that "the medium is the message." There is no denying that the medium by which an individual or a society received information or entertainment affects the way that they understand it. And conversely, the medium by which an artist or a reporter or a politician or a writer expresses themselves affects the output and message of what they express. It is hard to make a normative argument for any medium being "good" or "bad" since each medium promotes or diminishes certain values.
Alienation
The more modern authors are all very concerned with social alienation due to social media, and the first author that dealt with that seriously was Baudrillard. Media can connect people when it forms a connection where none existed, before but an unexpected result of media is to also replace and therefore degrade communications between people who were already connected. This effect is most pronounced today from social media replacing real-life interactions, causing tremendous social alienation across the world where people use social media.
Alienation is the reason I was interested in completing a unit on media, because I feel that the alienating effects of social media are some of the most important phenomena happening right now. After reading these books, I feel more grounded in understanding how media can connect or alienate us, but I don't feel that much closer to solutions in my own life. I feel like I need to re-engage with social media on terms that focus on connecting with people, rather than just turning it into TV. Wasting time on an endless scroll is not useful. I miss old Twitter, pre-Musk, which made my scrolling feel more productive since it was full of smart people posting their work. That Twitter has been dead for a while now. I think I need to just recognize when my endless scrolling is just a time filler and find better time filler. Even as time filler, scrolling isn't good because at least I can talk about TV I've watched with people. It's a lot harder to connect over a meme or a short video.
