Month: September 2017

Our time presents a unique opportunity for learning by means of humor – a perceptive or incisive joke can be more meaningful than platitudes lying between two covers (10).

I never thought about how the medium affected the way a message would be perceived until reading McLuhan’s work. When you look at it, the content you receive is entirely the same whether it is delivered electronically or through print. However, each medium creates a different response with the same material. This would have to do with how accessible and interactive it is. Through a newspaper, I can only read. Through an online article, I can do anything from comment, share it, or write to the author immediately.

In terms of the classroom, adding humor to the lesson plan (whether intentionally or not) can make the message more effective. The general procedure is to lecture, assign work, and test, but what if instead of doing a PowerPoint flooded with information and statistics, the professor does everything orally while incorporating personal anecdotes? I have only had two professors in my whole life that relied on themselves and not technology to get their point across. This makes the learning process more personal and engaging. Hearing stories from the professor’s life, the students feel like they can open up to and relate to them more. The added humor makes the information more memorable.

McLuhan’s use of different formats in the book itself is like experimenting with different mediums. When he chooses to repeat a phrase multiple times in a big font, it definitely attracts attention. In one section, the passage is mirrored and filled with typos. Extra effort must be made to decipher it. While this can force someone to study and memorize it, the typos irritated me because I would have to stop frequently to “fix” it in my mind. The flow of reading was disrupted multiple times. In this case, I believe the “medium” was not effective.

“The numerical coding of media and the modular structure of a media object allow for the automation of many operations involved in media creation, manipulation, and access. Thus human intentionality can be removed from the creative process, at least in part.” (32)

The new media element of automation by Manovich struck me the most. It draws fear and offense from the idea of not needing human interaction to create art. Many people would criticize it, saying artificial intelligence is not (yet) capable of what humans can do, think, and manipulate, but I would disagree otherwise. As someone who has been exposed to technology and electronic forms of media for the majority of my life, I can see how the “human” can be taken out of the equation. For example, in photography’s earlier stages, settings would have to be manually adjusted according to the amount of light available. It was a constant process of test and trial. Nowadays, one can simply buy a point-and-shoot that eliminates the need to manually adjust altogether. The camera is preprogrammed to use what it sees as the optimal setting. Furthermore, many photo editing softwares including Photoshop have an “auto” feature where it will adjust things such as brightness and curves for you.

While I do acknowledge what is happening, I see automation more as a supplementary tool than a replacement. After all, it is us in the end who programmed these softwares to act in such ways because they were desirable to us at some point in time.