Just back from Holland and a very ritualistic dissertation defense. Robes, old Dutch, hats, lady with big staff, old man with gavel, public audience, all in a room from the 11th Century. It amounted to one of my life’s great experiences, on par with wedding day and birth of child for impact. And it made me realize the value and power of ritual. Thanks everyone for your kind words and years of help. Without you, I would not be a PhD.
The defense itself was a bit like a play, where we engage with one another on one level (script) while we’re also actors interacting with each other on another. Like being on Colbert, where I am defending my ideas for real, but the «opponents» are putting on an act of sorts. There’s sense in what they’re saying, but they are playing the role of the defenders of the dogma.
Anyway, a few things came up that might be of interest to the MEA community.
I was seen as the defender or proponent of media ecology in general (the thesis looks at corporatism as a media environment, and the playability of the currency system). They were pretty happy with my playability stuff, but seemed predisposed to dislike the media ecological framework.
First, they seem to position McLuhan opposite Kittler as on the other side of some sort of media theory technique spectrum. Toronto vs. Germany. They see McLuhan as media determinist (as I suspected) but see Kittler as more layered. As I see it, each of Kittler’s layers is just a new ground – a new media environment. Maybe he’s a bit more like Barthes or Baudrillard in that layers become inaccessible to subsequent generations once their construction is forgotten, but isn’t this an aspect of media ecology?
Second, and more pointedly, they thought the Neil Postman quote in my discussion of Media Ecology as a framework ended up exposing my own much-too-deterministic bias. Specifically, they called out this:
>As Postman explains, the purpose of any media ecological study “is to tell stories about the consequences of technology;
> to tell how media environments create contexts that may change the way we think or organize our social life,
> or make us better or worse, or smarter or dumber, or freer or more enslaved.”[1]
They criticized both Postman and my subsequent paper for being too either/or, good/evil, cause/effect. And they suggested that even McLuhan wouldn’t have been so cut and dry about media ecology.
I decided to grant them the point in a way that they couldn’t attack further. I told them that I, like Postman, have what might be considered an «old testament» lens on the world, perhaps too easily defined by the letter of the law or the «command line» – and that McLuhan and Ong had a somewhat more «leavened» and «parabolic» approach. But that as literalists, we are accustomed to thinking about either/or’s (freer/enslaved and so on) as spectra rather than absolutes. We may use either/or’s for judging the influence of various media, but we don’t tend to use either/or as an expression of final Judgment.
And this got lots of appropriate laughter, because they got what I was implying by that.
Third, they suggested that media ecology does not take into account the role of «reception» in media, and that my paper didn’t talk about the role of the masses in «accepting» corporatism and central currency. I responded this would be a bit like discussing the role of convicts in their reception of imprisonment, which then became a discussion of prisoner’s dilemma. But I didn’t have time to go back to the basic assertion that media ecology is somehow opposed to reception theory (where I see Frankfurt and Friends throughout our work).
So, I am left wondering about the reputation of media ecology and media ecologists on the European continent. And the positioning of Kittler and his friends and reception theory as on the other side. Are media ecologists the new Jews?
Love
dr. DR
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