W3/WQ
Welcome to the third iteration of this weekly attempt to hopefully (re)introduce all the cliche academics that pop up in Communication. These are getting less academic as the weeks go by. But don’t worry! You’ll get something to take away!
It won’t take long! Read this on the bus! Read this while your car is stopped at a red light!
I promise it’ll help you weasel through your tutorial discussion later in the day. This is your term.
Søren Kierkegaard’s (1851) love for journalists
The daily press is the evil principle of the modern world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity which no state or government can control.
There is a far greater need for total abstaining societies which would not read newspapers than for ones which do not drink alcohol
If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced, I should not despair over her; I would hope for her salvation. But if I had a son who became a journalist, and continued to be one for five years, I would give him up.
Dilemmas of Transformation in the Age of the Smart Machine — Shoshana Zuboff (1998)
In its capacity as an automating technology, information technology has a vast potential to displace the human presence. Its implications as an informating technology, on the other hand, are not well understood. The distinction between automate and informate provides one way to understand how this technology represents both continuities and discontinuities with the traditions of industrial history. As long as the technology is treated narrowly in its automating function, it perpetuates the logic of the industrial machine that, over the course of this century, has made it possilbe to rationalize work while decreasing the dependence on human skills.
However, when the technology also informates the processes to which it is applied, it increases the explicit information content of tasks and sets into motion a series of dynamics that will ultimately reconfigure the nature of work and the social relationships that organize productive activity. (p.6)
Reading the Comments — Joseph Reagle (2016)
Online, people exhibit greater status equalization and disinhibition. We miss the social cues, context, and information that are normally relied on to regulate interpersonal challenges. (p.95)
The Society of the Spectacle — Guy Debord (1967)
With the “second industrial revolution,” alienated consumption has become as much a duty for the masses as alienated production. (42)
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man — Marshall McLuhan (1964)
But the same observation can be made about all the extensions of man, whether it be clothing or the computer. An extension appears to be an amplification of an organ, a sense or a function, that inspires the central nervous system to a self-protective gesture of numbing of the extended area, at least so far as direct inspection and awareness are concerned. […]
Psychically the printed book, an extension of the visual faculty, intensified perspective and the fixed point of view. Associated with the visual stress on point of view and the vanishing point that provides the illusion of perspective there comes another illusion that space is visual, uniform and continuous. The linearity precision and uniformity of the arrangement of movable types are inseparable from these great cultural forms and innovations of Renaissance experience. The new intensity of visual stress and private point of view in the first century of printing were united to the means of self-expression made possible by the typographic extension of man.
Socially, the typographic extension of man brought in nationalism, industrialism, mass markets, and universal literary and education. For print presented an image of repeatable precision that inspired totally new forms of extending social energies. (p.172)
Culture Industry Reconsidered — Adorno (1975)
The concept of technique in the culture industry is only in name identical with technique in works of art. In the latter, technique is concerned with the internal organization of the object itself, with its inner logic. In contrast, the technique of the culture industry is, from the beginning, one of distribution and mechanical reproduction, and therefore always remains external to its object.
The culture industry finds ideological support precisely in so far as it carefully shields itself from the full potential of the techniques contained in its products. It lives parasitically from the extra-artistic technique of the material production of goods, without regard for the obligation to the internal artistic whole implied by its functionality (Sachlichkeit), but also without concern for the laws of form demanded by aesthetic autonomy.
The result for the physiognomy of the culture industry is essentially a mixture of streamlining, photographic hardness and precision on the one hand, and individualistic residues, sentimentality and an already rationally disposed and adapted romanticism on the other. Adopting Benjamin's designation of the traditional work of art by the concept of aura, the presence of that which is not present, the culture industry is defined by the fact that it does not strictly counterpose another principle to that of aura, but rather by the fact that it conserves the decaying aura as a foggy mist. By this means the culture industry betrays its own ideological abuses. (p.4)
Mark Fisher Interview: Points on the Development of a Leftist Psychotherapy
This is really serious, I think. Since there are so many people who are depressed - and I maintain that the cause for much of this depression is social and political - then converting that depression into a political anger is an urgent political project. Of course it's not only about that. It's also about levels of real distress and suffering in society, which can not be handled or dealt with by the individualising, privatised assumptions of the dominant forms of treatment in mental illness, which are, in this country, cognitive behavioural therapy - which is a kind of combination of positive thinking and kind of psychoanalysis light: the focus on family background of the sufferer, and on then of converting thought patterns from these negative into positive ones.
There's that. And on the other hand, brain chemistry focus - the horrible loop whereby massive multinational pharmaceutical companies sell people drugs in order to cure them from the stresses brought about by working in late capitalism. Neither of these things are very effective - all they do is largely contain people's depression rather than actually deal with the actual cause of depression.
One can apply Marx's arguments about religion very directly to this - that religion was the opium of the masses. Anti-depressants and therapy are the opium of the masses now, in lots of ways. That isn't to say that they don't do anything at all. They do in many cases relieve intense suffering, which people are undergoing. But it's just the same as religion. As Marx said, it'll make people better in a kind of savage and pitiless world - religion wants real comfort to people in the same way, in a world of relentless competition, of digital hyper-stress, etc. Being able to talk to someone for an hour in cognitive behavioural therapy or having something which will take the edge of things via anti- depressants - that will make people feel better, but just as with religion, it doesn't get to the sources of that sort of misery in the first place. It in fact obfuscates it.
Meltdown — Nick Land (1994)
Level-1 or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly.
Garbage time is running out.
Can what is playing you make it to level-2?
Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude. Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs, you have just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic.
The residue of animal twang in your nerves transmits imminent quake catastrophe. Zero is coming in, and you're on the run.
