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2010

*Steve Lohr, "Now Playing: Night of the Living Tech: A faster-moving drama in which Web-era media evolve unpredictably," The New York Times: Week in Review, 22 August 2010, pp. 1; 4

Life in the media and communications terrarium, it seems, is getting increasingly perilous. The predictions of demise are piling up. Phone calls, e-mail, blogs and Facebook, according to digerati pundits recently, are speeding toward the grave. Last week, Wired magazine proclaimed, "The Web is Dead."

Yet evolution--not extinction--has always been the primary rule of media ecology. New media predators rise up, but other media species typically adapt rather than perish. That is the message of both history and leading media theorists, like Marshall McLuhan, [father of media-adaptation theory; p. 4] and Neil Postman. Television, for example, was seen as a threat to radio and movies, though both evolved and survived.

*John Guillory, "Genesis of the Media Concept," Critical Inquiry 36 (Winter 2010) 321-362

Nearly all works written before the sixteenth century ... are transmitted in the remediated form of print, as well as (usually) translated into modern languages, arguably a form of remediation as well. For the concept of remediation, see Jay Daivd Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). The notion derives ultimately from Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; Corte Madera, Calif., 2003), p. 19: "the 'content' of any medium is always another medium."

*Mark B.N. Hansen, "New Media," in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. Hansen and W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2010) 172-185

"Perhaps the most crucial dimension of McLuhan's vision for the topic of new media is his concerted effort to couple media form and media use. Indeed, it is perhaps this dimension that best anticipates current developments in social networking technologies, developments dubbed Web 2.0, that have driven home the profound interdependence of content (use) and form (technology) in the wired age. Far from the technological determinist he has commonly and simplistically been held to be, McLuhan can now be seen as the keen social analyst he always was. In arguing that the 'medium is the message,' McLuhan certainly did not intend to advance a purely formalistic doctrine; rather, he sought to establish and to foreground the large-scale societal impact of particular media as a phenomenon distinct from their concrete deployments by individuals and groups." (175)

*W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, "Introduction" to Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. Mitchell and Hansen (Chicago: U Chicago P, 2010) vii-xxii.

"The passage from content to medium, from a plurality of divergent contents to the collective singular, lies at the heart of what is arguably the first and still most influential effort to articulate a comprehensive theory of media. In Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan famously identified the medium and the message, or rather, he identified the message as the medium itself." (x)

"Though some, perhaps many, practitioners of media studies find this deeply problematic, McLuhan's redirection is foundational for 'media studies' in the sense that we employ it here. For precisely this reason, his approach has a capaciousness that can encompass the multiple and historically disjunctive origins of the term media as well as related terms like medium and mediation." (xi)

"McLuhan is the recognized source for Friedrich Kittler's media science." (xii)

"[T]he very burden of this volume [is] its neo-McLuhanesque injunction to understand from the perspective of media. Rather than determining our situation [as Kittler suggests], we might better say that the media are our situation." (xxii)

*John Durham Peters, "Introduction: Friedrich Kittler's Light Shows," in Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity P, 2010) 1-17

The one natural link of Kittler's work in extant media studies is to the Canadian tradition of Innis and McLuhan. Innis's great contribution was the notion of 'bias' in time and space, and McLuhan's was the notion of media as human extensions (or amputations). Kittler's key contribution is the notion of 'time-axis manipulation.' He is the pre-eminent thinker of time-based media and what it means to edit the flow of time with technical means. Like most scholars [sic], Kittler would rather be compared to Innis than McLuhan and this is quite fair intellectually [sic]. Kittler's materialist account of history, love of ancient Greece, and disdain for the kind of body-humanism at the heart of McLuhan's thought puts him closer to Innis. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, the most astute commentator on Kittler in English, calls Kittler 'Innis in battle fatigues.' But his persona--witty, arch, devil-may-care, politically incorrect--is closer to McLuhan. In tone, Kittler also is closer to McLuhan's flamboyant vaticism than to Innis's cranky accumulation of detail. Like both Canadians, his subject is the play of media in history, but he has taken a step forward over either. Over Innis's staccato inventories of historical occurrences and McLuhan's defiance of rigor, we have in Kittler a kind of media analysis whose method is dialectically acute and philosophically deep. Kittler brings a Hegelian ambition and lucidity to media studies. (6)

Media, for Kittler, are always about themselves. In this, he subordinates content to form, quite in the spirit of McLuhan. (15)

* Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns, with an introduction by John Durham Peters (Cambridge: Polity P, 2010)

The basic concept in the following history and analysis is the concept of the medium in the technical sense, which was developed above all by Marshall McLuhan, whose work was based on the fundamental historical groundwork laid by Harold Adams Innis. (29)

You are presumably familiar with the famous formula that the medium is the message. Without this formula, which virtually prohibits looking for something else behind technically manufactured surfaces, media studies would actually continue to have a subject ... but media studies itself would not exist as such in isolation or with any methodological clarity. (31)

**Glenn Willmott, "Waking Up to the Call Girl," in Transforming McLuhan: Cultural, Critical and Postmodern Perspectives, ed. Paul Grosswiler (N.Y.: Peter Lang, 2010) 37-65

"Indeed, McLuhan's most startling quality is his deconstruction of the conscious / unconscious discursive hierarchy upon which The Mechanical Bride and modern cultural criticism more generally has been based. Hence the archetype must not be understood merely as the 'coming to consciousness' of a cliche, but as an ongoing retracing of that very process itself as it stages itself, as it plays itself out in [a] series of cultural productions of the 'authentic' (conscious) self and 'real' (basic) social forms. Such a retracing is not wholly conscious, nor guided by conscious or individual mastery. When McLuhan says ... that everything he says is quoted or borrowed, or he emphasizes collective dialogue over individual argument, there is something to it that goes to the heart of his intellectual project in the sixties and beyond." (61)

**Gonzalez, Anxo Abuin, "Espaces acoustiques, textures sonores: oralite tertiaire et langages electroniques," in Recherche Litteraire / Literary Research 26 (Summer 2010) 3-14

**Marks, Laura U., Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2010)

"Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) influenced a generation of techno-hippie media tribalists. The movement took shape in video collectives like Videofreex, TVTV, Raindance, Ant Farm, and, in Canada, the Challenge for Change / Societe Nouvelle." (142)