Posts tagged media
“ By sitting still for the elaborately staged social experiments we call reality TV, we are supplying further evidence for Milgram’s main conclusion– ordinary people… without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.”
“ Removing something from its original context or setting, we kill the sense of awe that we might attach to it’s uniqueness. The danger when people mistake the reproduction for the work of art itself. It becomes presented sans “aura”
Walter Benjamin – The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Pretty salient in the age of the blog where context is lost and content is morselised into appropriate digestible chunks, the design blog et al have extended the problem of reproduction with low cognitive cost to publication.
“”Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won’t pay for content anymore. At least, that’s how they see it.
In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn’t better content cost more?
“ Damien Thorn, offspring of Satan, was educated at Yale before inheriting a global business conglomerate at a shockingly young age and using it to hypnotise millions in a demonic bid to hasten Armageddon. James Murdoch’s story is quite different. He went to Harvard.”
“My biggest fear is that people are overloaded with information and have no idea what is relevant and what is irrelevant”
Neil Postman on Cyberspace, 1995 (via tranquileye)
“ The Futurists would have loved YouTube, with its swift delivery of pornographic violence, cut, spliced and soundtracked, served up in little two minute chunks of mechanised, balletic carnage. It’s a sign of the times that we’d think of YouTube while reading Ghost in the Machine, a dissertation by Michael Heumann on ‘Sound and Technology in Twentieth Century Literature’, which covers the Futurists’ splenetic, frezied sound experiments.”
“ The logic of the Internet, a medium that is natively good at helping groups communicate at vanishingly low cost, is that the act of forming a public has become something the public is increasingly doing for itself, rather than needing to wait for a publication (note the root) to do it for them. More publics will form, they will be smaller, shorter-lived, and less geographically contiguous, and they will overlap more than the previous era’s larger, more rooted, more stable publics.”
