https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2020/03/mumford-art-and-technics-xiv.html COMMENTS ==-==-==-== Richard Schickel Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America (1985) pp. 12-14 "[12]"To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed," Susan Sontag remarks. And "There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera." Yes. And though television does not freeze moments forever, as still photography does, it has an appropriative and aggres[13]sive function. This is not serious for those who appear only occasionally on the tube. Their brief moments of exposure evaporate into air, lost in the media hum of the age. But for those who must put themselves constantly at the mercy of the cathode ray, it is a problem. They are, after all, volunteers for this duty; no one is forcing them to undertake it. Therefore people think they must like it, need it. And some do, of course. "But like it or hate it, their lives in the public eye implicitly encourage appropriation and aggression. Even victims—people thrust into the news because they happened briefly to get in the way of history or of some lunatic convinced that he was history—are forced to endure this final victimization... When the American hostages were finally returned from Iran, a State Department spokesman was quoted in the press as saying that they "would be free either to cooperate with news organizations and become celebrities or to withdraw quickly into private life" (emphasis added). Most chose the latter course after submitting to the orgy of welcome that was staged mainly for the benefit of the press. In a way, it was a well-managed business, a quick, healthy venting of built-up media steam. But surely there was no choice in this matter for this put-upon group. There never really is. "Be that as is may, since television has breached the walls of polite convention that formerly separated performer and audience, the well-known and the unknown, everyone now jostles rudely and noisily to exploit the opening in the defenses. They all pour through it, wave upon wave of journalists and pseudojournalists. They are of course abetted by modern technology. The jet plane, for example, can whisk the paparazzi to the most isolated of retreats. The telephoto lens permits the lurking photographer to sneak up on the famous, while the motor-driven shutter allows him to squeeze off many shots quickly—assuring him of at least one salable snap before the security men move in or the celebrated person pulls himself together and assumes his public face and posture. Lightweight film and tape cameras add to the mobility of the gawkers surrounding the famous. "In recent years, as a result of these "advances," we have been treated to glimpses, through a lens blurrily, of the contours of many famous breasts. Or to put the point as precisely as possible, we have been made privy to the breasts, et cetera, of many women whose fame [14] does not rest on the display of their physical charms. For example, a former First Lady, the Princess of Monaco, even, for heaven's sake, that aged recluse, Greta Garbo. This is not to mention the many well-known actresses whose unit publicists did not control the output of their stillsman as carefully as the promised they would (or didn't notice the grip with a camera up on the grid). Outtakes of similarly unprotected moments, caughts by the motion picture camera, somehow make their way from the trim barrel in the editing room to the pages of the less respectable skin books as well. From time to time the newsstands indeed offer one-shot magazines bearing some such title as Celebrity Skin (which at least meets the truth-in-advertising standard). What price the frisson provided by the forbidden or the unlikely? A suggestion: a sizable proportion of the male population is constantly being reduced to the status of the preadolescent, peering through the keyhole as his sister takes a bath. And that says nothing about legitimate feminine outrage over this exploitation." ==-==-==-== Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934) Ch. V/8 "While all these new forms of permanent record were first employed chiefly for amusement...they had important uses in science, and they even reacted upon our conceptual world as well. The photograph, to begin with, served as an independent objective check on observation. ...history is non-repeatable, and the only thing that can be rescued from history is the note that one takes and preserves at some moment of its evolution. To divorce an object from its integral time-sequence is to rob it of its complete meaning, although it makes it possible to grasp spatial relations which may otherwise defy observation. [e.g. astronomy] ... "One may perhaps over-rate the changes in human behavior that followed the invention of these new devices; but one or two suggest themselves. Whereas in the eotechnic phase one conversed with the mirror and produced the biographical portrait and the introspective biography, in the neotechnic phase one poses for the camera, or still more, one acts for the motion picture. The change is from an introspective to a behaviorist psychology, from the fulsome sorrows of Werther to the impassive public mask of an Ernest Hemingway." So, "history is non-repeatable," but also unfathomable in its totality. Human beings, the agents of history, nonetheless can faithfully record only frozen snapshots of it. These snapshots are more manageable, at the cost of also being profoundly misleading. Their fidelity is to atomized historical artifacts, not to history itself. Their "meanings" are illuminating but "incomplete." Their proliferation effects profound changes in the social environment. I reject the notion that the Old World was teeming with Werthers, but the one I live in does seem to be teeming with Hemingways. I am rather ignorant of both these gentlemen, actually, but Schickel also takes Hemingway as paradigmatic and devotes appreciable space to him and his antics. =-=-=-=-=-=-= Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media (1964) MIT Press edition (1994) "Nobody can commit photography alone. It is possible to have at least the illusion of reading and writing in isolation, but photography does not foster such attitudes. If there is any sense in deploring the growth of corporate and collective art forms such as the film and the press, it is surely in relation to the previous individualist technologies that these new forms corrode." (p. 189) =-=-=-=-=-= McLuhan, Understanding Media "To understand the medium of the photograph is quite impossible...without grasping its relations to other media, both old and new. For media, as extensions of our physical and nervous systems, constitute a world of biochemical interactions that must ever seek new equilibrium as new extensions occur. In America, people can tolerate their images in mirror or photo, but they are made uncomfortable by the recorded sound of their own voices. The photo and visual worlds are secure areas of anesthesia." (p. 202) =-=-=-=-=-=-= Peter Marler "Origins of Music and Speech: Insights from Animals" in Wallin, Merker and Brown, eds. The Origins of Music (2000) p. 32--"Some fifteen years or so ago, the thinking of zoologists about the semantics of calls of animals, especially the vocalizations of monkeys and apes, underwent something of a revolution. Not long ago, speculations about how best to interpret animal calls were all based on what Donald Griffin (1992) aptly described as the "groans of pain" (GOP) concept of animal communication. This approach assumed that vocalizations of monkeys and other animals are displays of emotion or affect, much like our own facial expressions. Only humans are thought to have progressed beyond this condition and to have achieved symbolic signaling. Premack (1975) stated the prevailing view clearly and succinctly: "Man has both affective and symbolic communication. All other species, except when tutored by man, have only the affective form." Symbolic signals are taken to be those that have identifiable referents that the signal can be said to connote in an abstract, noniconic fashion. For an animal communication system to qualify as symbolic, information about one or more referents has to be both encoded noniconically by signalers and decoded in equivalent form by receivers. "Note that this is not a discussion about whether animal signals are meaningful or meaningless. Both affective and symbolic animal signals are meaningful and are often rich in information content; both serve important and diverse functions, some communicative to other individuals, some with repercussions for the physiological and mental states of the signaler. At issue here is not the presence of meaning but the kind of meaning that affective and symbolic signals convey. This is a complex subject with many dimensions. Some view the contrasts as differences in degree rather than kind. In some circumstances signals traditionally thought of as affective, such as human facial expressions, can assume a symbolic function. Complex signals may contain within them intimately blended components in which the balance between affective and symbolic content can vary dramatically from one the another. Speech is an obvious case. Anonymous computerized speech, lacking individual iden-[33]tity, gender, and emotion, is a sadly impoverished vehicle for social communication. We must not fall into the trap of assuming that signal systems that are not languagelike are necessarily impoverished as vehicles for social communication." If you say so. But to apply the encoding-decoding criterion outside the realm of language seems merely to establish quite the "impoverished" level of "social communication." p. 36--" Phonological Syntax Recombinations of sound components (e.g. phonemes) in different sequences (e.g. words), where the components themselves are not meaningful. I call this "phonocoding." Lexical Syntax Recombinations of component sequences (e.g. words in the lexicon) into different strings (sentences). Here there is meaning at two levels, the word and the sentence. The meaning of the string is a product of the assembled meanings of its components. I call this "lexicoding." " =-=-=-=-=-=-= Christopher Lasch The Culture of Narcissism (1979) "Afterword: The Culture of Narcissism Revisited" (1990) "[239] The dense interpersonal environment of modern bureaucracy appeared to elicit and reward a narcissistic reponse—an anxious concern with the impression one made on others, a tendency to treat others as a mirror of the self. The proliferation of visual and auditory images in a "society of the spectacle"...encouraged a similar kind of preoccupation with the self. People responded to others as if their actions were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time. The prevailing social conditions thus brought out narcissistic personality traits that were present, in varying degrees, in everyone—a certain protective shallowness, a fear of binding commitments, a willingness to pull up roots whenever the need arose,...[etc., etc.] Narcissists may have paid more attention to their own needs than to those of others, but self-love and self-aggrandizement did not impress me as their most important characteristics. These qualities implied a strong, stables sense of selfhood, whereas narcissists suffered from a feeling of inauthenticity and inner emptiness. They found it difficult to make connection with the world." (pp. 239-240) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-= From Thomas Sowell's Goodreads quotefeed: "The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite." =-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Dave Pollard The Real Problems With Artificial Intelligence "My sense at this point is that AI/AGI is neither a new problem nor a solution to anything. The actual problem is humans’ propensity to misuse technologies, usually with the best of intentions." ... "I think our impoverished imaginations are mostly a result of lack of practice. ... "When I look at the Midjourney ‘showcase‘ of most-upvoted images, it is kind of depressing. Anything in the world that you can imagine could theoretically be constructed and displayed from the prompts, but 99% of what is presented looks like posters or cels from Hollywood cartoons, comic books, violent action films, sci-fi and horror movies, or disturbing incel fantasies. Part of that is that the Midjourney AI can’t imagine, but most of it is due to the fact the prompters can’t imagine either." =-=-=-=-=-=-= torpedo the ark Glitch: The Art of Error and Imperfection (With Reference to the Photography of Julia Margaret Cameron) =-=-=-=-=-=-=