Lesson Preface
We cannot discuss the mediated aspects of story (and culture) without mentioning two of the most prominent players in this domain: Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong. Yes, there are hundreds of others we could discuss but over time it has been shown that these two scholars produced probably the most well-known seminal works that covered the mediated cultural development of mankind.
is one of several influential people who have written about media and its effect on people. In looking at story you must also pay attention to those things that affect how the story listener (i.e., audience) thinks, learns, and communicates. The interesting thing about McLuhan’s work is that he actually died much prior to the Internet, PC, mobile devices, and all the pervasive media around us today. Yet, he seemed to sense where we were going as a digital culture.
McLuhan spent two years acquiring a B.A. from Cambridge University. There he studied under I. A. Richards, a psychologist turned literary critic who examined the process of reading. According to Richards it was not the para-phrasable content of a poem that mattered but the way the poem communicated certain effects in the mind of a reader. After he left Cambridge in 1936, McLuhan taught for a year at the University of Wisconsin, and then, following his conversion to Catholicism, he joined the faculty of a Jesuit institution, the University of St. Louis (WHERE HE MENTORED Walter Ong). He later met a political economist named Harold Innis who had discovered that certain media of communication are time based and certain media—more portable and ephemeral—are space based. Working with this hint, and discovering simultaneously in the works of James Joyce, notably Finnegans Wake, a critique of radio and television, McLuhan articulated his perceptions of media as extensions of the human body, and of electronic media, in particular, as extensions of the nervous system, imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions on the psyche of the user.
Media as an Extension of Man
McLuhan’s greatest accomplishments seems to be in the area of discussing how media has actually become an extension of man and actually changes who s/he is. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) is Mcluhan’s most widely known work. It is a pioneering study in media theory in which he proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should be the focus of study—popularly quoted as “the medium is the message”. McLuhan’s insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as a clear demonstration of this concept. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that “a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.” More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society—in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children’s shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example—the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it.
Throughout this book, McLuhan identifies the ways in which new forms of media change the perceptions of societies, with specific focus on the effects of each medium (as opposed to the content that is transmitted by each medium). McLuhan categories media as “hot” and “cool”. This terminology does not refer to the temperature or emotional intensity, or some kind of classification, but to the degree of participation of its users. Cool media are those that require high participation from users, due to their low definition (the receiver/user must fill in missing information). Since many senses may be used, they foster detachment. Conversely, hot media are low in audience participation due to their high resolution or definition. Film, for example, is defined as a hot medium, since in the context of a dark movie theater, the viewer is completely captivated, and one primary sense—visual—is filled in high definition. In contrast, television is a cool medium, since it many other things may be going on and the viewer has to integrate all of the sounds and sights in the context.
McLuhan uses the words medium, media and technology all interchangeably. A medium is “an extension of ourselves”. In addition to forms such as newspapers, television and radio, McLuhan includes the light bulb, cars, speech and language in his definition of “media”: all of these, as technologies, mediate our communication (and therefore, our understanding of that content).
Conventional pronouncements fail to properly study the effects of media because they pay attention to the content and not the social effects. All media/technology “amplifies or accelerates existing processes”, introduces a “change of scale or pace or shape or pattern into human association, affairs, and action”, resulting in “psychic, and social consequences”.
To quote myself:
For story, perhaps, it is not the content that affects us as much as the medium that delivers it.
So, in a classroom situation, I am suggesting (as you will see in later readings) that the mixing of hot media (i.e., digital media) with story creates a duo/combo that is without peer in its ability to motivate/change individuals. to a story. This is basically the meaning of “the medium is the message”… each media “adds itself on to what we already are”, realizing “amputations and extensions” to our senses and bodies, shaping them in a new technical form. So, your task is to now think about how media can ‘mediate’ (i.e., change) the content of a story and how the same story can be interpreted differently based on how that story is communicated.
The Gutenberg Galaxy
The Making of Typographic Man is a pioneering study in the fields of oral culture, print culture, cultural studies, and media ecology (which is a perfect segue to Walter Ong). Throughout this book, McLuhan takes pains to reveal how communication technology (alphabetic writing, the printing press, and the electronic media) affects cognitive organization.
Interesting Sidebar
Speaking of Gutenberg, it behooves us to take a look at an interesting hypothesis called the
Gutenberg Parenthesis.
was a student of McLuhan’s at St. Louis University and later a colleague and close friend. The Reverend Ong, an American Jesuit priest, was a professor of English literature, cultural, and a religious historian and philosopher. His major interest was in exploring how the transition from an oral culture to a literate one influenced and changed humans view of the world. Throughout history, culture has been described as emerging though various cultural changes. One of those periods (the oral cultures period) mankind lived by the spoken which entailed individuals recalling specific details. During that time it was said that if a man had to write something down to remember it, that it was a falsehood, giving forth the concept of a man’s ‘word’ being his bond. Written contracts were looked upon with disdain. It can be easily understood why and how oral storytelling was one of the tools that individuals utilized to recall information retelling moral stories (Aesop’s fables etc.)
Ong observed that during the Information Age (which emerged during the late 1960-80s) was what he deemed to be a period of ‘secondary orality’. While there were certainly considerable similarities to the earlier oral cultures his ideas were not only contrary to the time (the information age gave way to the idea that story was something that the illiterate used and/or was infantile… and a person needed to grow out of that line of thinking and become more ‘rational’.). slightly different.
In his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Ong contrasts oral and literate cultures. The phrase ‘secondary orality’ describes “a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print”. I other words, print media changed the conceptual design of the oral culture (whereas McLuhan felt it was television, a visual medium that changed mankind). Secondary orality is not primary orality of pre-literate cultures. In oral societies memory and memorization were of greater importance, increasing the amount of copiousness and redundancy (and basis for story as a knowledge acquisition construct). Oral cultures were situational and participatory, whereas literate cultures were abstract and distant. Media and technology were bringing back in new profound ways the participatory nature of civilization (vis a vis social media, which came about after he died). But because of mediated communicative forms (television, radio, the Internet) secondary orality is not as repetitive or redundant. But shorthand was prevalent in primitive oral cultures and is making a comeback in current cultures.
A Glimpse of the World using Ong’s own Words
We offer here a digital version of Ong’s work.. it is worth at least a perusal so you can see why he is being presented here as one who gives us insights as to the meaning or oral cultures and how it has played such a huge role in humans’ natural longing for story. In a later module we will further define these concepts looking at the role Gutenberg played in the development of story.
Note: The digital version has over 200 pages… not we are not suggesting you read all of them. but it is worth time looking over several pages and skipping to sections that are if interest.
Link to File:
ong_orality_and_literacy
Eric Havelock was a professor at the University of Toronto. Although he was trained in the turn-of-the-20th-century Oxbridge tradition of classical studies, much of Havelock’s work was devoted to addressing a single thesis: that all of Western thought is informed by a profound shift in the kinds of ideas available to the human mind at the point that Greek philosophy converted from an oral to a literate form. The idea has been very controversial in classical studies, and has been rejected outright both by many of Havelock’s contemporaries and modern classicists. Havelock and his ideas have nonetheless had far-reaching influence, both in classical studies and other academic areas. He and Walter Ong essentially founded the field that studies transitions from orality to literacy, and Havelock has been one of the most frequently cited theorists in that field; as an account of communication, his work profoundly affected the media theories of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan.
So, you can see that these three folks have influenced the idea of orality and literacy and have added their ideas on the definitions of both. I may e making a stretch here, but the link from this to story is obvious to me… our definition of what it means to be ‘literate’ is what has changed and what has helped to define humans. Perhaps it is technical literacy, scientific literacy that has had all the press these days, but I submit to you that literacy also has to include intellectual literacy and a case can be made for story literacy being a pathway to knowledge acquisition. Being literate in this sense meaning holding and using intellectualism (knowledge) about one’s world. So, we are moving away from text-based literacy to information/digital literacy but have not lost sight of those frameworks that help us become ‘literate’. The major difference is the tools we use to do that and the effect those tools/processes may have on our thinking.
A few final thought/anecdotes told by Ed Catmull in his book
Imagination, Inc. (2014) about the effect of media/technology on story and how it is interpreted.
- While presenting his storyboard to the directors at Pixer for Finding Nemo, the film’s producer, Andrew Stanton, pitched an idea where Marlin, Nemo’s father, through a series of flashbacks, would have his ‘back-story‘ revealed and explain further his anxieties and fears. At the pitch (which was delivered verbally), everyone thought it was a brilliant way to do this. A few months later when he presented the first draft of the actual movie, those attending the Braintrust meeting (brain-storming session) became confused and distracted and could not follow the idea… not because it was poorly done, but because when it was actually shown in visual form, the concept was not as clear to the audience.. and, therefore, had to be completely re-worked. A simple change of delivery modality changed the audience’s ability to understand the exact same story line.
- When John Lasseter was presenting his first short film at SIGGRAPH 1984 he ran out of time to complete it. So, a few important scenes were actually shown as wire frames (in black and white). Folks got so caught up in the storyline that no one even noticed that this occurred. The moral of this story is that before we all caught up in the technology remember that ‘content is king’.
So, media does have an effect on story.. but not always in predictable ways.
Do This!
Once you have sufficiently digested this material you should be ready to enter your thoughts discussing the question: What Does Media Add to a Story?
What we are looking for is to have you synthesize your thoughts on media (technology, digital media, etc.) and how it mediates (changes) a story’s interpretation, its content, its construct, etc.
First Assignment
A Little Role Play
As an instructional designer or technology resource teacher you have been named to teach a class on inter-modal storytelling. When developing the syllabus you need to decide on creating four lesson modules to explain story. Pick a media type from these three : 1-text; 2-graphics, video; or interactive media/immersive media, i.e., games for one) What would you include as the top 3-4 considerations ideas for selecting that medium? Post your responses to the Discussion Board so you can see what others have in mind.
Second Assignment
Once you have completed your posting come back here to go to the activity we have set up for you to take a visual medium (paintings) and write out the story line either as a paragraph or a story board.