mediums

Socrates: We must not get the habit of anticipating and suspecting the meaning of one another's words

--Plato's Gorgias

Mediums. It's not a word. Unless you're talking about multiple

energy workers of course.

But despite it being used by some really smart people in some

really intricate contexts and arguments, it still doesn't exist.

The word to describe a medium in the plural, is media.

Why shy away from the word media when trying to describe the

plurality of media (or mediums, if you insist)? It is because the

cultural connotation of media has polluted its dennotation.

'Media' now commonly refers to mass media. 'The Media' is almost

always a reference to mass media, newspapers, television, and film

as if their interests were related.

It is funny that 'media' has become a medium. It is no longer what

it is, but something else. So much so that it is necessary to

abandon the word for the sake of clarity. If you try to talk about

the various conduits we have for communication as media, it gets

muddied, confusion arises about whether the reference was to all

of the vast ways we have of communicating, or just the massively

commodified ones.

New media, social media, mass media, corporate media, multimedia,

mixed media are all starting to bring us back to media instead of

mediums. Since media is a rather broad concept, it has been

prefixed and qualified often. So often that referring to media

alone is ambiguous and could mean any of these things if not

properly refined. But what it really means is mediums, the plural

of a medium.

Medium is no simple word to pluralise though. It has many

different facets and origins. The usage of the word medium to

describe a communications catalyst, when systems of mass

communication were being developed, was an off-shoot of the usage

as a middle or in between. And thus started to describe a separate

entity, not just a middle, but a specific kind of middle that

referred to communications technologies. And so as these

technologies multiplied, so did the new version of medium,

solidifying its identity as distinctly different from the midway

or intermediate in general.

So now we have this word media, that refers to multiple tools of

communication. But it also has come to mean mass media. So in

order to subvert the common usage and return to where a medium

diverted from simply a middle, smart people speaking to a general

audience will say mediums, and I will cringe.

Socrates: When the division of our task is concluded, let us find the point at which we digressed, and return into the old path

--Plato's Republic

Mark Hansen, Math In Action!

"In merely terrestrial terms, programming the environment means, first of all, a kind of console for globalthermostats to pattern all sensory life in a way conducive to comfort and happiness. Till now, only the artist has been permitted the opportunity to do this in the most puny fashion. The mass media, so called, have offered new material for the artist, but understanding has been lacking. The computer abolishes the human past by making it entirely present. It makes natural and necessary a dialogue amoung cultures which is as intimate as private speech, yet dispensing entirely with speech."

                 -McLuhan, War and Peace in the Global Village, 1967

    Professor Mark Hansen (Duke) talked to Trent last

Thursday. He was setup by his many admirers in the room as a sort

of "new media" guru. But he was not some blissed out prophet,

telling us how it is or what we should be doing or what we're all

missing, but instead he just proved a very small truth in very

great detail.

Fekete described this small truth as "updating

McLuhan" and described it as the "ongoing technogenesis of the

human-being." But Hansen, himself paraphrasing Johnny Bored-dough,

put it best as: mathematics is "the structure of media that we can

master without understanding it."

    By no means is this a new phenomenon or limited to

mathematics. When I spoke with John Muir about this, he quickly

pointed out that people drive their cars with a minimal

understanding of what to do if it breaks down. It becomes obvious

with digital media though because we have artists and digital

content providers at he top of the game but with no real knowledge

of how the ones and zeros that actually create their content work.

And since the time of McLuhan, the goal of a medium has been to

conceal how it works. Pay no attention to the man behind the

machine. Jesse Brown in his first edition of CanadaLand tells the

story of how he was told that no one wants to listen to a show

about how the business of media works.

    Now Hansen does think this is problematic, but not for any

of the whiny social reasons we hear from old dogs forced to learn

new tricks. No, his principle example is stock traders trading on

futures and how it has lead to several collapses in the underlying

structures of a capitalist economy. Traders stopped needing to do

the actual math involved, and instead did the math on a preset

data sheet via their computers. It was a process of

objectification, turning social conditions into numbers on a data

table. This becomes a problem because the future is not so easily

predicted and social conditions are not actually numbers. When

traders reach the end of their formula, they haven't actually

predicted the future and acted upon it n the present but fulfilled

a problematic framework.

    For Hansen, the underlying Platonic assumption is that

math is a static realm of forms, untouched and unchanging. Instead

he studies Whitehead, who wants to make math a process. Math as a

contextual creature that is effected by history and personal

experience of it. So the formula of the past you have used to

predict the future is not the same formula required once you reach

that future.

    The problem with not knowing the code when you post your

selfies on the facebath or recreate Indiana Jones on the LudeTube

is not a problem at all. This has been going on for ages, before

the infinite space of digital media. The problem occurs when you

are making actions in the present that assume you know what the

future is going to be, on the authority of an unchanging

mathematical formula. There is a scene in Capitalism, A Love Story

where Michael Moore seeks out a simple answer to: What are

Futures? And finds many traders blowing him off and one that

spends a great deal of time with multiple formulas that in the

end, explain nothing. McLuhan describes this as speech becoming

obsolete, as in the systems that run a global capitalist economy

cannot be translated into natural language, whereas something like

the internet has being translated into natural language as its end

product.

    Technology is our best friend. We grew up together and

share a great deal of memories and thoughts. But it is folly and

plunder to suggest that we need to know everything about them in

order to be friends. Unless we are going to dream inside of their

subconscious (Inception) of course....