29.6.06
Science and prescience (New media part II)...
To continue from last bit of wind baggage, I suppose my real question is: should new technologies produce new forms of learning? In other words, what are the benefits of conveying the same type of knowledge or information via new modalities? Shouldn't instead those new modalities instead be aimed at conveying new types of knowledge?
Or does the converse actually happen: do new technologies merely confirm our past visions, our former suspicions? For example, the airplane confirmed the dreams of all cartographers and put to rest the myth of the giant (was it last visited in that 50's/early 60's TV serial Land of the Giants?). On the other hand, satellites in addition to giving us a present-time omniscience are suggesting new ways of reading masses and contusions as visible maps of history. Even Paul Valéry (quoted by Benjamin) noted the degree to which early 20th century technologies forever altered our perceptions of time and space.
Speaking of Benjamin, I am really thinking about his most famous piece, ... Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. And it is here an apposite argument is put forth: "One of the foremost tasks of the arts has always been the creation of a demand that could only be satisfied later." In other words, artworks engage ideas that have yet to be realized or again quoting Benjamin (this time quoting Breton): "The work of art is valuable only in so far as it is vibrated by the reflexes of the future." Borrowing on this, we wish to see myopically -- not blindly, but like the fly but panoramically and also three-dimensionally -- so Cubism precedes the invention of new optics, Dadism precedes the splicing and cutting of films. And where might all of the above stand in relation to Einsteinian physics?
In ancient times, didn't humans have dreams in which they fly? And if so what did the landscape look like? In the Middle Ages, how does Chaucer describe the world viewed by Troillis once he has exited life .. but as a dull gray marble, its concerns now so petty and so distant. When the cartographers referred to above first set out their designs, how could they imagine all information flattened .. perhaps they had stood on a mountain and viewed the valleys from on high? Perhaps some might argue that mapmaking, akin to our use of language, arises out of a natural inclination to use symbols. So I have heard of abstractions drawn in the sand by ancient groups of Pacific islanders before taking cross-ocean voyages. Having never taken a single linguistics course, however, maybe I'll leave symbolism well enough alone and return to the idea of prescience and science, or my first concern, which was whether new technologies should be used to convey new forms of information.
My point is that very often new technologies are often employed to the opposite effect: to merely replicate something that is best (or at least well) achieved using some older medium. Thus many early photographs attempted to achieve the effects of painting (although certainly in retrospect their own remarkable qualities arise in the struggle). This is almost the opposite of what Benjamin suggests when he says that later technologies will achieve effortlessly what prior technologies struggled to achieve.
The introduction of new media into "interactive informal learning environments" (oh .. I suppose they mean museums, parks, playgrounds and the like) -- where the intention is outrightly didactic -- often manages to achieve very little in the realm of say history or anthropology (the opposite is true as yet of science and art for the reasons given in my previous entry). Sometimes a nicely designed computer module will take a visitor through an abbreviated history on some topic .. but why need this module be site specific? Wouldn't it offer as much online? (See the Field Museum's online exhibit on chocolate for example.) In other words, how does the new technology contribute to pedogagy pure and simple? Ambient sound can if employed with care and a certain nearly musical (i.e. Cageian) sensitivity produce powerful effects. Does the fact that it is my body moving across space triggering said effect render the effect more instructive, more stimulating? I would argue that the stimulation is of value but the instruction is often paltry.
I think this may have to do with the traditional relationship of history and anthropology to the archival document or the artifact and (be patient but we are back to Benjamin again) the special idea of aura.
Or does the converse actually happen: do new technologies merely confirm our past visions, our former suspicions? For example, the airplane confirmed the dreams of all cartographers and put to rest the myth of the giant (was it last visited in that 50's/early 60's TV serial Land of the Giants?). On the other hand, satellites in addition to giving us a present-time omniscience are suggesting new ways of reading masses and contusions as visible maps of history. Even Paul Valéry (quoted by Benjamin) noted the degree to which early 20th century technologies forever altered our perceptions of time and space.
Speaking of Benjamin, I am really thinking about his most famous piece, ... Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. And it is here an apposite argument is put forth: "One of the foremost tasks of the arts has always been the creation of a demand that could only be satisfied later." In other words, artworks engage ideas that have yet to be realized or again quoting Benjamin (this time quoting Breton): "The work of art is valuable only in so far as it is vibrated by the reflexes of the future." Borrowing on this, we wish to see myopically -- not blindly, but like the fly but panoramically and also three-dimensionally -- so Cubism precedes the invention of new optics, Dadism precedes the splicing and cutting of films. And where might all of the above stand in relation to Einsteinian physics?
In ancient times, didn't humans have dreams in which they fly? And if so what did the landscape look like? In the Middle Ages, how does Chaucer describe the world viewed by Troillis once he has exited life .. but as a dull gray marble, its concerns now so petty and so distant. When the cartographers referred to above first set out their designs, how could they imagine all information flattened .. perhaps they had stood on a mountain and viewed the valleys from on high? Perhaps some might argue that mapmaking, akin to our use of language, arises out of a natural inclination to use symbols. So I have heard of abstractions drawn in the sand by ancient groups of Pacific islanders before taking cross-ocean voyages. Having never taken a single linguistics course, however, maybe I'll leave symbolism well enough alone and return to the idea of prescience and science, or my first concern, which was whether new technologies should be used to convey new forms of information.
My point is that very often new technologies are often employed to the opposite effect: to merely replicate something that is best (or at least well) achieved using some older medium. Thus many early photographs attempted to achieve the effects of painting (although certainly in retrospect their own remarkable qualities arise in the struggle). This is almost the opposite of what Benjamin suggests when he says that later technologies will achieve effortlessly what prior technologies struggled to achieve.
The introduction of new media into "interactive informal learning environments" (oh .. I suppose they mean museums, parks, playgrounds and the like) -- where the intention is outrightly didactic -- often manages to achieve very little in the realm of say history or anthropology (the opposite is true as yet of science and art for the reasons given in my previous entry). Sometimes a nicely designed computer module will take a visitor through an abbreviated history on some topic .. but why need this module be site specific? Wouldn't it offer as much online? (See the Field Museum's online exhibit on chocolate for example.) In other words, how does the new technology contribute to pedogagy pure and simple? Ambient sound can if employed with care and a certain nearly musical (i.e. Cageian) sensitivity produce powerful effects. Does the fact that it is my body moving across space triggering said effect render the effect more instructive, more stimulating? I would argue that the stimulation is of value but the instruction is often paltry.
I think this may have to do with the traditional relationship of history and anthropology to the archival document or the artifact and (be patient but we are back to Benjamin again) the special idea of aura.
