Assessment 3, Essay 1: Question 2
Provide a detailed discussion of the modernist idea of the mass media and/or popular culture (Benjamin or Berman) and show how that differs to the postmodernist idea using Baudrillard’s concept of simulations.
This essay will attempt to provide some details of the history and key theories of modernism and post-modernism. In this detailed discussion, material from the course reader will be used, to provide the context in, and the paradigm with which, to try to link this history and theory with the way Walter Benjamin presents the mass media and popular culture, and with how his essentially modernist, structuralist view differs from later, post-modernist theory of mass media and the concept of simulations, as espoused by Baudrillard. While both theorists were convinced of the immense power and importance of mass media, Benjamin was generally positive, believing the relationship between the mass media and masses held the potential to effect political change. Baudrillard was deeply pessimistic, seeing modern mass media as a deadly and dangerous tool, which allowed the people virtually no chance of effective response to an all-enveloping, artificial and distorted environment, Using recent examples from mass media, the essay will also try to show that the theoretical propositions proposed, by both writers, can be found in examples from today’s mass media and popular culture.
The development and establishment of theories of modernism and post-modernism, and their components, sit within cultural studies. In the Introduction to The Cultural Studies Reader, During, as editor, says this subject “is the study of culture, or more particularly, the study of contemporary culture” (1993, p.1) and so “is not an academic discipline quite like others. It possesses neither a well-defined methodology nor clearly demarcated fields for investigation” (1993, p. 1). Johnson says “cultural studies is a process, a kind of alchemy for producing useful knowledge” (1996, p. 75).
(see appendix 1)
Sitting within this analytical and reflexive subject is modernity, which Berman says “is realism”, (1983, p. 14) an “era”, passing through three phases lasting over five hundred years; (p. 16) the third and current phase of the “‘modern’ [as] of our own time – [from] the beginning of the 21st C” ( p. 13). He gives us a theoretical definition and historical outline of the “vast” subject, (pp. 15, 16) saying it has “developed a rich history and a plenitude of its own”, (p. 16) and is one in which
the first thing we will notice is the highly-developed,
differentiated and dynamic new landscape in which
modern experience takes place. … automatic factories,
railroads, vast new industrial zones; of teeming cities
that have grown overnight, often with dreadful
human consequences; of daily newspapers, telegraphs,
telephones and other mass media, communicating on
an every wider scale
Berman, 1983, pp. 18-19
(see appendix 2)
Early in the twentieth century, during the beginning of what is termed the final stage of this virtual “maelstrom”, an array of device, “electronic media”, was invented, and quickly came into general use; the telephone, radio, photography, film and television. This led to an extraordinary expansion in the modes of both public expression, and private communication between individuals. At the same time important modernist theories in relation to mass media and popular culture were developed. An early major theorist was Walter Benjamin, who “aims to assess the effects of mass production and consumption, and modern technology, upon the status of the work of art, as well as their implications for contemporary popular arts or popular culture” (Strinati, 2004, p. 73).
Berman, another, later theorist described the mass media in the modern era as “systems of mass communication” … “dynamic in their development, enveloping and binding together the most diverse people and societies”, (Berman, 1983, p. 16) stating this applied “in painting and sculpture, in poetry and the novel, in theater and dance, in architecture and design, in a whole array of electronic media” ( p. 23).
One of the almost immediate consequences of the development and use of these new media was the boundaries between high and low art dissolved, a situation Raymond criticized, terming it the “uncoupling [of] culture from society, and high culture from ordinary culture” (as quoted by During, 1993, p. 2). This revolution in art and literature, in culture and everyday life, continues today. Benjamin describes it as
breaking down the barriers between “art” and other
human activities, such as commercial entertainment,
industrial technology, fashion and design, politics. It
also encouraged writers, painters, composers and flim
makers to break down the boundaries of their
specializations and work together on mixed-media
productions and performances that would create richer
and more multivalent arts
Benjamin, 1983, pp. 31-32
Traditionally “the work of art acquired an ‘aura’ which attested to its authority and uniquenss, it’s singularity in time and space, … once imbedded in this fabric of tradition, art retained its aura independently” (Strinati, 1995, p. 73). This situation continued from the religious, through the secularization of art. Key theories developed around the operation of the new tools of communication, and their effects on the masses, Benjamin’s theory being that although a work of art “has always been reproductible” …[in the modern,] mechanical reproduction … however represents something new” (Benjamin, 1970, p. 220).
Benjamin understood “historical change and transformation are always viewed from the perspective of a particular present instant and interest … and the disintegration of [the unique, authentic work of art] its accompanying aura, and the transpostion of art from the sphere of ritual and tradition to that of political practice … [in this process] the aura of the artwork is fleetingly recognizable only at the moment of its extinction, at last sight” (Gilloch, 2002, p. 181).
Strinati states Benjamin explored how, because of “the emergence of capitalist industrialization and the commercialization of [modern] culture there commenced and developed a “struggle for artistic autonomy” during the period of the Renaissance, regarding the preservation, or the shattering, of the “aura” of individual works of art (Strinati, 1995, p. 74) “and in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition … their most powerful agent is the film” (Benjamin, as quoted by Strinati, 1995, p. 74).
Benjamin defined the aura as “the unique phenomenon of distance however close an object may be” (Caygill, p. 135). He believed the aura was “contaminated” and then “transformed” by the new technology (Caygill, p. 137). Gilloch tells us of the development by Benjamin and also Krackauer of “two key themes [in their theory] … [of] the essential connection between film and photography, and … the intimate relationship between these media and memory, history and historiography” (Gilloch, 2002, p. 180). Benjamin stated that ” the sound film is superior in capturing reality” (as quoted by Strinati, 1995, p. 74) and that “not only do film and photography show us many things we may never have seen before or existed … they also change the conditions in which they are received” (Benjamin, as quoted by Strinati, 1995, p. 74).
Benjamin linked this to “notions of authenticity as well as the political use of images”, (Strinati, 1995, p. 73) saying “technical reproduction can put the copy of the original [photographs or phonograph records] into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself” (Benjamin, 1970. pp.222-223). “This holds – not only for the art work but also, for instance, … a landscape which passes in review before the spectator in a movie” (p. 223). Gilloch says Benjamin theorised photography was a “vital quest … is not whether it is an art form, but how, with the demise of aura, a new form of political practice can be constituted” (Gilloch, 2002, p. 180).
In this early third stage of modernism, theorists harboured positive views about the development of this new society, its new tools of communication, its speed of change, and Benjamin quotes Paul Valery
Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into
our houses from far off to satisy our needs in
response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied
with viual or auditory images, which will appear and
disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly
more than a sign (Benjamin,1970, p. 221).
Thus it appears Benjamin was positive about the potential outcome, saying “Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art”. While believing “Digital imaging problemmatises the idea of the ‘real’ or ‘authenticity’ of an image”, Benjamin at the same time put forward the rationale that, although the work of art “which is reproducible [now, in the modern] has lost its aura and autonomy, … [it has] become more available to more people” (Strinati, 1995, p. 74)
Williams acknowledged “it was through this uncoupling that modern culture acquires its particular energy, charm and capacity to inform” (as quoted by During, 1993, p. 2). The theorists had faith in the populace’s future ability to deal with the new situations and the rapid change, for example, Strinati defines Benjamin’s position as one that “stresses the democratic and participatory rather than the authoritarian and repressive potential of contemporary popular culture”(Strinati, 1995, p. 75). Berman says
These world-historical processes have nourished
an amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to
make men and women the subjects as well as the
objects of modernization, to give them the power
to change the world that is changing them, to make
their way through the maelstrom and make it their
own.
Berman, 1983, p. 16.
Benjamin believed that the ordinary man could formulate “revolutionary demands in the politics of art” (Benjamin, 1970, p. 220). Berman stated, positively, “our century has produced an amazing plenitude of works and ideas of the highest quality … [that] give us a great deal to be proud of” (Berman, 1983, pp. 23-24).
The theorists held strong desires, to transmit this body of “ideas, that knowledge, through the intellectual function, to those who do not belong, professionally, in the intellectual class” (Hall, 2007, p. 39). Benjamin believed the sound film gave “the masses the opportunity to consider what it has captured”, (Strinati, 1995, p. 74) and said the “most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, … its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage” (Benjamin, 1970, p. 223).
The theorists believed, once the people properly understood the new situation and how to use these new tools, that the masses would be able to “participate in … [film] reception and appreciation. These views were linked to early cognizance of, within the development of the theory of cultural studies, that ” the cultural expression” and the belief in “the crucial importance of language and of the linguistic metaphor to any culture” developed within the theory (Hall, 2007, p. 41) also specifically applied to modern, western culture itself. This included
the expansion of the notion of text and textuality,
both as a source of meaning, and as that which
escapes and postpones meaning; the recognition
of the heterogeneity, of the multiplicity, of meanings,
of the struggle to close arbitrarily the infinite
semiosis beyond meaning; the acknowledgment
of textuality and cultural power, of representation
itself, as a site of power and regulation; of the
symbolic as a source of identity.
Hall, 2007, p. 41
As the period progressed into the post-modern, (see appendix 3) theory linked communication to “cultural anxiety” and “concern about increased social alienation and a sense of living at the edge of the abyss in the experience of the modern city” (Sturken & Cartwright, 2001, p. 241). Baudrillard states “Our media involves more than
‘the simple transmission-reception of a message … our media, however, follow this model, constituting a ‘speech without response’ … locking us into a unilateral power relation. Thus no liberation of the media is possible” (as quoted by Merrin, 2005, p. 20)
He described as “the only real communication” during the May 1968 revolutionary student uprising in Paris that did not receive the media’s “mortal dose of publicity” as
the real revolutionary media was the walls and
their speech, the silkscreen posters and
hand-painted notices, as it was only there, in
that immediate, reciprocal and external space,
that ‘speech began and was exchanged’.
Transgressive, ephemeral, dualistic, both inviting
and producing a response, these graffiti breach
‘the fundamental rule of non-response enunciated
by all the media’. In … [this process’ Baudrillard says,
‘an immediate communication process is rediscovered’
Merrin quoting Baudrillard, 2005, p. 21
Merrin says that “for Baudrillard the only revolution ‘lies in restoring the possibility of a response’, allowing speech to ‘be able to exchange, give and repay itself.” Baudrillard thought this was unlikely, believing it would require a total and profound re-structuring of the media. (2005, p. 20). Baudrillard and Debord developed “a similar critique of the media’s unilaterality, [where] spectacular replacement of the real and production of ‘separation’ is seen” (p. 20). Starbucks coffee chain has recently teamed with The Good Sheet, producing “a weekly series breaking down an important issue to help make sense of the world around us”. Maybe this is an example of just the type of media restructure we need.
Today, mass media and popular culture abounds with examples of both Benjamin’s, and Baudrillard’s theories. Benjamin’s own concerns about the way the development of the mass media and popular culture are warped, perhaps in this way a forerunner of Baudrillard’s thoughts, are shown by his statements that “the film industry is trying hard to spur the interest of the masses through illusion-promoting spectacles and dubious speculations … film production under capitalism resurrects cultic distance and creates an ‘artificial’ aura (Gilloch, 2002, p. 187). The major Hollywood studios are often guilty of this crime, with many examples both historic and current; Breakfast at Tiffany’s being an early, patriarchal forerunner of the acceleration in consumerism, which also trivialized the modern female role. More recently Alexander (the Great), and other similar movies glorifying combat, and nationalism, were deliberately funded, produced and released – just prior to the spurious “Weapons of Mass Destruction” war in Iraq, and the associated tragic loss of young life. This comes back to what Baudrillard described as “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth … it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true” Baudrillard’s theory related to ‘the vanishing point of communication’. He said “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.
In New York, young models literally ‘three days from death’ are sought-after, plucked off the streets by major fashion designers, as they stumble by in a drug-fueled haze. Consider the why, and how, there is such demand for such models, or how used; the imagery composed in their likeness is only a simulacrum; there is no reality, only pictures showing a life impossible (apart from 3 days) to achieve. Starvation or death from overdose is the result, or the real nightmare of America, the over-weight. All of the fashionable and expensive images thus composed carry not life, not even the shadow of death, but death itself; starved-strange, drug-addled, or dramatically-dying, comes before any reality. What is portrayed, consumerised, commoditized, sold on the high-fashion streets, as life, justifies what Baudrillard believed – that modern society has lost much of the contact with the real and lives go on in the hyperreal.
Merrin says Baudrillard has an “extreme picture of human relations”, and there is a difficulty with his work in that he applies a “blanket rejection of all forms of mediation and of electronic media in particular” (p. 22).This can be compared how Strinati says Benjamin’s position is not “without problems of its own, which include the relationship between power and the new popular arts, historical accuracy and an exaggerated technological optimism” (Strinati, 1995, p. 75). In addition, many expensive fashion shoot locations are far away from any chance of comparison with the realities of life, in fabled or historic settings. Sometimes the emaciated models are even styled and dressed to reproduce figures in famous works of art, such as the Mona Lisa, or Girl With a Pearl Earring. Certainly Benjamin’s position on the extinguishment of the aura of an original work of art is clearly in evidence here.
Baudrillard has an “emphasis on unilaterality that appears to suggest a passive, receiving audience that is rejected by the dominant contemporary paradigms of media” (Merrin, quoting Baudrillard, p. 22). Reading Scott’s The New York Times article “A Genial Explorer of Literary Worlds”, posthumously describing the career of literary critic John Leonard, it seems that “passive, receiving audience” is nowhere in sight. Scott describes Leonard as “more than any other critic, was assisting in the cartography, pointing readers toward freshly liberated zones of imagination. He spoke no in the voice of disembodied authority, but of enthusiasm” (2008, November 8, p. C1).
Merrin points out that Baudrillard does “make us question the value of … [art, communications, and mass media] content; whether it actually constitutes communication or just a reduction and simplification of human expression and meaning” (Merrin, 2005, p. 23). This can be compared to how, as Gilloch explains “Benjamin observes on a number of occasions, cinema and the city have a special connection, an ‘elective affinity’ … he emphasizes the cinematic character of urban experience and space. He notes how film offers both a privileged proximity to the urban labyrinth and an incomparable insight into its secrets” (Gilloch, 2002, p. 182). Gilloch says “Moreover, film disenchants reality … just as photography promises to expel aura from the modern cityscape, so film penetrates and demystifies the world” (p. 186).
Merrin says Baudrillard, although extreme, does “have the merit of making the question of form and effects of media visible again in an original and provocative way – question whether electronic media necessarily add to human communication” (Merrin, p. 23). Today much of our media is taken up with valid examples. In The New York Times recent article, “Child’s Garden of Hip-Hop (for Mom to Love, Too), article writer Motoko Rich quotes editor and poet Nikki Giovanni, who “wanted to reach back to what she sees as the roots of hip-hop in older poems by mainly African-American poets, like Hughes, or Paul Laurence Dunbar, as well as to use the familiar vernacular of hip-hop, to lure children to more established literary voices” (2008, November 8, p. C1). It is difficult to see how such valid new developments might be what Baudrillard termed “merely replac[ing] it [speech] as quicker and more convenient, simplifying our effort and investment” (Merrin, p. 23). More likely as Benjamin said: “The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception” (Benjamin, 1970, 225).
Merrin also says of Baudrillard “he distinguishes human relations and ‘communication’, arguing that the latter is a ‘modern invention’ as ‘a new mode of production and circulation of speech, connected to the media and to the technology of the media’ … [where] neither the word or the concept existed. ‘People don’t need to communicate, because they just speak to one another'” (p. 22). The recent mass media New York Post November 3rd. article by Olsham, entitled “Touched by the handheld of God” (see appendix 5) describes specific use for the new “Jewberry” technology. A busy, modern-day user quoted in the article, says “it’s not our technology that informs civilizations; it is our values” (Olsham, 2008, November 3rd.) (Also see appendix 5). This is certainly an example of “reserved communication”, whereby a modern sub-culture “respond[ing] to the symbolic demand for communication by developing electronic technologies to rejoin their own isolated populations”. (Merrin, p. 21-22). While this effectively “circulates[s]” that “communication” it is questionable if the aim is to “promote [this established religion’s] stimulation” (p. 22).
It is interesting that Merrin goes onto quote a number of other experts who criticize Baudrillard, who base their “communication studies” and their focus upon the actual, what they term the “active audience”(p. 22). In comparison, Benjamin appears to have backed up his theories with research or events, as he talks about the importance of statistics, saying “manifest in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics” (Benjamin, 1970, 225). This is an all-important matter in our lives, because of the “contradictions that pervade modern life” (Berman, 1983, p. 14). Recently statistics informed the work that advised us “The Internet is not just changing the way people live but altering the way our brains work with a neuroscientist arguing this is an evolutionary change which will put the tech-savvy at the top of the new social order” ( Reuters, 2008, October 27). (see appendix 4).
Benjamin and Baudrillard did not doubt the new and ever-increasing powers of the mass media and popular culture, and both were concerned by the close links between these elements of modern life, and both the economic base, and politics. Cultural studies deals with contemporary culture, so it is natural all theory is in a constant state of movement and flux, and due to the pressures of modernism, is now delivered and changed at very high speed.
Nonetheless cultural studies continues to benefit greatly from each of their different theoretical perspective, in the writings of both these important theorists. In the everyday of modern society, thousands upon thousands of objects of the mass media and popular culture are conceived, manufactured and portrayed, and commoditized, specifically as described by either Benjamin or Baudrillard. Benjamin held an essentially positive view of mass media in the modern period, as he believed in the real of modernism and of modern life. Baudrillard centred his work aroung the concept of similacra and simulations, delivering dark, negative views, believing all modern reality to be now so blurred, with no distinction between the hyperreal of the perceived world and the hazy simulacrum. He did not think there was a high probability that the masses would develop abilities that allowed them to analyse, be reflexive and then communicate, effectively and politically. Benjamin thought, once properly informed and educated about the profound developments of modernism, ordinary people would be able to understand, become reflexive, to engage, have the ability to reply or challenge and thus effect political change, to improve their circumstances and lives. In contrast, Baudrillard believed there was no way out of the modern abyss and deplored the use of all technological tools of communication and implicated the mass media totally. Benjamin was more concerned with techniques and politics, the how, or the what of the message or commodity as delivered. He developed important new ideas to demonstrate the striking changes in modernism, how the valuable, traditional aura of an original work of art irreversibly changed in modernism, yet still believed modernism contained positive tools for mankind. Both views, both theory, still valid today.
Reference
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aura. The decay of the aura. In Introducing Walter Benjamin (pp. 135-137). Cambridge: Icon Books.
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Appendix
appendix 1
During explains the dynamic nature of this relatively new field of study by saying “to introduce the forms of analysis developed by [this] discipline, we can point to two features that characterized it when it first appeared in Great Britain in the 1950s. It studied culture in relation to individual experiences and lives … [and] it was an engaged form of analysis” (1993, pp. 1-2). Coming out of a form of Marxism, this new study, while concerned with the society in general, was, in the beginning particularly located within production and focused on the quality of ‘everyday’ historic and modern ‘working class’ life (p. 2). Johnson provides us with a framework to understand this theory by it is based upon
Procedures by which other traditions are approached
both for what they may yield and for what they inhibit.
Critique also involves stealing away the more useful
elements and rejecting the rest.
Johnson, 1996, p. 75
From the outset cultural studies was “a Marxian but not communist movement” (p. 2) and that “early cultural studies did not flinch from the fact that societies are structured unequally, that individuals are not all born [equal]. … In this it differed not only from the (apparently) objective social sciences but from the older forms of cultural criticism, especially literary criticism, which considered political questions as being of peripheral relevance to the appreciation of culture. ” (p. 2). The idea of “cultural capital” was developed and one the early aims were “to use the education system to distribute literary knowledge and appreciation more widely” (p. 2).
Analysing Hall’s writing in the Editor’s Introduction, During says cultural studies emerged out of the “disintegration of classical Marxism in its Eurocentrism and … [part of Hall’s] thesis was that the economic base has a determining effect on the cultural superstructure” and goes onto “acknowledge cultural studies must be formed in interruptions to its trajectories and perceived mission – notably, early on, by feminism and anti-racism” (1993, p. 36) which Hall explains happened in the 1970s (p. 37). Hall discusses the links between cultural studies, and the “radical displacement” of classical Marxism and briefly outlines the “substantial “superstructuralist mistranslations” which went on internally, when the “anti-theoreticism or resistance to the theory of cultural studies had been overcome”(p. 37. He states there were parts of the “theoretical framework” with remained “unresolved” (p. 37).
Hall admitted the non-existence of the “organic intellectual” Gramski hoped cultural studies would produce, who would work ” at the very forefront of intellectual theoretical work … to know more than traditional intellectuals do … [and who] cannot absolve himself or herself from the responsibility of transmitting those ideas … to those who do not belong … in the intellectual class” (pp. 38-39). On the one side there developed the “uncritical romance of machines, fused with their utter remoteness from people, … reincarnated in modes that would be less bizarre and longer-lived”. This included “the vision of the factory as an exemplary human being which men and women should take as a model for their lives” (Berman, 1983, pp. 26-27).This meant the “brilliant machines and mechanical systems [play] all the leading roles” (p.27).
appendix 2
At the same time Berman describes modernism as a unique period in the development of mankind, one in which
Environments and experiences cut across all
boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class
and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense,
modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a
paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into
a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal,
of struggle and contradiction of ambiguity and anguish.
Berman (1983) p. 15.
On the other side, he tells us the “great modern thinkers” of the 19th Century believed modern individuals had the capacity both to understand this fate and, once they understood it, to fight it.”. 20th Century thinkers, he says, “lack[ed] this empathy”, even to the point, in the 60s when a paradigm developed that “both Marx and Freud are obsolete: not only class and social struggles but also psychological conflicts and contradictions have been abolished by the modernist state of “total administration”.” (p. 28).
Berman goes onto say this in “volatile atmosphere” there developed what he saw as “a travesty … [to invoke the critical tradition of Hegel and Marx] while rejecting their vision of history as restless activity, dynamic contradiction, dialectical struggle and progress” (p. 29), but also a “large and vital body of thought and controversy over the ultimate meaning of modernity .. which [in the 60s could] be divided into three: affirmative, negative and withdrawn” (p. 29).
The general processes of modernism were broken and fractured, into many facets of literature and visual arts, all apparently in states of flux. For example, in what was then classified as the category of the “withdrawn” “the modern writer turns his back on society and confronts the world of objects without going through any of the forms of History or social life” and “the only legitimate concern of modernist art was art itself: … Modernism … the quest for the pure, self-referential art object” (Berman, 1983, p. 30).
As time went by, this definition was seen as too “arid, and lifeless” (Berman, 1983, p. 30). This particular theory of modernism then moved onto a more politicized form, where modernism was thought of as “‘seek[ing] the violent overthrow of all of our values, and car[ing] little about reconstructing the worlds it destroys” (p. 30). In turn, this line of theory was perceived as leaving out “the great romance of construction, a crucial force in modernism, … all the affirmative and life-sustaining force that in the greatest modernists is always interwoven with assault and revolt; the erotic joy, natural beauty and human tenderness” (pp. 30-31).
appendix 3
There was no clear division between the modern period and the commencement of post-modernism. Sturken & Cartwright state
Postmodernism has often been characterized as
a response to the conditions of late modernity
linked to late capitalism. But it is widely agreed that
there is no precise moment of rupture between the
modern and the postmodern. Rather, postmodern
intersects with and permeates late modernity, a
period during which modernist approaches continue
to be generated.
Sturken & Cartwright, 2001, p. 240
Throughout the most recent period of modernism, conflicting, cross-over situations constantly arose, such as with
the proliferation of images and image-
producing apparatuses like the cinema, video,
and digital imaging devices that can be
characterized as postmodern have been met
by criticism steeped in modernist ways of
thinking.
Sturken & Cartwright, 2001, p. 240
appendix 4
Posted on ZDNet News: Oct 27, 2008 5:04:29 AM
http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-243997.html
CANBERRA–The Internet is not just changing the way people live but altering the way our brains work with a neuroscientist arguing this is an evolutionary change which will put the tech-savvy at the top of the new social order.
Gary Small, a neuroscientist at UCLA in California who specializes in brain function, has found through studies that Internet searching and text messaging has made brains more adept at filtering information and making snap decisions.
But while technology can accelerate learning and boost creativity it can have drawbacks as it can create Internet addicts whose only friends are virtual and has sparked a dramatic rise in Attention Deficit Disorder diagnoses.
Small, however, argues that the people who will come out on top in the next generation will be those with a mixture of technological and social skills.
“We’re seeing an evolutionary change. The people in the next generation who are really going to have the edge are the ones who master the technological skills and also face-to-face skills,” Small told Reuters in a telephone interview.
“They will know when the best response to an email or Instant Message is to talk rather than sit and continue to email.”
In his newly released fourth book “iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind,” Small looks at how technology has altered the way young minds develop, function and interpret information.
Small, the director of the Memory & Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior and the Center on Aging at UCLA, said the brain was very sensitive to the changes in the environment such as those brought by technology.
He said a study of 24 adults as they used the Web found that experienced Internet users showed double the activity in areas of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning as Internet beginners.
“The brain is very specialized in its circuitry and if you repeat mental tasks over and over it will strengthen certain neural circuits and ignore others,” said Small.
“We are changing the environment. The average young person now spends nine hours a day exposing their brain to technology. Evolution is an advancement from moment to moment and what we are seeing is technology affecting our evolution.”
Small said this multi-tasking could cause problems.
He said the tech-savvy generation, whom he calls “digital natives,” are always scanning for the next bit of new information which can create stress and even damage neural networks.
“There is also the big problem of neglecting human contact skills and losing the ability to read emotional expressions and body language,” he said.
“But you can take steps to address this. It means taking time to cut back on technology, like having a family dinner, to find a balance. It is important to understand how technology is affecting our lives and our brains and take control of it.”
Story Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
appendix 5
FAITH GOES WIRELESS
TOUCHED BY THE HANDHELD OF GOD
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By JEREMY OLSHAN
PEOPLE OF THE FACEBOOK: Tech-savvy worshippers can organize prayer groups and, like this man in Jerusalem over the weekend, recite prayers with a “JewBerry.”
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Last updated: 5:53 am
November 3, 2008
Posted: 5:02 am
November 3, 2008
Tech-savvy Orthodox Jews can now reach out for the handset of God.
Two entrepreneurs who attended Yeshiva University have written software that turns the BlackBerry from a device to check e-mail and stocks into a pray phone.
Dubbed “the JewBerry,” the $30 program replaces the traditional prayer book by providing all the Hebrew blessings observant Jews are required to say three times a day.
“Throughout the day, Jews gather in office-building stairwells and conference rooms to pray, and while sometimes you might not remember your prayer book, no one goes anywhere without their BlackBerry,” said co-creator Jonathan Bennett, 33, of Cedarhurst, LI.
Currently, JewBerry – which is not affiliated in any way with BlackBerry maker RIM – is a static program that does not take advantage of the device’s wireless capabilities.
But Bennett and Jerusalem-based partner Jonathan Kestenbaum hope their product will eventually become the Facebook of Moses followers.
Using GPS technology, for instance, the phone will one day enable Jews to create minyans – the minimum-10-member groups necessary for prayer.
“Say you’re in a place like Shea Stadium. You could post that you are looking for a minyan, pick a location, and other people signed up will be able to respond and meet up at the Carvel stand,” Bennett said.
Nearly 10,000 Jews from across the world have already purchased the software, and Bennett’s company, Promised Land Holdings, has been besieged with requests for new features, including mobile versions of the Talmud.
Yeshiva University President Richard Joel was among the device’s early users. “I love it, because now I can not only look how the market is doing, but I can also say my evening prayers,” he said. “A lot of breakthroughs are done trying to advance science or make a buck, but at the heart of what Yeshiva [University] is about is the notion that it’s not our technology that informs civilization; it is our values.”
The JewBerry has already caused some confusion during worship, but people who appear to be checking e-mail may in fact be immersed in prayer, Bennett said.
But he does not believe the technology will ever completely replace the prayer book itself.
“Personally, I still like the experience of holding a prayer book when I have one available, but I like that if I ever need [the JewBerry], it’s there,” he said. “Our goal is not to make the book obsolete but to take something as physically mundane as the BlackBerry and make it more spiritual.”
jeremy.olshan@nypost.com
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