Women Week

Concerning the potential of females to make an impact using either mass media or the newer media, Ann Tyler would presumable give the same answer. Women have historically been important socially and in media regardless of what the linear historical record might suggest. This capacity to alter and change history is not limited to the past technologies, but will continue in the present and the future. I am sure that Tyler would extend this influence and capacity of women to political potential.

It seems that the mass media of the decades preceding World War II, were usually a reflection of an elite society. The change in media had not been the number of people who actually had control and influence over the content of media, but rather a shift in how many people thought that the media was a reflection of themselves: whether it really is a reflection, is debatable. Turkle explores how the virtual world offered by the MUDs might have a similar problem: “if the politics of virtuality means democracy online and apathy offline, there is reason for concern” (244). The new medium is not free of any of the fears that centered on other media.  The idea that virtual life, just as older forms of media, may only work to alienate the masses and keep them from participation is a worry for Turkle. She also paints the scenario of how new media could become a modern day social Panopticon; hardly a pleasant thought. However, new media also has the hope that came with the older media. “Today many are looking to computers and virtual reality to counter social fragmentation and atomization; to extend democracy; to break down division of gender, race and class; and to lead to a renaissance of learning” (245).  Turkle relays how the ability to be anyone in a MUD, say someone from a different gender, can give some insight into their perspectives; that it might be a way to simulate walking in someone else’s shoes. The problem then, is knowing how much of it is simulation and how much is real life. A man can understand some of the outward social problems a woman might experience in the virtual world, but he can never understand all of the physical and emotional aspects encountered in the real world. It is wonderful that we can gain some knowledge from simulation, but only if we understand that this knowledge is extremely limited. Turkle emphasizes that the fact that the virtual is not real is what makes it all the wonderful things that it is: an escape, a demonstration against the real world, a learning experience. However, the lack of embodiment and real world implications also means the virtual world is lacking something, and I think that something is meaning, although Turkle never says so. But in the end, I think that is why all of her examples of the virtual world doing good involve “a permeable border between the real and the virtual” (246). The things she likes about virtual worlds is the psychological compensation and political criticism which according to Turkle, “give precedence to the events in the real world” (249). The virtual world is a great escape because it can be made perfect through programming. However, using it as a permanent escape isn’t practical. We still have to live in the real world. So I think the implication is that we have to use the virtual world and then understand if and how it is applicable to the real world, just doing the first is not necessarily harmful, but it also is not helpful.

(mostly) Turner and (less so) Hayles

Both Hayles and Turner emphasize the clash of old thought and new ideas in the rise of new media culture. The progressive leaders they discuss never so much seemed to propose some radically new idea, so much as they just kept extending and progressing thoughts and theories that already existed. I think Turner (my favorite of the two) especially shows how the individuals and groups that were creating this new world were always creating it as a response.

On the whole, the new media world was a response to both Turner and Hayles. For Hayles, it was a intellectual response to the war and the implications of information theory. For Tuner, it was a response to cold war thinking and the wish to escape the organizational structure of the looming Russian soldier and industrial man. The generation that was to produce the men that would take media culture onto a new level was looking for a different way to approach the world. Many new scientific discoveries supported a more communal and less hierarchal way of thinking, and the generation in turn responded by following this avenue presented to them. Turner has many statements implying that the “new” trends were in one aspect an attack on the cold war world and its philosophies and in another aspect “a celebration a migration towards the de-centralized, systems oriented forms of thought then occurring at the center of the scientific establishment” (47). I think Turner does an amazing job of showing how these response to the scientific discoveries varied across different areas: science, arts, politics, life style, media theory etc. and how these responses then became an overreaching new world that encompassed all of these areas. For Turner, what it always comes back to is the inclusion of all of these areas into media. While this was not new, it was different, but only as a sort of warping form cold war thinking. Turner repeatedly goes emphasizes how these thinkers, artists, etc. who wished to produce something new, always got their original ideas form cold war thinking. They were a product of that kind of thought, and although they disliked it, they had to use it to change it. An example would be one groups wish to move away from politics as a way to change the system since it was the system. However, it seemed that the direction the other group took to follow that philosophy was to try to change business. Today, we see big business as a similar entity to government. So, were they really getting away from the mechanisms of society to change society, or did they just recognize early that the mechanisms were changing?

So, I think the answer for both Hayles and Turner, although my emphasis is on Turner, is that these thinkers provide evidence that although the leading intellectuals after WWII created a rather new world, this world is made of the spare parts of the preceding world. Their ideas and actions may have been radical, but they were not utterly new since they were so grounded in a reaction to previous thought, regardless of if this is media theory, as for Hayles, or a more social theory, as with Turner.