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.
You're argument really clarified some things for me in regard to these two authors. I agree that both Turner and Hayles and their fellow intellectuals created a new world, but I hadn't really focused too much on the idea that this new world was, as you said, "...made of the spare parts of the preceding world" and that their thoughts weren't entirely new. It makes sense that they would have drawn from previous forms of thought and various ideas in order to create new and seemingly radical ideas. And isn't that how any idea is formed--nothing is every entirely new I suppose.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right when you say "Their ideas and actions may have been radical, but they were not utterly new". Society has come so far in the past 60 years, with the creation of the internet and the dominate role of mass media in inspiring culture, but the changes that have taken place are simply reactions to previous changes that have inspired a chain of events that got us where we are today. I find it interesting that we focus so much of our education on understanding history and the "cycles" it goes through that lead us to the present, in many ways so we can avoid the mistakes we see in it. However, I think it is definitely a radical idea to say that there is little room for "new" ideas in the modern world. The way that the world is developing now is technically driven, in all areas of society. As technology continues to improve, I believe society will adapt its old ways to meet the new ones, and I think that's the argument Hayles is making in her book. Even if the basic principles of society remain the same throughout history, changes must take place to accommodate shifts in popular ideology and technology.
ReplyDeleteI really hope that made sense. ;)
One of the points that needs highlighting here, and your discussion leads into it, is that whatever might have been "new" about the world that people like Brand or the folks at the Macy conferences were envisioning, the one thing that seems not terribly new was the group of people who were in control. Brand and Kesey, as well as the engineers in the Bay area who were developing all this new technology, seem to all have come from the same kinds of social backgrounds as the folks who were organizing the world that young Stewart Brand, in his diary entries, seemed so dismayed by.
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