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San Francisco, 3:35 PM
Wed Dec 16
25 posts in the last 24 hours
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08/30/09
I'd also highly recommend Lynn Spigel's Make Room For TV. It is more of a cultural history and looks at the ways in which television reshaped our lives and even reconfigured the way we build houses.
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[books.google.com]
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08/30/09
This is very true.. the advent of movies on television definitely blurred the landscape and made the medium more complex. TV used to be a much stricter display and delivery of a certain kind of content (that which we think of as television: sitcoms, crime dramas, those specific formats created for the television delivery system and medium)
I also find it amusing that tv grew out of radio, with regard to early content: they didn't yet know what to do with this new medium, so they would re-work radio plays in a television context. It was early performers (borrowed over from radio), like Milton Berle, that began to shape and sculpt with the new medium. Ernie Kovacs also comes to mind.
08/30/09
08/30/09
The failure of a lot of audience members/readers to recognize that really bums me out sometimes. There is a huge difference, for example, between a novel and a film adaptation, but too often the comparison happens (which was better?) and not the discussion of the content/message as delivered in the medium.
Unless one enjoys reading pretentious or academic criticism, which I don't.
Wow. Got kinda ranty there. Sorry!
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08/30/09
Mcluhan once said that a lightbulb was a device of pure information carrying. That by its very nature and existence, it transmits a fundamental change in the human consciousness and our conscious process. Thus "the medium is the message".
08/30/09
McLuhan also describes the message/content as being like a Russian doll: the content of writing is speech, the content of speech is thought, thought is nonverbal and is the smallest doll of all, small enough to be insignificant. This idea is intriguing, but completely disregards the creator of the content. Something he consistently does.
I think for people who haven't read (or have tried to read and given up on) McLuhan, or find McLuhan's assumptions about human physiology and perception suspect, they might get a bigger kick out of James Carey or Walter Ong.
I have to admit, after I read Ong's Orality & Literacy and Carey's Communication As Culture, I had a much better understanding of what McLuhan was attempting to communicate, what he was building towards as a school of thought.
This many years later and I am still on the fence about McLuhan! I have no reservations about Carey, though. That man was pure genius.
08/30/09
You're right that he somewhat disregards the creator of content, and to me that seems entirely appropriate because his purpose is not to delve into content but to examine structure... Most of what he does in Understanding Media delves into the unconscious change of scale and speed brought on by new media, and their concomitant effects on the human psyche. His definition of the word "message" is not the content of the actual medium, what we would today call the message of something, but is in fact the effect that medium has on the structure of our consciousness, or the pace of our lives. It's a weird use of an accepted word.
I don't recall that nesting doll quote from my readings, and to be honest, it sounds funny to my ears. Are you certain McLuhan would have said that thought itself is insignificant? I don't see that as something he would have written.
08/30/09
You don't recall the Russian doll bit because that's my interpretation of his statements - I paraphrased "the content of writing is speech" bit - forgive the lack of quotable materials at my disposal. I do recall quite clearly that he referred to thought as "nonverbal" and without content. The medium is its own content/message. Thought is contentless and therefore not media.
You and I are, in fact, using the "message" in the same way that McLuhan means it...
I don't misunderstand McLuhan, I've just internalized a lot of it and so I use my own words to describe his work. In other words: I learned it.
And, like I said at the very beginning, he's a lot of fun to discuss and argue over. But, ultimately, he isn't quite all there, and so I remain skeptical about his conclusions.
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08/30/09
This drove the note-takers insane and many people congregated outside of his office door demanding to know WTF he was doing. He kept his door locked and refused to speak to any of us. He went on like this for the entire semister!
I got into the habit of going to this class half-asleep and just letting the drone of his unrelenting chatter wash over me. I figured we were either all going to flunk or all going to get A's depending on exactly how crazy this guy was.
When he presented the final exam and people saw that it was 150 multiple choice and five essay questions, a few students actually had emotional breakdowns on the spot. I looked at the first question and realized I KNEW the answer! I breezed thru the rest of it in a state of disbelief. How did I KNOW this stuff! I even had whole concepts to apply to the essay questions!
After collecting the exams, he passed around a questionaire asking how old we were when we first started watching tv, how many hours a day we watched, etc. He told us to return the next day and ALL WOULD BE EXPLAINED.
The whole thing had been an experiment for his PhD thesis on how television alters our ability to process information. I had watched the most tv and scored 98 on the exam. The students with very little exposure to tv all flunked the exam. He gave them B's, to be fair.
Television had trained my brain to absorb and retain random bits of information and form them into cohesive patterns.
08/30/09
And 40 years ago, the effect was that strong? Back when there were only 3 networks and TV went off the air every night.
Thanks for sharing this story.
08/30/09
08/30/09
I think the way the brain is trained by watching television was even more pronounced in the older, low-resolution projection of dots fired at the back of a tube. If you get up close to an older tv, you can only see dots; there are no solids, no hard lines. The visual right-brain fills in the blanks and says, hey, that looks like a dog or whatever. It's this process of absorbing dots and accepting them as whole images that alters the way the brain works.
Also, for the first 10 years of my life I only had black and white tv so my mind had to fill in the colors, too.
McLuhan's observations weren't really about the content of the media. His interest was in how types of media alter perception.
For example, if your sole source of information is the printed page, he felt that led to left-brained linear perceptions. A reader expects reality to unfold in a straight line, in an orderly progression from beginning to end.
A tv watcher, on the other hand, expects reality to be a chaos of bits that form patterns in an endless chain of impressions.
So McLuhan was basically saying that all of academia was based on imposing a linear, orderly structure where none actually exists in reality. And television was training people to see reality in a radially different way.
08/30/09
I see your point regarding early TV being even more abstract, b/c I remember both those big-ass fuzzy dots and B&W TV's. While the elasticity of TV plots and storytelling has expanded, it does take a lot less interpretation to see a color hi-def picture as reality.
We had a B&W TV as a kid, and indeed I watched stuff on B&W sets till into the 80's, but I too always remember it as being in color. My brain was trained young enough, I suppose.
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08/30/09
McLuhan, if he were alive today, would probably create a third category for the web, for its ability to mind-numbingly bend and alter our perceptions of reality and identity set themselves apart from the passive medium of television and the easily-background medium of radio. (Although personally I love radio, and get very engaged by it. Call me old school, from the days of boomboxes in neighborhoods of Brooklyn, where radio was the only broadcast medium out there that *anyone* could engage in.)
I would also recommend Jerry Mander's "Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television" ... a fascinating read.
*hate being a pretty strong word: I at the same time love so much sci-fi that it kind of reveals my dual nature about the thing. I could rationalize it by saying that sci-fi is so theoretical that it can't be used as a replacement for real life the way more conventional 'drama' tv does ... sci-fi helps us to dream.
08/30/09
I find it funny that you hate TV for that reason. It seems people did it naturally for thousands of years before we ever invented television...
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But I disagree with you, Firefly was better than good and Serenity was better than mediocre. I just rewatched it all for fun, so I'm biased. Still, I wish there had been more.
08/30/09
I just hope no one out there is thinking that this will help change the minds of Twenty Century Fox, as that would be more sad then anything else.
Which is why I posted that here, as It is another theory as what TV does to people minds: makes them absolutely bat^*$*$ crazy...
08/30/09
It's confusing (even to most fans) how The Dark Knight is getting his ass handed to him from a girl who is afraid of blue gloves.
Of course Batman is more (to the billionth power) popular overall, so even on io9 it's weird.
08/30/09
Not that it was awful, but the whole show was just kind of cliched and underwelming TV space adventure junk. Seriously overrated, considering how many people cream themselves at the mention of the show.
Maybe if I was still in high school I'd get into it like I did Farscape.
Any way, a young girl who's name I had to look up, from a middling short-lived TV program getting more votes than a ubiquitous American cultural icon? Yeah, it's pretty fishy. And I don't even like Batman!
08/30/09
Anyway, I love Firefly and the character, but yeah, it's fishy. Even on a Firefly fansite it would be fishy.
07/24/09
"The Godfather," for example, is considered by many to be the greatest film ever made. I found that, but for a subplot or two, the book was almost identical the to the movie. I wouldn't call the book the greatest book ever, but it was quite enjoyable. I don't believe anything was lost in the adaptation. In this case, it seems to me that the adaptation was so successful that it superseded the novel. I suppose the same could be said for "Gone With the Wind." I've never seen the movie or read the book, but I imagine I could just watch the movie to save time and not miss anything from the novel.
Similar to "The Godfather," I saw "Fight Club" before reading the book. Once again, but for some minor details, I found that they were quite similar. So similar, in fact, that after some time had passed, I found I couldn't remember the differences anymore.
Which reminds of the main problem I have with film adaptations: after seeing one, it seems to erase the way I had imagined the book version. Put a gun to my head right now and I wouldn't be able to tell you how main battle of The Two Towers played out in the book. The only difference I remember in "Contact" is that more than one person went on the interplanetary subway. The only versions of Dexter, Frankenstein, Interview With the Vampire, Catch-22, A Scanner Darkly and several others that I remember are the filmed versions. It's for this reason that I refuse to watch the Harry Potter movies: for fear of losing the books as imagined in my head. Thus is the power of the visual medium.
This brings me back to my main point: good adaptations seem to take the essence of a book and the most important points and make them work. I think this is why I forget the little details that have been excised from the filmed versions. The films that I can clearly differentiate in my memory are the ones that had serious departures from the original work: the end of "A Clockwork Orange," the completely different "I Am Legend," "Jumper,"etc.
So, if I had to give advice to someone trying to adapt a book, I would give these pointers:
1. Understand the essence of the source material.
2. Be careful to keep the main points intact.
3. Don't significantly change things!
(As long as this post is, it only scratches the surface of what makes a good adaptation work. I should mention that I saw the first Harry Potter film and was utterly bored by it. Perhaps because it was more a literal translation instead of an adaptation.)
07/24/09
One book I'd like to see re-made into a movie is Naked Lunch, only do it low budget, independent, and preferably made in a country that has a lenient attitude towards obscenity. I actually liked the version that was made but it felt like a surreal take on the real life story of the writing of the book. I'd be happier with something that does justice to the fucked up humor of the book and a bit of the shit-eating ickiness of it. And the bits that offend Muslims - no ethnicity on teh planet should ever be beyond ridicule. Ever. Someone should suggest it to Peter Jackson.
07/24/09
I am glad you mentioned -- even passing -- David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which is one of my favourite books, somewhere in my top five, and which is technically a science fiction novel. It does have a very idiosyncratic approach to its narrative. But even as I was reading it, I kept thinking how I'd adapt it for film or TV.
I think it'd make a great twelve-part HBO series, actually. I reckon you could do it.
Likewise, some people here have mentioned House of Leaves. Obviously, you could film it, but you'd have to find a way to express what the book says in a way that exploits the visual in the way that the book exploits the textual.
If you know what I mean.