Theory | Mediacology by Antonio Lopez

The New Science of Human Evolution – Newsweek Technology – MSNBC.com:

New research also shows that “progress” and “human evolution” are only occasional partners. More than once in human prehistory, evolution created a modern trait such as a face without jutting, apelike brows and jaws, only to let it go extinct, before trying again a few million years later. Our species’ travels through time proceeded in fits and starts, with long periods when “nothing much happened,” punctuated by bursts of dizzying change, says paleontologist Ian Tattersall, co-curator of the American Museum’s new hall.

What does evolution have to do with media? There is an internalized belief in the advanced information economies that technology is an inevitable byproduct of the most successful and necessary cultural products of human culture. Part of our culturally biased thinking relates to an institutional attitude that our communication systems are rational, evolutionary progressions of civilization, something that has been thoroughly debunked by anthropology.

The point is that very few people believe what anthropology teaches: that indigenous, small-scale traditional societies are not earlier (or degenerate) versions of our own. They are rather differing solutions to historical circumstances and environmental particulars that testify to the breadth of human intellectual creativity and its capacity for symbolization.

(Eric Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media and Technological Horizons, p. 82)

The Newsweek article quoted above shows that “progress” and “evolution” do not necessarily come together. My desire is for us to consciously choose how we use our tools, and not let them control us (this is the essential anxiety of most sci-fi films). I think this is the lesson we can take away from these evolving concepts of human development. I’m not anti-technology, but I am about perspective, and for positive communication and community building. If our tools are in service of these goals, then I’m all for them.

Technorati Tags: culture, evolution, technology

Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff is one of the saner, more hip theorists of media today. I have read many of his books (I recommend Media Virus! and Screenagers) and enjoyed his two Frontline documentaries, Merchants of Cool (about “cool hunters” – culture spies) and The Persuaders (about the PR industry). You can watch the documentaries for free on PBS’ Frontline site. Perhaps it’s that we have the same generational sensibility, but we are both less likely to demonize media (having grown up mediated ourselves). Rushkoff is more interested in the liberating aspects of media culture (while keeping a critical and watchful eye on their more nefarious aspects as well). You can keep up with his work on his Web site, and also read this great interview, with a snip below.

Douglas Rushkoff Interview – Pop Occulture:

T: Why do we even need media theorists? Why canâ€™t we just unplug ourselves from mass media and break its power over us once and for all?

D: Who said all media is mass media? As a media theorist, I guess Iâ€™d have to ask you what is *not* media? Even the way you choose to do or not do the top button of your shirt is media – it communicates something about you. As for unplugging from the mass media, go for it! Letâ€™s see how many people join you.

I donâ€™t know that you need media theorists the way you need farmers or doctors, but I donâ€™t know that dispensing with our mediating technologies is really the best way to tackle some of the problems they create. Where do you stop? Radio? Print? Writing? Speech? Signs? Are you saying we could live in small groups of hunter-gatherers, again? Perhaps – but weâ€™d have to kill a few billion people to make that sustainable without agriculture.

I do believe thereâ€™s value in understanding the biases of different media – understanding, for example, that the bias of the money we use today is towards centralization. Money is a medium – and there are many different kinds of money we could be using. But central authorities outlawed the use of local currencies in order to promote the power of central authorities. If we dontâ€™ understand the biases of media – in this case, the printing press – then itâ€™s hard to understand the reason why so much of our content and our reality works the way it does.

Technorati Tags: DouglasRushkoff