I've been thinking about how we all came to have an understanding
of what ubiquitous media was before we started this course, and for those like
me who haven't taken that many media-focused papers, it's usually through
(among other things of course) film and T.V. Of course the genre which involves
representations of new technologies and media the most is science fiction,
which lead me to do some reading on the subject.
Often when academics write about the technologies, real or
imagined, in science fiction films they discuss them as metaphors for something
else, usually something to do with collective social anxieties. In the rather
excellent Liquid Metal – the
Science Fiction Film Reader, editor
Sean Redmond writes “if you want to know what really aches a
culture at any given time don’t go to its art cinema, or its gritty social
realist texts, but go to its science fiction” (x). And the rest of this text
focuses on the broader metaphorical/social meanings behind science fiction
representations of technology and media. This approach is incredibly important,
but I noticed very little focused on the technology itself and its environment, and what it
says about how we view and understand new media and technologies.
More than ever, as the technological fantasies of these films
become a reality, science fiction reflects our views and anxieties surrounding
literal technology and media, and even more importantly, it shapes our views too. Admittedly
whenever the subject of surveillance or dystopia is brought up in this course
my mind flicks for a moment to 2001: A
Space Odyssey’s HAL. To cheer myself up after this, I like to think about Iron Man's Tony Stark and his friendly anthropomorphic fire extinguisher. The ability of
films to shape how individuals feel about new media and technology is powerful,
and the hows and whys of it is something I would be interested exploring for my
research essay.
This week's Nusselder reading briefly mentions Claudia Springer who wrote on similar ideas to what you've discussed in this blog post.
ReplyDeleteA Jump Cut review of the book makes the link between your post/interests and the book clearer than I can:
"Claudia Springer illustrates in Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age how a variety of popular culture texts explore such mind/body possibilities. These texts fantasize the fusion of human bodies and technology or technology's eventual erasure of corporeal experience altogether. Springer's book covers a broad spectrum of science and science fiction texts which imagine such conditions — from artificial intelligence debates to science fiction films and from ideas about the future of virtual reality to cyberpunk comic strips. She takes her reader through a maze of fantasies about utopian and dystopian worlds in which bodies are no longer the discrete (or, quite often, discreet), fundamentally "human" entities we once believed them to be."
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC41folder/ElectronicErosRev.html
Basically, I think the book seems to tie together several of our weekly 717 topics in relation to your ideas and interests.
And if this comment is posted multiple times, I'm really sorry. I'm having trouble posting for some reason (likely my own technological incompetence).