The paper proposes to distinguish the technology of computing-networks from a medium of digitality. It draws on Niklas Luhmann’s thesis, that the information of mass media is produced outside the technology of dissemination. The central concept will be that of redundancy. By algorithmic data processing digitality establishes forms of unambiguousness within redundant patterns, thereby emitting an undesignated side of ambiguities. Thus the medium of digitality is defined by the code unambiguousness/ambiguousness. Referring on the theory of social addresses, the final sections describe why (and how) organizations (and not persons) are the first addresses to realize the forms of digitality. The case of Big Data could serve as a test of the thesis.
New technologies of communication affect the social and cultural constellations in society. This essay adopts a perspective linking the three key concepts of networks, culture, and communication to examine these constellations and the effects of new media on them. Culture and networks are seen as interwoven, with cultural forms disseminating in networks, but also shaping them. New media alter the conditions of communication taking place in networks—with communication taking place across space and time, dyadically, within groups, or one-to-many, depending on the media at hand. The mass media of printed materials, radio, television, and the Internet, then, disseminate cultural forms in addition to the direct communication in interpersonal networks. Due to their social and economic conditions of production, writing and print media foster the development of first elite cultures, then high languages and national cultures, and finally life-style subcultures. The broadcast media of radio and television make for a blurring of social boundaries and for the homogenization of knowledge in complex modern societies, at least before their increasing specialization in the late 20th century. The Internet, in contrast, caters international subcultures and fosters cultural fragmentation.
Taking up a suggestion by Marshall and Eric McLuhan to use the metaphor of the ear rather than that of the eye when it comes to exploring media effects, the paper looks first at a certain oblivion of media following their clear-sighted discovery by Aristotle. Media, which for Aristotle were the invisible precondition of any vision, were to be rediscovered only when notions of the invisible were no longer the exclusive domain of religion. First in German Romanticism, then in the psychology of perception, and finally in both cultural theory and sociological theory, both phenomena and notions of media had to be reconceptualized to account not only for figure and ground but also for loosely coupled elements prefiguring their rigid coupling in things. Focusing on sociological ideas, the paper looks at dissemination and success media of communication and adds a notion of media of composition, examining the examples of causality, rationality, and complexity. Brief remarks on a culture theory and a management theory of media conclude the paper. Listening to media rather than attempting to watch the ground of a figure amounts to learning to account for media dependencies, media interconnections, and media compositions. This might be useful in a next society opting for meshes and mashes, cross-overs and coverings rather than for reasonable clear-cuts among media. I. Oblivion of Media For Marshall McLuhan and his son Eric, fruitful work in media theory would profit from a switch from visual to acoustic metaphor. Media do not refer to the ground of a figure to be looked at but rather to "the apposition of both figure and ground" to be listened to (McLuhan/McLuhan 1988: 91). There are at least four effects one may notice when listening to both figure and ground: an enhancement of a certain form, a corresponding obsolescence or displacement of some other form, a retrieval of earlier forms, and a reversal into some other form when pushed to its limits (ibid: 99). McLuhan and McLuhan comprehend these four effects or aspects of media listening in their tetrad model, which gives the "four laws of media," which act simultaneously when new forms present themselves in old or new media. The invitation to listen to media instead of watch them may already address one of the most pertinent reasons for a striking reluctance to take the notion of medium seriously in old * Submitted to Cybernetics & Human Knowing.
The article addresses a shift observable in recent artistic practices that relate to technology and the sciences, and the merger of technological and biological matter. This shift is described along a selection of the author’s artistic works from the 21st century, which are paralleled with Roy Ascott’s visionary writings from the last decades. This article examines a few aspects of bio + technological artistic practice: how experimental art, practices, and thinking address the networked world; how technology-infused thinking and technology-enabled connectivity have gradually become our incontrovertible reality; and, how it has impacted our perception of nature and the way we relate to the biological world.
