Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id PAA17521 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Tue, 16 Apr 2002 15:04:44 +0100 Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2002 09:58:39 -0400 Subject: Re: media violence report in Science Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed From: "Wade T.Smith" <wade_smith@harvard.edu> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit In-Reply-To: <570E2BEE7BC5A34684EE5914FCFC368C10FC2F@fillan.stir.ac.uk> Message-Id: <0DED41EC-5142-11D6-A21F-003065B9A95A@harvard.edu> X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.481) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
On Tuesday, April 16, 2002, at 05:27 , Vincent Campbell wrote:
> I'm
> predisposed to thinking the media are inherently benign,
No idea is benign, in any sense of the word, but the messenger often is.
The problem with media studies is precisely the reason McLuhan said the
medium is the message- there _may_ be something inherently 'memetic' in
the very form of the carrier.
And he was talking about the 'form' more than the content. TV and films
montage (although, IMHO, the real power of TV is in its ability to show
us unprocessed realtime images from other vantages- as we now know,
there _is_ processing technology that puts the lie to everything seen on
TV, although, saying the mantra 'if it's an ad, it's a lie' will work in
almost all cases) present the viewer with a time-and-space-modified
narrative- and Eisenstein worked specifically with montage in the early
cinema years to elicit precise reactions.
But montage and point of view and all the rest are methods of presenting
the 'idea' (in the strong aristotelian definition) of a work, and, if
the idea is dangerous (like Riefenstahl's work), then there may be
followers of the idea. The idea finds a way. That's a basic memetic
premise, and the form it takes is evolution's crap shoot.
- Wade
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