Expanded Cinema - Selections from Part 1

While reading the first part of Expanded Cinema, I was struck by a sentence in the section, Popular Culture and Noosphere, which mentioned that the world population was at three and half billion people at the time of the writing. Now, as I sit here responding to the writing, I realize that I am a part of a population of humans that has doubled in just over forty years.
Pondering this fact, brings a lot of questions to mind. I wonder what is the relationship between the ever-growing population and the intermedia network? On one side, the network can serve to condition people especially if it is largely corporate controlled and appeals to the lowest common denominator of taste. When McLuhan referenced Pavlov’s experiment with the dogs, he said that the true significance was that it showed that controlled and man-made environments produce passive sleepwalkers that are conditioned to act without questioning the rules in place. The intermedia network on one level can serve to do just this. Rather than create a richer reality that incorporates that diversity of cultures across the world, it can serve to instead spread a message of reality that is corporate controlled and narrow in focus. This message can be wrapped in glamour and glitz, capturing our attention, though not expanding our understanding of the world we live in.
On the other hand, if used to educate and connect communities, the intermedia network can extend the “psychic mobility” of individuals by exposing them to realities that exist beyond their immediate vicinity. Individuals can partake in this network to create and fund documentaries, journalism, art, etc. that comes from the bottom up rather than the top down and works to educate rather than distract. Obviously this is already being done.
In The Intermedia Network as Nature, the author states, “We’re now moving into the Cybernetic Age in which man learns that to control his environment he must cooperate with it; he not only participates but actually recreates his environment both physical and metaphysical, and in turn is conditioned by it”. So then, what is the role of content creators? If this intermedia network is becoming more and more pervasive, reaching out to people even on their cell phones in Africa, India, China, South America etc., how can the network be used to solves problems, educate, and create meaningful community across borders and oceans and deserts rather than spread a corporate message. Also, as interactivity becomes more pervasive in digital environments, how will this affect how we see ourselves on the metaphysical level and in turn what effect will this have on the material world? And last, though the intermedia network will spread to more and more people, what is being left unsaid by those who do not have access to such networks?

More food for thought....


Internet World Stats

USA Today Article - Cellphone Use