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

Reading Response: Radical Evolution, Intermedia Network, Popcultue/noosphere

Part 1 Radical Evolution and Future Shock in the Paleocybernetic Age, The Intermedia Network as Nature, and Popular Culture and the Noosphere:

The articles become interesting in temporal context, even though
this was only written in 1970 it feels like a brief
retelling of some past that should feel familiar but doesn't.
His rhetoric is riff with the aqueous glow reverberating
from the American "hippie" youth revolution of the 60's and
70's with his belief that a global worldwide
revolution was being birthed on the earth. Which to the
authors credit was probably the result of his global "intermedia
network" which to him would be credited to Cinema, TV, Radio and
print media. And today would expand to include the
internet. Just as many young people
today believe and feel that something is afoot, some revolution of the social fabric through the internet and other "converging technology" . SO my question is than does every new generation
feel an overwhelming revolution just on the horizon in response to changing
technological innovations?

I really had an issue with some of his arguments, as in
his distinctions of craft from industry and art from
entertainment. To pretend that art was never entertainment
is to affect the attitudes of the intellectual elitism
plaguing the "art" world today.

Youngblood writes:
"One might
make a similar analogy between entertainment and art: entertainment
is inherently "local," that is, of limited significance, whereas
art is inherently universal and of unlimited significance. Too often
today we find that so-called artists working in the intermedia

network are little more than adroit imitators, collectors of data and
phenomena, which they glean from the noosphere and amalgamate
into packages that are far from whole. They're clever and glib;
they've made an art of selling themselves, but they know only effect,
not cause; they are merchants of mannerisms. " end quote.


And yes though the criticism of those "artists" working in the in intermedia network
being glib imitators only ripping stuff off from the "noosphere" may seem rather apropos
he fails to acknowledge the fact that humans not just artists have been constantly
ripping each other off since the dawn of time. What is Vernadsky's and Chardin's nooopshere? really only a cool word.
Man has always been embedded in the web of culture since its coalescing. What it's really about
is as Lars Ulrich so adequately put it is "control". Who is the story teller? old versus new.
The old in fostering the new for its own continued survival
must now defend its relevancy or bear the fate of a perceived nonexistence.