May 30 — New Medium, the printing press

Beobachtung

We discussed the poem by Günter Kunert, "Bebachtung," which relates back to the idea of schizophrenia from last week because it is about a seeing man observing a blind man and how is comprehension of a text is no different than the blind man's, even though he can see and the blind man cannot. In other words, literate man is split into two worlds — the world of his senses and the world that he pictures as he reads.

New Medium

New medium doesn't fall from the sky. It is always comes from an old medium, and for us to understand it, we first must relate to it as it is connected to the old medium. This all changes, of course, and we have terms from the stages from Giescheke:

1. Abhängigkeit

When there is a new medium, it is first dependent on the old. I.e., we used to view a computer simply as a really good type writer.

2. Gegen-abhängigkeit

The old medium begins to depend on the new. We recogize where it fails and discover new potentials in the new medium. For example, we can see that the type writer cannot do web browsing, and we think that that is lame.

3. Autonomie

In many cases, the new and the old medium eventually attain separate and equal statuses. Such is the case with, for example, theater and movies. It is not always the case though.

Hugo

Architecture tells a story. It is a monument to history that is always building upon itself, always getting more and more complex and detailed. It is like a bridge between oral and script memory, because it has the nature of the oral tradition with the permanence of text. Architecture became more and more complex until it could no longer contain the memories of society. Then came the printing press!

The printing press is not only special because of how it made literature more available to the masses, but also because with it came homogeneity of every letter.