Today Dan Binns talked to us about media materialism and the anthropocene.
Media materialism is a way of looking at and grounding our understanding of media technology (Binns, 2015). It forces us to look back at media technologies and realises that even though technology may seem brilliant and futuristic, it is only an enabler for what we are physically able to do, that is the’cloud’ isn’t really a cloud, it is created physically and grounded somewhere, just as the internet and YouTube aren’t all floating in hyperspace, but really have an actual physical location. Media materialism seeks to show that technologies have a realistic foundation.
There are two distinct schools of thought within media materialism: technological determinism and social constructivism. Technological determinism relies upon the ideas that technology has a preconceived course, a logical progression, that technology advances automatically and that technology effects our way of interacting with the world, even to the extent of being a natural extension of our bodies (Binns, 2015). Dziga Vertov took this concept one step further and created films around the concept that the camera was his eye and body, such as “The Man with a Movie Camera” (Vertov, 1929):
Social constructivism on the other hand believes that since humanity created technology we have the ability to control how its used and regulated, that no matter how radical the technology becomes we’ll still have the ability to control it (Binns, 2015). Social constructivism however presents many other ideas, such as the issue of ethics in the creation of technology and the idea that the production of technology is not a straight line, but rather a rocky, murky, unpredictable one, which many see as a hindrance to the progress of such technologies (Binns, 2015).
It is also accused of producing a rather romanticised version of the world, as many texts demonstrate a clear criticism of our creation of such advanced technologies that, even though we created them, have clearly grown out of our grasp, such as “I, Robot” (Proyas, 2004), and even as far back as “Metropolis” (Lang, 1927), both of which depict an A.I. entity created by humankind, that soon spirals out of control to endanger humanity. All of this occurring in the 197 years since Frankenstein was first published (Binns, 2015). Since then the lines between man and machine are constantly becoming more and more blurred as science fiction explores the very real possibility of humanity getting ‘too big for their breeches’.
One particular text which Dan showed us and I found very interesting was a short film created by Quantic Dream called “Kara”, what was originally supposed to be a beta for a game turned into a 7 minute short film about the concept and reality of constructing A.I robots in the visage and mind of humans:
This then brought up the holocene, the age in which we are now, characterised by the heating of the planet, the rise of human supremacy, the dis-allowance of a natural reset (the ice age had a natural reset) due to technology programming itself into the natural chemistry of the planet (Binns, 2015). However, McKenzie Wark believes that we have now entered a new age – the anthropocene, the age of the human. Wark also believes that in this new age since we’re “going to hell in a hand-basket”, it should force new ways of looking at the world, creating new non-hypocritical theories and ways of sorting through problems (Binns, 2015). Hopefully, this new age of the anthropocene will bring about a new way of looking at media mateialism and technology itself that will help steer humanity towards a much brighter future.
– Binns, Daniel. Week 12 Lectorial. May 26th 2015.