McLuhan Remix: Prologue 1/3 from the Kurtweibers channel.

McLuhan Remix: The Medium is the Mix 2/3 from the Kurtweibers channel.

McLuhan Remix: Epilogue 3/3 from the Kurtweibers channel.

See Jamie O’Neil’s The Medium Is the Mix website and his discussion of fair use and YouTube takedowns.

I missed Jamie’s MiT6 talk, Mashing-Up as Video Essay Writing: A Distinct Form of Literacy. Here’s the abstract:

McLuhan described “the medium is the massage” as a “collide-oscope of interfaced situations” i.e. a series of preexisting concepts that were juxtaposed and combined in interesting ways. His famous puns, aphorisms and neologisms served to open up new possibilities for his concepts because he realized that “precision is sacrificed for a greater degree of suggestion.” This paper reflects on a recent project (http://www.McLuhanRemix.com) that “the death of the author” has only further enabled. Remixing (and by extension, mashing-up) are an important form of literacy for digital natives, whose YouTube mash-ups point to a day when Godard’s idea of the video essay (exemplified in Histoire(s) du cinema) will supplant the .doc. The Medium Is the Mix is a video essay that was created with this in mind, ironically, it was made for a class of students who were turned-off by reading McLuhan’s words only on paper… this is ironic because it was for this reason that McLuhan (with the help of Fiore and Agel) remixed his own message in a pictorial, graphic, non-linear, “cool” paperback in the first place.

Jamie O’Neil is an assistant professor of digital media arts at Canisius College in Buffalo and a video and performance artist. He is the creator of the mock motivational speaker Kurt Weibers.

See, for example, “#Amazonfail, the Google Books Settlement, and the importance of open access for preserving cultural heritage: In honor of National Library Week” posted on April 16:

Over the past two years for National Library Week, I have posted about the importance of openness of publication and accessibility of government information and the limitations of relying on Google. Free Government Information, Public.Resource.org, OpentheGovernment (PDF),  and others, are continuing to do a great job of promoting openness in regards to government (and scholarly) information. Unfortunately, most people are not aware of the great usefulness and importance of government information. But they do know about Amazon, Google, and YouTube, with many among us using them everyday. What would many do to find information if they stopped working?

The #Amazonfail censorship/ glitch / griefing situation last weekend shows the power of publics working together and the organic nature of much of tagging and movementsourcing; people will often be able to create a simple way of communicating information with each other (the first person to use the #Amazonfail tag on twitter used it because it worked as a folksonomy of the situation and it spiralled from there because it was effective). But it also shows the difficulty for all when most rely on one source — Amazon — for information about bestsellers and similar items.

Great work, Learned Fangirls!

If you’re coming to the Media in Transition 6 conference at M.I.T., please come to my session on Intellectual Property. It’s scheduled for Sunday, April 26, 2009, 10:45-12:15 p.m. The room is TBA. Here’s the presentation lineup:

Intellectual Property
Keidra Chaney, Raizel Liebler, The Intellectual Property of User-Generated Content
Artur Matuck, Ewriting Prospective: Rescripting Authors’ Rights in the Electronic Domain
Mark Willis, Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab
Eva Hemmungs Wirten, Translation and Copyright: The Transmission of the Law
Moderator:TBA

While reading W. Terrence Gordon’s biography of Marshall McLuhan, I came across a McLuhan pronouncement so absurd that I need to figure out how to fit it into my MiT6 presentation:

In North America … TV has not been the friend of literacy except to encourage depth involvement in language as a complex structure. In other words, TV fosters the Finnegans Wake approach to language.

Huh? Like almost everything McLuhan ever said, this “probe” is at once intriguing and preposterous. I watched a lot of TV as a kid, and I’ve read (which means I’ve listened) to enough of the Wake to surrender to its word-horde, but I never found a deep structural convergence between TV’s commercial blather and Joyce’s mythopoetic text.

Gordon’s “authorized” biography follows a trove of McLuhan family letters and sprawling unpublished manuscripts. The book is long on cryptic quotations and short on social history that puts McLuhan in any kind of context that explains how the nutty professor got so far out there. As a teenager in the late 1960s, I wondered what he was smoking, and I wanted some. The medium is the massage.

Musing on this led me back to Finnegans Wakes McLuhans, presented first in the Mouffe last May. I love the counterpoint of McLuhan’s deadpan voice with the outrageous video shots. My thanks to MyCluein for pushing the probe into other post-Gutenberg galaxies.

Encore: Time for a little oral amputation? “If Homer was wiped out by literacy, literacy can be wiped out by rock,” says Marshall in McLuhan – Rock On. “A strip-teaser puts on her audience by taking off her clothes. I put you on by bearing my mind. I put you on as an audience. I wear you as my coat.”

Café Mouffe opens on Fridays at 3:00 p.m. Please drop by for a listen and a chat. Sometimes the embedded videos don’t work here due to bandwidth constraints, but you’ll always find links to video sources in the set notes. Try them. If you’re curious about the Mouffe, here’s the original idea behind it’s creation. [Cross-posted on a blind flaneur.]

A blind reader who constructs an accessible text of Harold Innis’ “The Bias of Communication” will find in it some powerful ideas that suggest why such an accessible text is possible, if not inevitable. Innis’ essay is not available now in an accessible format produced by commercial or nonprofit publishers, but today’s blind reader has more tools than ever before to make it so. One goal of this presentation is documenting the implications and consequences of establishing such an accessible text within the rationale of fair use in copyright law.

Accessibility to communication for people with disabilities was not an academic concern when Innis wrote the essay in 1951, and it is not a widespread concern now. A blind reader, however, can sense the broader possibilities of accessibility wherever Innis discusses the flexibility of communication media. In the sweep of his historical survey, the flexibility of one medium after another shifted over space and time, leading to successive “monopolies of knowledge” that favored some people but excluded others. As a dominant medium came to shape the knowledge it transmitted, it lost flexibility through its “bias of communication” and eventually was undermined by new media capable of carrying new knowledge. The dominance of one medium over another was not the result of some implicit technological determinism, as the development of communication often is portrayed, but of contending power relations among people.

Another goal of this presentation is applying Innis’ ideas to a sensibility widely shared among blind people today: we live in a culture with a  dominant bias for visual communication. It’s easy to dismiss such a sensibility as the narrow concern of a few marginalized people, but it gains wider relevance with Innis’ provocative assertion that oral communication has played a recurring, resurgent, and revitalizing role in shaping media throughout history.  This idea was further developed by Innis’ protégé, Marshall McLuhan. It counters prevailing dogma that posits the complete and irrevocable eclipse of oral traditions by the advent of literacy and literate technologies. Innis and McLuhan presaged alternative social models of literacy that now acknowledge the interaction of oral/literate processes in what Shirley Brice Heath calls “ever-shifting, protean forms.”

Today’s rapidly changing digital technologies are capable of producing ever more creative hybrid oral/literate forms. However, along with the promise of greater accessibility, new media bring new biases of communication. A final goal of this presentation is exploring how accessibility is threatened by digital rights management, erosion of the fair use doctrine and contraction of the public domain.

Links to accessible texts supporting this project will be posted at Fair Use Lab.

Posted originally at a blind flaneur.