media theory

the beholding of idols, or the use of technology, conforms men to them.

the man in a literate and homogenized society ceases to be sensitive to the diverse and discontinuous life of forms. He acquires the illusion of the third dimension and the “private point of view” as part of his Narcissus fixation, and is quite shut off from Blake’s awareness or that of the Psalmist, that we become what we behold.

The square room or house speaks the language of the sedentary specialist, while the round hut or igloo, like the conical wigwam, tells of the integral nomadic ways of food-gathering communities.

The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs.

For just as a metaphor transforms and transmits experience, so do the media.

Pope Pius XII was deeply concerned that there be serious study of the media today. On February 17, 1950, he said: It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of modern society and the stability of its inner life depend in large part on the maintenance of an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of

men are never aware of the ground rules of their environmental systems or cultures. Today technologies and their consequent environments succeed each other so rapidly that one environment makes us aware of the next.

To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it.

Each new technology creates an environment that is itself regarded as corrupt and degrading. Yet the new one turns its predecessor into an art form.