Introducing Second Nature Journal

SECOND NATURE


I'm proud to announce that I'll be moving over to a new site, Second Nature Journal, to focus on creating a place for people to dialogue about technology and media in light of the Christian tradition. The idea is to bring the people thinking and talking about this to one place with the hope of encouraging more discussion. My colleague, Brantly Millegan and I will be hard at work looking for the best content out there, and we will be accepting multi-media material (articles, visual art, poetry, music, videos, etc). 

Feel free to kick around at Resident Alien to get an idea of what I see as the important strains in media ecology and then get over to Second Nature to see the best new material on the subject. 

You can see my first article there, Thinking Trivially About Radical Orthodoxy, which traces the influence of the Church Fathers in McLuhan's thought and those scholars who identify as "radically orthodox."

Our press release:


April 1st, 2013 – The new online journal Second Nature officially launches today and plans to be the definitive place for critical thinking about technology and new media in light of the Christian tradition, with written articles, images, videos, poetry, and links.

The journal’s co-founders are Benjamin Robertson, Brantly Millegan, and Read Mercer Schuchardt. Robertson and Millegan both studied under Schuchardt, Associate Professor of Communication at Wheaton College (IL). Robertson and Millegan serve as the journal’s Editors, and Schuchardt is the Chairman of the Editorial Board. The other members of the Editorial Board are: Juliette Aristides, Eric Brende, Peter K. Fallon, Geraldine Forsberg, T. David Gordon, Shane Hipps, Arthur W. Hunt III, Eric McLuhan, and Brett T. Robinson. The board members represent a wide range of academic and professional backgrounds, denominational affiliations, and interests in the subject. For bios and pictures, see the journal’s About page.

The idea of the journal came about after Millegan wrote the article ‘Of Mics and Men‘, and couldn’t find a proper publication in which to publish it. In talking to Robertson and Schuchardt, they decided to form Second Nature. “Everybody knows new technologies like the Internet and smartphones are radically transforming our world, ” Millegan said. “So what does the Christian tradition have to offer to help us to think critically about these powerful tools, their meaning and their proper use? That’s one of the driving questions of the journal.”

The journal is now accepting submissions, which may come in the form of written pieces, images, or videos. While submissions should adhere to the general boundaries set by the journal’s description, there is no religious affiliation required for those submitting pieces. See the journal’s Contact page for full submission guidelines.

For launch, the journal has six published pieces: one painting and five written articles, on topics ranging from the eight characteristics of mass audiences created by electronic media, to how the Internet is reuniting families previously kept apart as a result of other technological innovations. The journal plans to publish a new piece every few weeks, bridging the publication schedule between a quarterly journal and a weekly website.

The journal also has a blog, which will be updated weekly with relevant news or other items of interest related to the journal’s topic. Examples of recent blog posts include: an article about an Italian priest who recently smashed a TV on the altar of his church during Mass to remind his parishioners to not become enslaved to technology; pictures from a new tumblr that gives life advice from machines; and a set of videos in which a person tests to see why people are comfortable with security cameras recording them but get very nervous when a person holding a camera does the same thing.

The journal hopes to eventually offer an annual print edition, conferences, and seminars.

The journal may be followed on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, by email, or with its RSS feed. The journal’s web address is http://secondnaturejournal.com.

All questions, comments, media inquiries, and submissions should be directed to contact@secondnaturejournal.com.

McLuhan's Literary Landscape

As soon as you adjust to McLuhan's literary landscape, you will start to look at things in a different way; you will see them as they truly are and learn how to see through them. You will see the grammarian through the guru, literature through technology, and the humanities through media. You will see through the literary origins of McLuhan's media studies, and, from there, you will set off on new explorations of your own. You will learn to apply McLuhan and understand why literature is not a subject but a function inseparable from our communal existence.

--Elena Lamberti, Marshall McLuhan's Mosaic, 2012

McLuhan's Three Books

With our accelerating cascade of new media it is borne upon us that each represents not an appendix to but a complete retranslation of the Book of the World, and of the reader. As W.B. Yeats sang, in 'Sailing to Byzantium': 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling...

Vico simply had not distinguished between first and second nature for separate study: nothing in his experience suggested such a distinction would be of any use. Second nature is nature made and remade by man as man remakes himself with his extensions. Separate them: the first is the province of traditional grammar; the second, that of Bacon, Vico, and Laws of Media.


Eric and Marshall McLuhan
Laws of Media 

 

 

 

The New Res Publica

After the Second War, an ad-conscious American army officer in Italy noted with misgiving that Italians could tell you the names of cabinet ministers, but not the names of commodities preferred by Italian celebrities. Furthermore, he said, the wall space of Italian cities was given over to political, rather than commercial slogans. He predicted that there was small hope that Italians would ever achieve any sort of domestic prosperity or calm until they began to worry about the rival claims of cornflakes and cigarettes, rather than the capacities of public men. In fact, he went so far as to say that democratic freedom very largely consists in ignoring politics and worrying, instead, about the threat of scaly scalp, hairy legs, sluggish bowels, saggy breasts, receding gums, excess weight, and tired blood.


Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media,
1964

Why Bother With Marshall McLuhan?

Check out Alan Jacobs interesting and valuable meditation on the value (or lack thereof) in reading McLuhan:

"I have been reading McLuhan off and on since, at age sixteen, I bought a copy of The Gutenberg Galaxy. His centenary — McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta on July 21, 1911 — provides an occasion for me to clarify my own oscillating responses to his work and his reputation. I have come to certain conclusions. First, that McLuhan never made arguments, only assertions. Second, that those assertions are usually wrong, and when they are not wrong they are highly debatable. Third, that McLuhan had an uncanny instinct for reading and quoting scholarly books that would become field-defining classics. Fourth, that McLuhan’s determination to bring the vast resources of humanistic scholarship to bear upon the analysis of new media is an astonishingly fruitful one, and an example to be followed. And finally, that once one has absorbed that example there is no need to read anything that McLuhan ever wrote."



http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-bother-with-marshall-mcluhan

Interview with Read Schuchardt

Laureano Ralon has a great series of interviews over at his website, Figure/Ground Communications. His most recent interview is with my very own professor and mentor in media ecology, Read Schuchardt. Check it out:


http://figureground.ca/interviews/read-schuchardt/

Finding Your Way in a Sea of Information

The goal of science and the arts and of education for the next generation must be to decipher not the genetic but the perceptual code. In a global information environment, the old pattern of education in answer-finding is of no avail: one is surrounded by answers, millions of them, moving and mutating at electric speed. Survival and control will depend on the ability to probe and to question in the proper way and place. As the information that constitutes the environment is perpetually in flux, so the need is not for fixed concepts but rather for the ancient skill of reading that book, for navigating through an ever uncharted and unchartable milieu. Else we will have no more control of this technology and environment than we have of the wind and the tides.


Marshall and Eric McLuhan
Laws of Media,
1988

Splitting the Etym

The "etym" is the fundamental 'bit' in the Joycean world, just as the atom is in the physical world. For Joyce, TV's annihilating of the 'etym' is as significant as in the realm of culture as the potentiality of destroying the atom in the physical world. Since, however, neither etym nor atom disappears as a result of the contemporary challenge, the process is abnihilisation, not actually a destruction.

Donald Theall

Beyond the Word,

1998

Media as Cliché as Probe

Any extension of man's sensory life such as the dog, or the motor car, imprints numerous clichés on any language, extending its range of probe. All media of communications are clichés serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of association and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness. The limits of our awareness of these forms does not limit their action upon our sensibilities. Just as the rim-spin of the planet arranges the components of high- and low-pressure areas, so the environments created by linguistic and other extensions of our powers are constantly creating new climates of thought and feeling. Since the resulting symbolic systems are numerous, they are in perpetual interplay, creating a kind of sound-light show on an ever-increasing scale.


Marshall McLuhan
From Cliché to Archetype
1970

The Perpetual Nomad

All this information and more has overtly, osmotically, or perhaps inadvertently damaged a collective sense of time that has been working well enough since the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the middle classes. This "timesickness" is probably what killed the economy, and God only knows what it's up to next. Everywhere we look, people are making online links--to conspiracy, porn, and gossip sites; to medical data sites and genetics sites; to baseball sites and sites for Fiestaware collectors; to sites where they can access free movies and free TV, arrange hookups with old flames or taunt old enemies--and time has begun to erase the twentieth century way of structuring one's day and locating one's sense of community. People are now doing their deepest thinking and making their most emotionally charged connections with people around the planet at all times of the day. Geography has become irrelevant. Our online phantom world has become the new us. We create complex webs of information and people who support us, and yet they are fleeting, so tenuous. Time speeds up and then it begins to shrink. Years pass by in minutes. Life becomes that strange experience in which you're zooming along a freeway and suddenly realize that you haven't paid any attention to driving for the last fifteen minutes, yet you're still alive and didn't crash. The voice inside your head has become a different voice. It used to be "you." Now your voice is that of a perpetual nomad drifting along a melting landscape, living day to day, expecting everything and nothing.


Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan: 
You Know Nothing of My Work!
2009

The Self Mover: Automobile

Source

In the spring of 1928 when the Swiss art historian Carola Giedion-Welcker first visited James at his flat in Paris, their conversation included a highly suggestive interchange about technology. She reports that Joyce asked, "Tell me what sort of an idea do you think the word 'automobile' would have aroused in the middle ages," and without waiting for a reply, he continued, "Certainly only that of a divine being, a self mover, thus a god." ... Recollecting that original conversation, she observes that there is a cultural project central to the Wake by which, "from a key word and the conceptions it aroused, Joyce wanted to crystalize a cultural state, or better yet the cultural crisis of a century. For god and technology had moved critically close to each other.


Donald Theall, James Joyce's Techno-Poetics, 1997

The Medium is the Message

On turning to the 'Work in Progress' [Finnegans Wake] we find that the mirror is not so convex. Here is direct expression--pages and pages of it. And if you don't understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless the form is so strictly divorced from the content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. ... Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read--or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.


Samuel Beckett, "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce,"
in Our Exagmination Round His Factification
For Incamination of Work in Progress, 1929

Beyond Media

In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan came to be for the populace the prophet of the death of the book, since many commentators transformed his observations on these problems into an unqualified prediction and endorsement of that death. What actually has been implied as taking place in this process is not the movement beyond a particular medium, such as the book or print, but a movement beyond the very idea of a unique communication medium. The appearance of new methods of technological production, reproduction, and distribution permitted the possibility of transcending traditionally recognized modes and returning to the original vision of the poetic as a concept which could simultaneously embrace various modes of communication, as in Aristotle's treatment of drama in the Poetics. Joyce represents a monumental movement beyond media--itself a comic commentary on McLuhan and his commentators.


Don Theall, Beyond the Word, 1995

The Role of Media Ecology in Church History

I recently came across this well-written article by Michael Giobbe from the Media Ecology Association proceedings of 2009. It should be of special interest to those Christians interested in the intersection of faith, media ecology, and ecumenism.

How Wide and How Long,

How High and How Deep:

The Role of Media Ecology in Church History

Abstract:

"The leading figures in media ecology—Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Neil Postman, Harold Innis, and Elizabeth Eisenstein—have all commented on the influence of various media environments upon the unfolding of church history. Their observations on the topic, however, have not to date been specifically collected and set into perspective with a view toward understanding more recent developments in that history. In this article, I undertake a preliminary overview of the subject, leading to two conclusions: First, the role of media ecology in church history is more varied, pervasive, and influential than previously thought. Secondly, therefore, by teaching media ecology as a unifying discipline either at the church or seminary level, one could actually deconflict that history, potentially leading to greater unity between church communities."



Full Article: http://www.media-ecology.org/publications/MEA_proceedings/v10/10_How_Wide.pdf

Understanding Poetry

Because poetry--like all the arts--involves this kind of experiential knowledge, we miss the value of poetry if we think of its characteristic knowledge as consisting of "messages," statements, snippets of doctrine. The knowledge that poetry yields is available to us only if we submit ourselves to the massive, and subtle, impact of the poem as a whole. We have access to this special kind of knowledge only by participating in the drama of the poem, apprehending the form of the poem. What in this context do we mean by form? To create a form is to find a way to contemplate, and perhaps to comprehend, our human urgencies. Form is the recognition of fate made joyful, because made comprehensible.


Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren,
Understanding Poetry,
1960

The Joyce of McLuhan Studies

He [Marshall McLuhan] was never reticent about the debt he owed to Joyce in particular, and frequently uttered and published such statements as this: 'Nobody could pretend serious interest in my work who is not completely familiar with all the works of James Joyce and the French symbolists.' Such statements were intended to be taken quite literally: a full appreciation of McLuhan's work is impossible without the sort of perceptual training that such familiarity instils. ... He once remarked to me, as I know he did to many others, that his work on media and culture was, in the main, 'applied Joyce.'


Eric McLuhan, The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake, 1997

Technological Determinism

The consequences for literature that stem from major changes in technology are only inevitable to the extent that they are unforeseen. Determinism is the result of the behavior of those who are determined to ignore what is happening around them. Recognition of the psychic and social consequences of technological change makes it possible to neutralize the effects of innovation. If we maintain lively dialogue with, and among, the technologies, we can enlist them on the side of traditional values instead of watching those values disappear while we play the helpless bystanders.


Marshall McLuhan, Letters of Marshall McLuhan

What the Public Wants

Nobody wants a motorcar until there are motorcars, and nobody is interested in TV till there are TV programs. This power of technology to create its own world of demand is not independent of technology being first an extension of our own bodies and senses.


Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.


Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964

The Wild Broncos of Technology

Harnessing the Tennessee, Missouri, or Mississippi is kid stuff compared with curbing the movie, press, or television to human ends. The wild broncos of technological culture have yet to find their busters or masters. They have found only their P.T. Barnums.


Marshall McLuhan
Explorations in Communication
1966

The Medium is the Message?

via: James Morrison