New Media Reader 177-227

I loved Italo Calvino's mathematical crime story. I thought it was ingenious of him to use the genre of the crime story. The actions he uses in his equations (to rape, to murder, etc.) are funny because these are actions that we generally conceive of as being beyond the rational, unpredictable, and unexplainable. But also, he is playing on the crime fiction idea that all crimes can be solved by a hyper-rational computer like mind (McLuhan mentions Edgar Allen Poe's "The Purloined Letter" for example). Finally, I thought it was a good satire of the genre because the plots of these kinds of stories are often formulaic, involving a set number of stock characters doing a set number of actions, as I discovered at my own peril while reading a massive pulp fiction anthology recently. It reminded me of the article we read about how movies of the future might conform themselves to the desires of the viewer, and shows a model of how this might work. It was also interesting showed how cultural or personal biases can subjectify a seemingly objective mathematical process, in showing the actions that Calvino thought each character might be capable of, or which actions could exclude each other. In the real world, by some freak incident maybe one of the eliminated combinations of actions and characters could occur, but not in the rational world of fiction or computing.
McLuhan's articles were so dense with ideas and references that sometimes I had difficulty understanding it all, but several of his ideas stood out to me. His "Gutenberg Galaxy" excerpt resonated with some of my recent preoccupations. I'm taking a class on the history of mass media. and reading a book about Victorian sexuality, most of the sources for which are sensationalist newspapers, pamphlets, and pornography publications. In these contexts, I often think about how the internet is currently considered to be bringing information to the masses as never before, but the wealth of affordable publications that sprang up in the 19th century was a similar paradigm shift, into paradigm that I think is still mostly holding sway today. I was especially compelled by McLuhan's statement that widespread literacy created a shift from the manufacture of art for a patron, into the manufacture of art for mass consumption, and transformed art into a commodity. This also forced the artist to be more aware of the audience and the arts intended effect. This was the first move towards artist/veiwer interaction. I also was interested in his discussion of the individual versus the group experience. While we mostly consume and interpret culture in an individual way, we also have a shared experience in pop culture, a level on which people can communicate across class, race, age and gender.
"The Medium is Message" was interesting because of McLuhan's argument that technologies have a meaning in and of themselves, that they are political and non-neutral. This was different from most articles we have read where technology is only as dangerous as those who wield it.