If like me, you’ve always been interested in learning how SLR’s work, but have found it too daunting, this is the video to watch.

Priscilla Long on the fascinating world of the reading mind.

What is reading? To me it’s a noisemaker. Reading—I mean silent reading—sets off sounds, the sounds within words and the sound of words. If I can’t pronounce a word, I can’t read it either. It stops me. I read of course with my eyes. My eyes give me words as sounds. It’s as if the book were reading itself to me in my voice.

Oliver Reichenstein makes a strong case on why Twitter share buttons, Facebook likes, and Google Pluses are not so great.

Some people probably do use those buttons. Maybe even a lot of people. And maybe you do and think I’m dead wrong about this. Maybe I am. And maybe someone needs to do some serious research to know for sure. I won’t deny all that. What I know for sure is that most people who know how to use social media also know how to share URLs.

Pure notebook porn.

A big issue that worries the author Jerry Mander is how much of our lives have been separated from nature. He spends a lot on this topic at the start of the book, and with the first argument, which he calls The Mediation of Experience. From the moment we wake up to when we go to sleep, everything that we experience is artificial. From the buildings that sourround us, the houses or apartments that we live in, the cities, the roads that we drive on, the cars we’re driving; all of this was created by humans and not by nature. He calls this the walling of awareness. Television just happens to be a “natural” extension of all that.

The second argument, The Colonization of Experience, deals with advertisement. This is one of the authors strongest arguments being that before writing the book he worked 15 years as an advertising executive. The cliched criticism of Television is that it’s just ads that has content sandwiched in between. But it’s so sadly true. For Mander, the medium wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for the advertisement industry.

In the third argument, Effects of Television on the Human Being, Mander explores how Television affects us physiologically, psychologically, and culturally. It has one of the most alarmist points in the book.

When you watch Television all you do is sit down and stare at a screen that emits light. Your seeing images, but they’re just light. The light is transformed by your eye into an image, but you’re still, literally, ingesting light. They don’t just stop at your eyes after your brain decodes it into an image. This light goes into your body. Mander is surprised that there was very little research or studies done(at that time) on the effects of the light emitted by Tv’s. He even suggests, with no proof whatsoever, that Television light can cause cancer.

The psychological effects of Television are easy to see just by observation. In order for the medium to work, you have to be passive. You can’t be critical. You can’t go back and read the passage. You have to become a little bit stupid in order to enjoy it.

Another spooky point Mander makes is that the images that we see stay with us for a long time. And the images we get from Tv and the ones we get from the “natural” world get intertwined. The point is that we have a difficult time separating these because they are up to a certain point equally real.

The last argument deals with the biases of the medium. Mander’s point is that the medium is unreformable. Violence works better than peace. Complex issues like politics and wars will always be narrowed, thus knowledged will always get narrowed. Television has to be a certain and specific way in order for us to pay it any attention. There are simply things that are impossible to televise.

There’s so much more compelling stuff in the book that I’m leaving out and I don’t want to make this review too long. Taking aside the light causing cancer fumble, I still find it hard to completely disagree with the book. There is no question that Television, for better or worse, has changed our lives. I’m a strong advocate of watching it as little as possible, and that when you watch it, you watch it because you want to. I don’t think that the medium is completely un-reformable, but I do believe that network television as we’ve known it should die. My book would be titled Four Arguments for the Elimination of Broadcast Television. And I’m not so sure with the premise that society will be better off if we banish the technology. But like Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, I do agree that media technologies are not neutral utilities that don’t affect us if we don’t let them. They do have their own agendas and we have to pay attention to them in order to not lose our humanity.

This man is amazing.

As a technology medium, Television is something that’s hard to pin down. The simplest way to describe it, is that it’s a medium that transmits audio and images together. But as The Verge article explores, the technology was hard to grasp at first. People didn’t understand what it could be used for, or what it could potentially be used for. From it’s early conception of a “telephonoscope”, to visual telegraph, to visual radio, the medium was a tough sell in it’s early history. And even today we’re having a hard time giving it a specific definition.

We live in a time when it’s hard to define what television is precisely. Is television defined by the device you’re watching it on? Is television defined by the length of a certain piece of visual media? Am I using television if I chat with someone through a TV screen over the internet? The thing is, it’s always been that way. The history of the future of television is particularly messy because no one at any given time has been happy with defining exactly what it is.

My hunch is that in the future, thinking of media as different categories like print, radio, or television, is going to be silly. The networked computer is already starting to make that happen. For example, the idea of a Television as we have known it doesn’t matter any more. What is a Television in a world with Netflix and YouTube? The device in itself is starting to matter less and less. It’s just a screen. The content that we put in it is what’s going to matter.

The message is the medium. Take that, McLuhan.

*Post title is a reference from a scene from Back to the Future were Marty McFly tells Milton Baines that has already seen a brand new Honeymooners episode from a rerun.

*McLuhan believed that the particular content on a medium didn’t make a difference. The medium was the thing the really was affecting you in some way, and not the particular content. Thus, the medium is the message.

Being ignored on the web is like being a bum holding up a cardboard sign, seeing everyone pretending to not see you. It really is not a good feeling. Who ever says that they don’t write for an audience, and just do it for themselves is just lying. They’re lying to themselves. Because you don’t have to publish things to the public in order to write. You can always write and no one has to see what you write. But the job of being a writer doesn’t work that way. Writers need readers and vice versa. Writers literally need readers in order to make a living off it.

Feedback on blogs don’t have to be with just comments. That’s not what I’m exactly asking for, though it could help. Comments on blogs as a feedback mechanism is hotly debated. Getting linked to, or just getting more traffic can be more than enough feedback for me. But getting absolutely zero activity doesn’t help. How can you know how good you are? How can you know how much you suck? If a blog falls in the giant woods of the web, does it make a sound?

Remember when television was dismissed as a passive medium? I do, and every time I write a next-day review of a new episode, I grin as I recall those bygone days. Watching TV used to be a mindless experience to be shared with only those in the room (often just oneself); thanks to Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, it has become a group activity, practically a hive mind.

It’s a good read, but I don’t buy the whole premise of social media changing Tv viewing from passive to active. In any case it’s more of a way of being “alone together” than anything. Not that I don’t enjoy doing a search for what people say about a show I like, but I prefer to do that after I finish watching it, specially if it’s a show like Mad Men. And more people just say that they’re watching the show, Get Gluing it or whatever, than adding any interesting commentary.

(Via The Verge)

Full album in 8-bit. Boner. Huge one.

via MeFi