I want to write, finally, about a thought experiment. I’ve been going on and on about figs. Now’s the time to do some work. How do we get to the point I describe here:
That’s what I want my students to do — figure out how to “cook” with new technologies. If they’ve got some sort of machine in front of them, but no “recipe,” can they make it work? How can I get them to the point where they have strategies to generate the questions they need to ask, and then answer them?
I’m not sure how this thought experiment will turn out, and I expect to refine it. But what if we 1. choose an object in the world, and 2. “look” at it through the filters of different mediating technologies? We can perform the phenomenological reduction I described in previous posts, but when we take our “naive look around,” it’s not the effect of our senses we’re concerned with, but the effect of the technologies, which come to act like senses. If we turn our attention to those effects, can we build mental catalogs that allow us to “cook” in the way I’ve described above?
Think back to the meal you had at Thanksgiving (which I’m presuming was turkey — if it wasn’t, humor me!).
1. What did it taste like? Look? Smell? Sound? Feel?
2. How do you know? That is, how does your memory of the meal differ from the meal itself? Why do you feel you can trust your memory?
3. What do these clips (here and here) reveal about the experience of Thanksgiving dinner? How do they suggest experience that they are technologically incapable of conveying? (You can’t taste YouTube. How does YouTube suggest taste?)
4. What does the gap between our mediated experience and our knowledge of a turkey dinner reveal about the types of mediation each technology performs?
4a. Questions 1 to 3 went step by step, and question 4 jumped a few steps, but I’m not yet sure which. What do you think?
(Some time, I’ll write about Marshall McLuhan, who described the media as “extensions of man.” Those who know me know I find McLuhan’s work frustrating because he makes proclamations or even declamations without ever saying how he got to them. I think if he had named his method, it would have looked like what I’m proposing here.)
Kyle Conway 