Now We Are Different

Updates from May, 2009 Hide threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

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  dubber 12:29 pm on May 21, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: media, perception, space, time

  I’ve been listening to Sonic Museum today, and blogged about it at New Music Strategies.

  It got me thinking about how we experience things through our senses, and the way in which (as McLuhan would have it) new media extend our senses.

  Simply put, television lets us see things that are much further away than our eyes would ordinarily allow. Radio does the same for our ears. But just as we can extend our senses in terms of distance, we can also extend them in terms of our relationship to time.

  Recording can extend our hearing back through time. Digital editing and, in particular, hypertext changes the relationship of our senses to time and space. In a way, digital technology allows us to perceive in 4 dimensions, travelling up and down, side to side and jumping around in the chronology as we see fit.

  We can see some of these things being explored in narrative. This is, admittedly, not new – and experimental cinema has messed with sequence for some decades. However, our capacity to process multi-linear and non-sequential narrative has changed with an increasing familiarity with the 4-dimensional perception that comes with digital media.

  Mental note made to explore and research this further – and I’d welcome any links to work that may have already been done in this area.

   

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  Book report 

  dubber 7:40 am on May 20, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: book

  I left this book idea alone for a while, which was both necessary, and kind of a shame, because it is still very much a book I want to write – but a book that’s going to take a lot of research, writing and fact-checking.

  I still think that the premise is not only an interesting one – but an important one: that we ourselves are quite literally changing and adapting in response to our technological environment. And I think it’s one that we need to think more clearly about because those responses and adaptations should be deliberately selected rather than haphazard.

  But interestingly, it’s only because I’ve started work on another book – one that will take a great deal of time away from any chance I ever had of working on this one – that has spurred me to revisit Now We Are Different and pick up the story. Sometimes you just get into the right frame of mind for things – and something as simple as discovering a new WordPress theme can galvanise you into action.

  So – actually, I’m writing three books right now: this one, Deleting Music and a co-authored undergrad text book called ‘Understanding the Music Industries’.

   
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  Memory and evolution 

  dubber 11:19 am on July 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  

  I’ve been reading a lot about memory this past week, and one of the things that strikes me is that we don’t yet have a good enough model for equating the biochemistry of the brain with the experiential phenomenon of memory.

  When I say I remember my 10th birthday or I remember what happened at the party last night, you know what I mean. But there’s an amazing array of processes that go into that – in terms of imagery, emotional connection and recall of facts and impressions.

  However, although you can remember an event that took a long time to transpire, the act of rememberance happens in a very short space of time.

  Obviously, you’re not recalling a sequential series of instants, but an overall sense of the recalled event. But the ways we have to explain that are derived from various different fields: literary criticism (metaphor seems to be the most useful framework we have to understand this), psychology, biochemistry, sociology – and so on.

  And each perspective gives us a different view of what is going on… but none of them really address the brain itself and the complexities that it really presents.

  One thing that is clear is that the brain changes in a concrete and very real way as a result of experiences. The information that makes its way into the brain rewires pathways, causes physical impressions, creates and reinforces connections… and this is entirely mediated through our senses.

  As we change the way in which we take in visual, auditory and other information – that is, if the mode of mediation shifts – so too do the resulting physical processes that occur in our brains change.

  Culturally, as our technologies change – and those extensions of our senses provide new ways of processing and importing information – so too do the meanings that we create change, thereby altering and adapting ourselves to the media environment.

  Even if not ‘evolutionary’, it has to be said that the process of memory is an adaptive one. There’s a lot more to be said about this, but I’m still processing…

   
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    Jason Kemp 3:45 am on July 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    

    This is your brain on music has some useful reference points on the way that different elements and different theories of brain science can help us make sense of this.

    The act of memory is far more than just recall. In simple terms we now understand that the brain adds weight to certain memories almost like applying experiential filters which actually distort memories and regenerate them with extra social indicators that have meaning for us.

    I wrote about some of them over here
    http://www.dialogcrm.com/blog/2007/08/22/uses-not-innovations-drive-technology/

    The book This is your brain on music puts it all more elegantly but our brains are not neutral data retrieval systems. And yes external triggers like music and other vivid experiences all help to build a kaleidoscope of memories.

    Like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle often translated as something like “the act of observation changes the act being observed” which is a bit like what seems to happen.

    Each time the brain learns something new it is either added to a matching pattern area or depending on age and experience might even carve out now pathways in the brain. (or both)

    So memory and the act of remembering adds layers of extra meaning to the situation and effectively this results in a “memory” that looks different to differnt people even if they were all present and trying to remember the very same event.

    Actually even trying to describe some of this is not so easy. That is one of the other key points about Daniel Levitin’s book.

    Researchers and academics often describe the very same things with wildly conflicting viewpoints. Some of this is semantics and some of it is lack of meaningful collaboration.

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    Jason Kemp 3:50 am on July 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    

    Last point was supposed to say

    “Some of this is semantics and some of it is lack of meaningful collaboration…..
    and some of it is just another example of the way that memory works.”

    Also “carve out now pathways in the brain” should have read new pathways.