Print visual culture
Visual space
Visual space, Cavell explains, is
not space filled with visuals or images, it is not the contemporary mediascape,
but instead it is space that is easily demarcated with vision, it is space that
is highly regular (like the standard printed page), and it tends to be static.
One way to understand McLuhan's famous formulation, "the medium is the
message," is to understand that each medium 'impose[s] its own spatial
assumptions and structures' on consumers (70 in Cavell), thus in an era dominated
by the printed word, the dominant conception of space was a visual one. But,
as Cavell notes, "Visual space was only one kind of space, and as electronic
media brought the other senses back into analogical interrelationship, other
sorts of spaces would come (back) into being, spaces that would be dynamic and
interactive" (70).
Just as visual space is not filled with visual elements, but instead refers
to the dominant means of perceiving space, acoustic space is not necessarily
filled with sound. Acoustic space tends to be perceived by both the ear and
the eye, but more importantly, the qualities of the space, therefore, tend to
be as Cavell says, interactive and dynamic. In Cavell's reading of The Gutenberg
Galaxy, McLuhan's second book, he sees McLuhan emphasizing that even non-verbal
communication, like a mosaic, can be understood as oral or acoustic, because
of its many resonances, its piling up and juxtaposing of images, its "allatonceness"
(55). We generally recognize that email, discussion board text, weblog text,
reads more like speech than finished prose, but in addition to those formal
qualities, the text is being produced and consumed in spaces that emphasize
exchange. Cavell states clearly in his preface that the first part of the book
"argues for the importance of understanding acoustic space as a hybrid
of oral and literate modalities" (xiv). The word is not dead, and visual
space is not vanquished, but both are being increasingly pushed aside by communication
with images and spaces that are formed through social interaction. As educators,
we know intuitively that the kind of spaces we create – from our paper
or hypertext syllabi, our arrangement of the classroom, our structuring of activities
– will send clear messages about authority, knowledge, power, and the rules
of conduct for communication to our students.
Marshall McLuhan explains visual and acoustic space, interview with Nina Sutton,
Simultaneous is necessarily acoustic. Anything sequential is necessarily visual . This structure is valid for any period of History. The pre literate world tended to be ear because they didn't have any powerful technology that would equal the power of the ear to order existence, so all people in the world before the semantics of the Greek alphabet allowed to the barbarian world .... what the Greeks call the holy barbarian old science at affair... they come to ... a ...full circle of visual people out there the holy barbarian. Now these are all ear people ... before they took everything including the Greek world ... over two but that is only history .. the simultaneous is automaticlly acoustic because you feel .. at once. you see only a small area and Vision is a continuous as the acoustic world is not continuous... there is no continuun in the ear world.. there is no continuum for the blind
The recording is poor and several passages are not intelligible, but the final mentioning of the blind can be fully understood in an experience that goes in detail about that at the movie To see and not to see
It is the same for the case of Africans reported by McLuhan in the Gutenberg Galaxy.
When McLuhan predicted Internet, and I quote:
"The next medium, whatever it is — it may be the extension of consciousness — will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.”
He did not only foresaw Internet as we know today, but if you mix the above and the new technologies that are around the corner as extensions of consciousness, it becomes very clear that we are about to enter an era exactly as the one he describes to Nina Sutton as the pre literate or barbarian, in an all encompassing acoustic form of communication will be totally allowed, since it is only partially allowed today.
Take a look also at this preview on virtual reality that will be available very soon.
The same way that although the medium is the message and it does not exclude the message, an acoustic culture does not exclude the visual.
Take a look in something constructed visually under an acoustical approach, i.e., there is a continuum in the images that obliges you to think about it the same way a person accustomed in a acoustic culture would.
Acoustic culture is in itself a very broad suject and this exploration should be expanded or, better yet, having a separate project exploring only that.
For the moment it is enough.