Medium Technology Assessment in James Joyce

The medium technology used by James Joyce is print, from which books were invented.

Technology is generally defined as "science or knowledge applied to a definite purpose". Technology assessment has been defined as a form of policy research that examines short- and long-term consequences of technologies.. Instruction Assessment, determines whether or not the goals of education are being met. Our assessment here is how much Print Technology meets its goals.

Instruction Assessment is not our purpose here, also technology in general, and they are quite different subject but share a common sense objective which is to realize if ends meet.

The technology we are interested in is the one invented by Johannes Gutenberg, which enabled the existence of books, from which we can access James Joyce works.

We can say that McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy is a Technology Assessment of Gutenberg's invention, the movable type setting. Although anything in reality materializes under some form of technology, there are much more things involved that are not technological. McLuhan gives us a glimpse on that and Charles Eames, with his wife Ray, were amongst the most notable capacities of an effective holistic and specific analysis, specially their thinking and modelling processes involved, which we will use here too.

McLuhan has a very special way of sorting all that out and basically we can say indeed about Joyce that The Medium is the Message.

As matter of fact, I sort of already explained it when discussing Ulysses in a job I called McLuhan Glosses on Ulysses medium Origin . The design proved clumsy in its usability and we will use the material there as an encyclopedia and will reach it through projects, which will reveal evidences of the ideas discussed here.

The case of the printed word

Where the word is the signal, printed page the transmiter, light the channel, the eye the receiver. Actually the receiver is the brain.

What about the noise?

If you take the Shannone Weaver model in consideration, the noise typically is the lack of light, excess of noise or uncomfortable environment, quality of the printed material, the size of the printed word, its format, etc.
If you take the interactive model into consideration, there are much more aspects to consider, and it is done above, but basically they all can be encompassed in the design.

The interaction in the case of reading a book is sort of one way and is a function of the intellectual ability of the reader which reflects what he reads.