Reading Response

Major Studio 1 | MFADT

 

Medium is the Massage

– by Marshall McLuhan

The book is a graphical representation talking about an evolution of perspective. Marshall McLuhan takes the reader on a journey to understand what the world was initially, and how the electronic information (or the digital age) has shifted our way of doing things.

Whatever we see or do today is composed of the primary elements. Marshall talks about the book being an extension to the eye, the wheel being an extension of the foot, and clothing as an extension of the skin. I liked how he integrated the different components (seeing, hearing, touching) into an interdependent system. It gives an idea of how everything gets built from the fundamentals – one thing over the other.

The view of the world communicated in the text is very realistic. It is almost like stating those facts which are often unseen. I also like the typography and the design of the book. It forces the reader to look from different perspectives – sometimes upside down, sometimes through a mirror.

 

Oulipo

– by François Le Lionnais

This reading gives an understanding of how an order of text creates a different meaning – a series of diverse topics and ideas put together, with the reader given the freedom to rearrange them and draw meaning from the output – a way of generating perception. The style of cutting lines of a poem to create a sonnet made me think how people at the beginning of information age would assess information presented to them in bits and pieces.

The text also talks about literature, and how writers tweak the same idea to give a different sense to it.

The text relates it to how computers would perceive the texts in a poem – a language with a set of instructions for the computer to understand and execute. It is a different way of looking at things. Today, when we talk about machine learning, we consider making the computer execute a set of instructions to perform an action. Segmenting the words or lines of a poem and making them be understood by a computer is a different take on such poems. From the perspective of the computer, it is mathematics, where several segments are being tied up in a different fashion to generate meaning (matrix of text blocks generating a sentence through combinatorics: model by Claude Berge).

The concept of using bits of information to create computer-generated sentences has more applications. The text talks about the possibility of assessing a crime scene based on the sentence combinations generated by the computer.

The book (Medium is the Massage) talks about how the world has transitioned to the information age (digital), and this text accounts how computers are being taught this information.