New Media Fidelity

The Medium is the Message is the Medium 


"War is never anything less than accelerated technological change. It begins when some notable disequilibrium among existing structures has been brought about by an inequality in rates of growth." 
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan, 1964, SIGNET BOOKS, New York 


"No society has ever known enough about its actions to have developed immunity to its new extensions or technologies.  Today we have begun to sense that art may be able to provide such immunity.
... The ability of the artist to sidestep the bully blow of new technology of any age, and to parry such violence with full awareness, is age-old."
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan, 1964, SIGNET BOOKS, New York 


"I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form."
Playboy Magazine, March 1969.


Fidelity within a relationship or citizenship, if you happen to be French, invokes a passionate loyalty to partner or country. The simplified iteration, Fi, has evolved as it's been applied to technology. Hi-Fi, one of its earliest iterations was an indication of advanced audio reproduction, a wider band width, paired and separated resulted in greater frequency response, or greater fidelity, or function. The difference in sound was remarkable. 


It's latest iteration, WiFi, is a buzz term any converged individual searches out while vacationing abroad, a wireless port, a new frequency response in way that engages our devices and allows communication.


McLuhan postulated and spoke our earliest thoughts on the fidelity of media, its function on us within all the contexts, and in some respects his notions are prophetic in the context of new media. 


Let's bring all that together in the heading of this topic; new media fidelity. What we're talking about is functionalism, the idea that society can't function without the media and that media exist to serve the needs of society. 


Surveillance and the Fourth Estate     Combined we call it citizen journalism with the web as its medium, but its functionality transcends the three w's in redefining the Internet (why do we capitalize this?) to bring the world to us versus finding the world on the web. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and the antiquated email and texting give us an eye on what's going on. 


Interpretation     There's an interesting notion that raw media, images mostly, need some form of interpretation until they can be correlated with what we might already know, or our frame of reference. This creates all kinds of noise depending on the filters involved with the interpreter, the photographer, the producer, the censurer, the parent. One of my favorite interpreters is Jon Stewart with The Daily Show. 


Values Transmission and Socialization     The medium is the message. When Sam disregards his own life to follow Frodo on his quest we have an inferred value of fidelity, and not just the inference, we see it played out, living, with consequences and rewards that audiences experience vicariously.  


Entertainment     From self-expression to billion dollar budget blockbusters, new media channels access and frees audiences from the anchors of what they used to consider high fidelity. HD-TV has become portable, five-channel surround sound personal, and music finds me when I want to listen.