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Thursday, March 16, 2006 |
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Notes on "The Gutenberg Galaxy" |
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Been reading Marshall McCluhan's 1962 book, "The Gutenberg Galaxy", and found a few things to be interesting, but here's one.
John Wilson, at the African Research Institute of London University, writes about a film he shot in Africa showing the audience (the tribes people) how to get rid of stagnant water from a village. They shot very simple shots of the actions taken, and showed it to an audience of 30 tribal villagers. The tribes people were asked what they had seen, at the end of the five minute film, and they collectively responded that they had seen a chicken.
The director of the film didn't understand- a chicken wasn't shot for the film. When they looked at the film afterward, they noticed that for about 7 seconds, a chicken had been startled and flew over the right side of the frame. When the researchers asked the villagers later what else they had seen, they remember seeing a man, but they didn't tell him anything about a story or instructions being gleaned from the film. What they had done was look at the frame the way they would glance around the environment. None of them had known where to look, so none of them did what "literate" (conditioned) audiences do, which is stare at the entire screen, instead of treating it as a special kind of environment.
Wilson had to do some research on film, then, in order to shoot films that the villagers could understand. He found out something else interesting: When you show two characters talking, and one leaves, the villagers didn't understand what happened to him. They think he has disappeared, and they get confused and angry, and start yelling at the picture to ask it where he went. So Wilson started showing the paths of people as they left the frame. The only way tribal audiences approved is if they saw the character make a natural exit- going into a doorway, for example, or walking behind some trees. But a panning movement, to show the character walking away, made no sense to them, either- they understood it as the landscape moving, not the camera, because they weren't really even aware of what a camera was.
So what's interesting is, as we learn media "literacy", as McCluhan explains, we start losing our connection to the immersive environment of oral culture- where participation and interplay is mandatory, unless you are talking to yourself. The written word allows for isolation and independence because an idea can be stored for later retrieval. Strictly oral cultures can't do that.
So a hallmark of unmediated culture is exchange and interplay between people. The rest of what we look at as a storage medium- text, film, photographs, recordings- are isolated. But an audience based on interconnection and community, an oral culture, also demands an intrinsically interactive experience in their storage. In other words, these tribe's people might have intuitively understood an open ended video game such as morrowind or final fantasy, because it is interactive and navigable, in a manner that is more natural to them than the passive consumption of film. (McCluhan, for reasons I can't understand, seems to think they would understand television more than film. I don't agree, and actually have no idea why he would make the assumption).
Posted by
Eryk @
5:02 PM
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