This is my second round of teaching the course “History of Media and Media Philosophy.” The overall syllabus and bibliography did not change much. Compared with the previous cohort, discussion sections were removed, a final in-class exam was added, and in terms of content, artificial intelligence and Web3 were added. The syllabus is as follows:
- (Two weeks) Introduction: Discovering Media — Media Philosophy
- McLuhan, Understanding Media; Heidegger, Being and Time
- Primitive Media — Language, Stone Tools, Symbolic Objects, Knotted Cords
- Harari, A Brief History of Humankind; Mien, A Brief History of Prehistoric Humans
- (Two weeks) Writing — Script and Its Material Supports, Oral vs. Written, Alphabet
- Innis, Empire and Communications; Ong, Orality and Literacy; Logan, The Alphabet Effect
- (Two weeks) The Printing Press — Gutenberg, Printing, and the Scientific Revolution
- Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change; McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
- The Telegraph — Sharp, Morse, and Spiritualism
- Peters, Speaking into the Air; Standage, The Victorian Internet
- (Two weeks) Television — Postman, Critiquing Postman
- Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood, Amusing Ourselves to Death; Pankhurst, The Death of Childhood
- (Two weeks) Information — Computers, the Internet, Artificial Intelligence
- Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings; Mumford, The Myth of the Machine; Street, Network Effect
- Social Media — Fragmentation, Information Bubbles, Addiction
- Strate, Resonance, Bits, and the Web; Hassan, The Age of Distraction
- Web3 — Blockchain, the Metaverse, the Future
- •Amos, The Future of Money; Chang Jia, Metaverse
- In-class exam (Week 16)
After ChatGPT rose to prominence, I changed the exam rules. Instead of the previous completely open-book format, which even allowed internet access, students were now limited to printed materials only. Judging from the results, the average quality of the answers was about the same as in previous years, but there were no especially outstanding scripts. I don’t know whether that was because of the restriction on materials, or simply because there were not many students enrolled to begin with.
Grading in Tsinghua’s general-education courses has already fallen into a distorted state of involution. In the early years, Tsinghua used to require that no more than 40% of grades could be A- or above. That one-size-fits-all rule was much criticized, and then it was abolished in one stroke. In recent years there have been no percentage restrictions at all, which means that in principle I could give every student an A. In fact, as far as I know, quite a few teachers really do grade that way. Meanwhile, in previous years I still conscientiously kept to a scale centered around A and A- for about 40%, which instead made me seem rather harsh.
Although I had known this situation for a long time, I had always stuck to my own grading scale. In literal terms, A means excellent, B means good, C means average, and D means pass. In many cases, when students were clearly just muddling through, I still started at C; for average work I gave B. I thought I was already being generous to the students. Yet in contrast to other teachers, I ended up looking very out of step. Last semester a student who had received a B came to me to appeal, thinking my grade was too low. That finally made me realize that the situation was even more serious than I had originally imagined. The current grading climate should be: A+ is excellent, A is good, A- is average, and B is merely passable. This scale is absurd: on the one hand, it completely departs from the literal meaning; on the other, it lacks sufficient differentiation, leaving truly excellent students without a sense of achievement.
But what could I do? As a humanities course, grading is inherently relative. Since the prevailing standard is now like this, if I continue to cling to the old scale, that would also be another kind of injustice to the students. After much thought, I finally decided to compromise this time and gave out more A’s. But this time I did not give any A+, and apart from the students who were absent from the exam, I did not give any failures either.
The Exam Questions and Commentary
2023 Final Exam for History of Media and Media Philosophy
- Printed materials may be consulted (books, photocopies, notes), but mobile phones, computers, and other electronic devices may not be used.
- Please indicate the source when quoting (a simple notation such as “author + title of book/article” is sufficient); plagiarism is prohibited.
- You may hand in your paper after class. Deadline: 19:00. Please manage your time carefully. Points will be deducted for overtime, starting at 10 points.
- Please fill in your student number and name accurately on the answer sheet.
I. Short-Answer Questions (objective questions, 5 points each; one sentence or even one word is enough; meant to test class attendance and post-class reading):
—I tried to make the short-answer questions serve as an attendance check. For students who attended every class and completed the required readings, they should not have been difficult, nor should they have taken any time. For students who missed many classes, as long as they brought all their notes and searched through them on the spot, they could still answer most of the questions correctly. Judging from the actual results, Question 5 had the highest error rate, with only about 20 to 30 percent of students getting it right. The reason should be that the answer was not written on the slides for that question.
1. McLuhan says media are like a thief; what is the content of media like?
—Meat to lure the watchdogs—In the third week of class, I once casually said that the first two weeks’ introductory material would not be tested. My original intention was to reduce students’ anxiety about difficulty. But when I prepared the exam, I forgot that I had said this. Later, after students appealed, this question was excluded from the total score. I still counted the responses, though; in fact, about 80% of the students answered it correctly as well.
2. Why is it necessary to be both fast and accurate when writing cuneiform?
—“Because it has to be inscribed on damp clay, while the clay tablet dries very quickly” (The History of Communication, “Media in the Ancient Empires”). This was the question with the highest number of correct answers; 95% of the students got it right.
3. For his 1930 book Radio Mind, which prominent figure wrote the foreword of endorsement?
—Einstein (more than 80% answered correctly)
4. Beginning in the 1950s, some American TV stations aired burning Yule logs every Christmas Eve. What position did this practice show television replacing?
—The fireplace (mentioned in The History of Communication, in “Making Way for Television”; there was also a hint in the PPT; about 70% answered correctly)
5. In the cover image of Riccioli’s New Almagest, which astronomical system is shown falling to the ground?
—The Ptolemaic system (answers such as geocentrism, the geocentric system, or the old astronomical system were all counted as correct). This question was not explicitly written on the PPT, but it was mentioned in class; see 7.mp3:01:26:50. When it came up, the room burst into laughter, so the students in class should have some impression of it.)
II. Essay Questions (subjective questions; answer any3 questions, 25 points each; no standard answers; meant to test independent thinking and the coherence of your argumentation)
1. McLuhan said: “The medium is really massage, not message; it gives us a hard time… it massages all of us with a savage effect.” —Please interpret and elaborate on this statement.
—This time I graded the essay questions relatively generously; the average score for almost all of them was above 22 points. Question 1 had the lowest average, below 22. The trap in this question is that this sentence is one of McLuhan’s playful remarks, but many students failed to notice the context. “The medium is the message” is McLuhan’s more famous maxim. In answering, one should of course first lay out what “the medium is the message” means, and then supplement it with the additional meaning conveyed by “the medium is massage.” But some students launched straight into an analysis of “why the medium is not the message,” and that inevitably led to rather large deviations.
In the course, “the medium is the message” and “the medium is the massage” appeared respectively in the first and second halves of the introduction. In the first half, I mainly introduced a kind of “weak philosophy of media”; in the second half, I put forward a “strong philosophy of media.” The basic meaning of the weak version of media philosophy is “media matter.” Media are not optional neutral conduits, but things that are as important as, or even more important than, content (message); media themselves express all kinds of tendencies. Weak media philosophy acknowledges that media’s influence on human beings is not neutral, and tries to reflect on the tendencies of media. So where does the strength of strong media philosophy lie? Roughly speaking, the first point is this: from “media affect people” to “media shape people.” The phenomenological philosophy of media that I advocate rejects reified concepts of human nature; people’s modes of cognition and ways of life are all shaped by media environments. In a certain sense, one can say that strong media philosophy is a kind of “media determinism” (of course I also maintain that media determinism does not mean that human beings have no freedom, but rather that human freedom must unfold on the basis of some understanding of the media environment and within certain boundaries relative to the media environment). And from “the medium is the message” to “the medium is the massage,” the additional layer of meaning is precisely the “decisiveness” of media influence and the “passivity” of the human being. The influence of media is not some optional garnish, but something heavy and savage.
When answering, there is no need necessarily to emphasize “determinism”; it is enough to stress the general idea that “media shape people.”
2. Innis believed that media have two different biases, toward time and toward space. What did he mean? Do you agree with his classification? If you do, you may as well list more modern media (such as television, the internet, etc.) and discuss which bias they have; if not, can you offer a better classification?
Very few people went wrong on this question, because I had written the key points very clearly on my PowerPoint slides:
Time: the preservation and transmission of knowledge across generations
Space: the communication and control of knowledge across regions
Time > space: religious civilization — culturally resilient, but weak in military affairs and suppressive of innovation
Space > time: expansionist civilization — powerful for a time, but hard to sustain
It should be noted, first of all, that temporality (transmission) and spatiality (dissemination) are both present in every medium at once; a so-called bias means that one of these dimensions is clearly stronger than the other. And in Innis’s case, this kind of bias is discussed especially from the standpoint of human civilization or imperial governance. So to reject Innis simply because a certain medium possesses both temporality and spatiality is not quite to the point; of course, one can argue that Innis’s dichotomy is overly simplified. A small number of students proposed their own classifications, but I did not see any that were especially brilliant. In fact, McLuhan proposed another classification: tactile and visual. I also have one classification: media biased toward focused immersion and media biased toward dispersed attention.
As for modern media, most students thought they were spatially biased, or had both time and space biases. I think that if one wants to make sense of the internet, one cannot lump internet media together indiscriminately, but must look at different kinds of online media—for example, Weibo and Douyin seem to be more spatially biased, while blogs and archives are more temporal, and as for blockchain, I think it is even more distinctly time-biased.
3. McLuhan and Logan believe that the use of alphabetic writing systems created an environment conducive to the development of systematic law, monotheism, abstract science, deductive logic, objective history, and individualism. Do you agree with them? Please comment.
The fewest students chose to answer this question. Indeed, it was not easy to answer. If one merely says things like abstract thought versus concrete thought, that is a bit too mediocre and has no real highlight. If one supports this view, possible arguments include: the precision of alphabetic writing makes it easier to read words out of context; alphabetic writing is more readily symbolized and thus works hand in hand with the development of abstract mathematics (this is also discussed by Logan later in the article included in the required reading); alphabetic writing promotes a visual-centered rather than synesthetic orientation (McLuhan’s formulation); alphabetic writing easily forms an awareness of classification and ordering and facilitates retrieval (Chinese characters, traditionally organized by radicals and strokes, are relatively cumbersome in this respect), and so on. Arguments against it are not easy to make, because the question stem does not say that alphabetic writing created deductive logic or the like, but rather that it created an “environment conducive to…” So McLuhan and his collaborators are not saying that alphabetic writing is a sufficient or necessary condition, only that it is a “favorable condition,” and that is hard to deny. To refute it, one would probably need to delve more deeply into the details of the argument.
4. Discuss the relationship between the telegraph and futures trading.
This question can basically be answered using the content on the PowerPoint slides. If one has additionally read Carey’s reference article, one should be able to answer more fluently, but it is not easy to produce something especially original. The key points are nothing more than a few: first, the securities industry was an early user of telegraph technology, and the securities industry had very high demands for the timeliness of information, so the development of the securities industry and telegraph technology promoted one another; second, the telegraph weakened the traditional (spatial) arbitrage model, namely buying goods in one place and selling them in another to make a profit on the price difference, so the temporal arbitrage model rose as the other declined, and prospered; this is the basis of futures trading; third, the telegraph and futures share a similar structure of thought: information is separated from the entity, reflecting a new mode of abstraction and decontextualization, and thus they can complement one another.
5. Why did Postman believe that “childhood” disappeared in the television age? Briefly explain Postman’s view and comment on it. In addition, briefly discuss: in the internet age, what has become of childhood?
This was the most commonly chosen question to answer. On the one hand, that may be because the PowerPoint slides contained relatively rich material; on the other hand, it is also because this course devoted quite a lot of space to Postman—we spent a full two weeks discussing Postman, one week praising him and one week criticizing him. Postman believed that adults’ social identity is constructed through three aspects: educational experience, reading ability, and proprietary secrets, while television eroded the boundary between children and adults in these three domains, leading to the infantilization of adults. Of course, I also introduced criticisms of Postman, including philosophical regress and male chauvinism, and one may refer to my “School and Television—A Critique of Postman’s Media Thought” or the relevant chapters of The Strong Program in the History of Media.
One student received a low score on this question because he objected to my (quoted) criticism of Postman, which is fine; the problem is that his way of objecting amounted to a personal attack. His original words were as follows: “There are criticisms of Postman that conflate the issue of childhood–adulthood with the issue of patriarchy, which is unjustified. First, childhood itself is not the same as being underage; Postman’s ‘adulthood’ more often refers to ‘maturity.’ It is also laughable to confuse the ‘madness’ of television content with the ‘madness’ of life; anyone ‘mature’ should not regard these two kinds of madness as the same.”
This passage clearly targets the two critics of Postman that I introduced, Pirkle and Paglia; of course, it also targets me. Pirkle wrote a book in response to Postman, and Paglia’s long dialogue (debate) with Postman was also included in the recommended reading. It is clear, then, that the critics offered many “reasons.” You can rebut them one by one by saying their “reasons” are wrong, but you cannot dismiss them with contempt. This student lumped us into the ridiculous and immature category, yet he himself is precisely “without reason.” The only thing he offered about his position was the sentence quoted above: “First, childhood itself is not the same as being underage; Postman’s ‘adulthood’ more often refers to ‘maturity.’” But what does this sentence mean? The critical views I cited were precisely those that argued that Postman’s adulthood means “maturity” in the first place. Postman himself does indeed often use the phrase “mature adulthood.” But what Postman emphasizes, and what the critics are targeting, is that this “maturity” in Postman is entirely traditional masculine traits—rationality, rigor, calmness, logic—while children are regarded by Postman as “immature,” as being in the process of striving toward maturity. So this student provided no argument at all, and did not even bother to restate Postman’s view, yet he managed to refute the teacher and all the critics. This is a very bad habit: when taking part in debate, he shows no respect for opponents, attacks people personally without laying out arguments, and talks only about positions, at most adding a little empty and vague rhetorical flourishes. This is absolutely not a feature of critical thinking or independent thought.
6. Wiener hoped to “establish a society based on human values rather than on buying and selling.” What does this mean? Briefly explain it and give your own comments.
Very few people chose this question, and it was indeed relatively difficult to answer. The overall line of thought can be found in my introductory essay “Treating People as People”; my PowerPoint also contains more elaboration, but when answering the question one needs to simplify and extract the essentials. First, note that the problem this sentence addresses is the employment crisis caused by automation; the pathology it targets is the American value system that treats everything as something that can be bought and sold; what it promotes is human value, such as sharing and responsibility.
7. Musk claims that he wants to turn Twitter into a “digital town square,” that is, a public space of free speech. Is this possible? If not, discuss what elements Twitter lacks. If it is possible, discuss what elements a digital town square needs.
Everyone who answered this question thought it was impossible; it seems everyone has a very clear understanding of Musk’s habits. How exactly to answer is very open-ended. Personally, I would be very glad to see students answer this question in relation to Web3, taking “decentralization” as a necessary element of a digital public space. In addition, the distinction between the public sphere and the private sphere that I emphasized in class is also very important.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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