ABSTRACT
In this chapter we look at the notion of the mechanical reproduction of images, and in particular photography, in order to highlight the early stages of the distancing effects of media technology whose latest expression is that of digital matters. In order to examine the cultural effects of concepts such as Heidegger’s withdrawal or forgetting, we examine the real consequences of media technologies. In the Introduction we encountered the notion of media bias and the concept of the society-technology dialectic or cultural alignment. The above two quotations relate directly to the role the media play in this alignment. In the first, Kracauer asserts the inherent tendency of each particular medium to promote some forms of communication over others. In the second quotation, McLuhan provides a dramatic example of Kracauer’s assertion, illustrating how easily the notion of media bias can appear as essentialist technological determinism. Of particular interest to us, however, is the last sentence, in which he highlights the basic nature of the cultural alignment involved in media bias. A key part of movable type’s profound impact upon Western culture is the subtle, culturally aligned way in which its outputs (books) reinforced the emergent social climate of capitalism, representing as they did examples of both a new medium and one of the earliest commodity forms. We show in this chapter how, in turn, the advent of photography marked a newly ambiguous relationship between the materiality of reality and the immaterial yet totalizing nature of the media representations that prefigure the immersive media-generated environments explored in Part II.
