WHAT IS COSMIC MEDIA THEORY?
Sun Daggers: ancient cosmic media technology; click on image for video demo.
The Center for Media and Destiny is developing cosmic media theory as a new area of media studies, precisely because of the overlooked role of media images and media technologies in transforming how we see ourselves in relation to the universe and Spaceship Earth. From Galileo's telescope to Russia's Sputnik to Apollo's Earthrise to the Hubble Space Telescope, cosmic media technologies have utterly reoriented humankind's place in space and time. Cosmic media theory invites you to think big about the role of media technologies in human civilization, especially for the 21st century.
DEFINITION
Cosmic media theory may be loosely defined as the study of media images and media technology in relation to:
1) how humans understand their place in the universe and on Spaceship Earth.
2) how human orient themselves in space and time, personally and collectively.
3) what these understandings and orientations mean for human identity, culture, and destiny.
Rather than seek meanings or relevance for specific groups or tribes of humans, cosmic media theory looks to discover meanings that are universal to all humans. After all, every human shares 99.5% of the same DNA and every atom in our bodies is comprised of evolving stardust.
Cosmic media technologies include: electric light, electronic screens, traditional telescopes, space telescopes, radio telescopes, microscopes, satellites, computers, hypertext, and the internet. As we develop and extend the ideas and theories, these definitions will surely require some polish and modification. We realize these are just the first steps.
Our books, essays, and events are provocations designed to stimulate new theory and fresh thinking on cosmic media theory. Over time, we hope to collaborate with many authors to produce numerous essays on cosmic media theory.
AREAS OF MEDIA STUDIES
Over the course of the 20th century, media studies in academia and university classrooms have evolved and expanded to include numerous areas and specializations. Obviously and naturally, some areas are more traditional, while others have emerged more recently. Such evolutionary processes are to be expected with a growing body of knowledge and the proliferation of media technologies permeating almost every aspect of human culture. This table includes some of the main areas.
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EVOLVING AREAS OF MEDIA STUDIES |
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MORE TRADITIONAL |
MORE RECENT |
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Political Economy |
Media and the Environment |
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Sociology |
Internet, Digital Media |
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Psychology |
Health Communication |
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Class, Gender, Ethnicity |
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender |
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Law and Policy |
VR - Video Games |
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Media Economics |
Presence (Telepresence) |
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Media and Children |
Entertainment |
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International, globalization |
Social Media, Mobile Media |
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Cultural Studies |
Media and Religion |
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Information Technology |
Media and Science |
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Media Ecology |
Cosmic Media Theory |
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Note: This table is not meant to be exhaustive or provide the final word on the classification of media studies. The purpose of the table is to merely illustrate the evolving areas of media studies, especially for those readers not familiar with the specialization of academic media studies. Obviously, many of these areas overlap and did not emerge on a linear timeline. |
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THE RATIONALE FOR STUDIES IN COSMIC MEDIA THEORY
We can see that the main areas of media studies have been driven by two key factors: ideology and technology. The past two decades have seen the proliferation of the internet and digital technologies, thus leading media studies to include the internet, video games, virtual reality, social media, mobile media, and so on. Computers and satellite technologies have also led to an explosion in the sciences of ecology and increased public awareness of numerous environmental issues. More recently, we have seen media studies broadened to include religion and science.
Hubble Space Telescope: Click on image to view the "Ultra Deep Fields" in 3D.To ideology and technology, we propose the addition of cosmology. Here's why:
• If media studies can be grounded in ideology and technology, then why not cosmology?
• If we can study the effect of media on cultural identity and globalization around the world, then why can't we study the effect of media on human identity on Spaceship Earth and in the cosmos?
• If we can have new areas in religion and science, then why not studies in cosmic media theory?
All this seems especially true when we consider that telescopes (a key cosmic media technology) have dislodged our planet and species from the center of the universe, from the center of space and time — surely the most radical effects wrought by any media technology. The Hubble telescope has revealed a universe of billions of galaxies and the Kepler has suggested there likely are billions of planets in the Milky Way. Media technologies and science have completely reordered how we see ourselves in the universe and how we orient ourselves in space and time. For example, the latest combinations of theory and evidence show:
We are not the center of Space:
• We are passengers on Spaceship Earth, a planet which orbits the sun, which is one of 200-300 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe.
• We are traveling at 492,000 miles per hour, the speed at which Earth and the solar system orbit the center of the Milky Way. Every atom in our body is on a journey that began with an exploding star from which emerged the solar system and Spaceship Earth. We are self-aware stardust.
We are not the center of Time:
• The universe we inhabit is 13-14 billion years old and is expanding at an ever-increasing velocity, with vast voids and dark energy shoving the galaxies across vast stretches of space and time.
• We are part of the evolution of life, which emerged on our planet about four billion years ago. We share 99.5% of the same DNA with every other human passenger on Spaceship Earth. Our ancestors evolved in Africa and have been migrating around the world for tens of thousands of years.
In other words, we exist in a brief moment in a universe comprised of deep space and deep time. None of these discoveries would have been possible without media technologies — telescopes, microscopes, cameras, software, computers, and electronic screens.
Though scientists are often great at explaining these discoveries in terms of science, they mostly fail in explaining what these conditions mean for culture, meaning, and human destiny. Meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook counter by letting us pretend we are the center of space and time, the center of everything. In fact, social media are the counter to cosmic media, for both provide different existential stances toward the universe, as demonstrated in Barry Vacker and Genevieve Gillespie's recent publication: "Yearning to be the Center of Everything When We are the Center of Nothing."
Simply put, media technologies are revolutionizing how we see life on this planet and our place in the universe, and even how we understand and experience "reality." Why are these effects largely ignored on the cultural and intellectual levels, as illustrated in the news everyday? Other than scattered passages among a few works, these effects and issues are not being studied, theorized, and organized into a new and expanding body of knowledge. Can there be anything more profound or relevant in media studies, especially in a global culture experiencing an explosion in artistic expression and scientific knowledge, only to be countered by war and terror, crisis and catastrophe, climate change and resource depletion, paranormal beliefs and Mayan prophecies, anti-intellectualism and denials of evolution, along with shrinking attention spans (Twitter) and self-aggrandizing narcissism (Facebook)? Shouldn't our culture, civilization, systems of meaning, and efforts to secure our destiny — personal and collective — be based on the exisential conditions of our actual place in the universe?
THE CHALLENGE
All of these moments and issues combine to present humans with the profound challenge of finding a sense of meaning, beauty, and destiny on Spaceship Earth and in the cosmos, in the universe of Hubble and Darwin, in the expanding and evolutionary universe of immense scales across space and time. These are the challenges facing future studies in cosmic media theory.
EARLY COSMIC MEDIA THEORY
Perhaps the first book that explored issues directly related to cosmic media theory was Through the Vanishing Point (1968), though there were hints of cosmic media theory in Marshall McLuhan's earlier works, Understanding Media (1964) and The Medium is the Massage (1967). In Through the Vanishing Point, McLuhan and Harley Parker theorize and explain how electronic media reverse the vanishing point that characterized three dimensional representation in painting. In addition, they recognized the existential effects of space age media and technologies. For example:
"The model of space created by Medieval Man gave one the feeling of looking in. In contrast, the modern man feels that he is looking out: 'Like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic, or from the lighted porch upon the dark and lonely moors'" (p. 24). Italics in original.
This insight can be applied to cosmic media and social media. Cosmic media technologies are those that tend to look out and away from humankind, while social media tend to look in, socially, toward and among humankind. Does that mean that social media might generate medieval and tribal effects? Here are two other quotes from McLuhan and Parker:
"If the telescope of Galileo had revealed the heavens as a kind of junkyard, in lieu of the crystalline spheres, there was also a dismay because of the absence of any sublime astral music. Instead of the heavenly symphony, the heavens were revealed as an area of ghastly silence: 'The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me' says Pascal. Both the visual and auditory order seemed to be denied by the new astronomy" (p. 29).
"Beyond the environment of this planet there is no space in our planetary or container sense. The gravitational point once transcended, the astronaut must have his own environment with him, as it were. (...) Strong indications are given to astronauts that objects, as well as people, create their own spaces. Outer space is not a frame any more than it is visualizable. (....) Man in outer space as yet has no means of imagining the nature of his own experience in space. Until artists have provided him with adequate forms to express what he feels in space, he will not know the meaning of the experience" (p. 25, 30).
So far it seems neither the artists or philosophers have provided the forms. Four decades later, in The Grand Design (2010), Stephen Hawking laments the decline and irrelevance of modern philosophy in post-millennial culture:
"Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics" (p. 5).
While modern philosophy may be not be dead, it sure seems to be overlooking our most profound existential conditions and what they mean. In our view, it is time to address the obvious, yet long overlooked issues — issues present before our eyes since the Ancients began mapping our place in the cosmos, since Galileo and Hubble dislodged us from the center of the universe, since Charles and Ray Eames created the Powers of Ten, since Apollo 8 and Apollo 11, since James Lovelock's revolutionary "Gaia hypothesis" was inspired by photos of Earth from space, since Carl Sagan's revolutionary Cosmos TV series, since the explosion of the internet, since the Hubble Deep Fields.
RECENT COSMIC MEDIA THEORY
In the decades following Through the Vanishing Point, other theorists have explored issues related to cosmic media theory. Jean Baudrillard offers a nihilist take on the effects of media technologies and the mediated fate of humanity, with brief riffs on cosmic media theory in Simulacra and Simulation (1994), The Illusion of the End (1994), Paroxysm (1998), The Vital Illusion (2001), The Impossible Exchange (2001), and Screened Out (2002). What makes Baudrillard's ideas relevant here is his recognition that politics and economics do not address or offer solutions to the deeper existential conditions posed by technology, mediated culture, and our relation to the universe and what we perceive as "real." Paul Virilio explores issues related to cosmic media theory in Open Sky (1997), The Information Bomb (2000), and Negative Horizon (2005).
More optimistic takes on human destiny in the cosmos are offered by Carl Sagan in Pale Blue Dot (1994), Brian Cox in Wonders of the Universe (2011), and Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel Primack in The New Universe and the Human Future (2011). Abrams and Primack fully realize that current scientific cosmology has left a gaping void in human meaning, but they strangely insist on situating humans at the "center of the universe," as defined in terms of various midpoints in scale, space, observation, and time. Elements of cosmic media theory also can be found in: Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (2000); Howard Bloom's The Global Brain: The Evolution of the Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2001); Ray Kurzweil's vision of the "the singularity" in the merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence, as theorized in The Age of Spiritual Machines (2000) and The Singularity: When Humans Transcend Biology (2006). Given these intellectual trends, perhaps the time is right to make a concentrated effort to develop and extend studies in cosmic media theory.
FILMS DEALING WITH COSMIC MEDIA THEORY
We have not yet had the time to develop this list, but these films seem to clearly deal with some aspect of cosmic media theory.
Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard 1965)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick 1968)
Planet of the Apes (Franklin Shaffner 1968)
Powers of Ten (Charles and Ray Eames 1968); short documentary.
THX 1138 (George Lucas 1971)
• based on his short film, Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB (1967); this might be better than the feature film.
World on a Wire (Rainer Fassbinder 1973)
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982)
Akira (Katsuhiro Ohtomo 1988)
Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii 1995)
Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow 1995)
Cosmic Voyage (Bayley Silleck 1996); short documentary.
Contact (Robert Zemeckis 1997)
eXistenZ (David Cronenberg 1999)
The Matrix (Wachowski brothers 1999)
Avatar (James Cameron 2009)
The Known Universe (Carter Emmart 2009); short documentary.
Inception (Christopher Nolan 2010)
• Though downplayed in the film, they used some kind of wired media technology to jack into the dreams of the target.
Gravity (Alfonso Cuaron 2013
COSMIC MEDIA STUDIES: AN UNTAPPED MARKET?
The Center for Media and Destiny thinks there is an untapped national and global interest in this topic, especially from students and young scholars, writers, and theorists. In the past 4-5 years, several graduate and undergraduate students at Temple University have worked with Barry Vacker on these topics, ranging from class papers and presentations to independent studies to scholarly conference panels and publications. These students include Agreen Wang, Genevieve Gillespie, Osei Alleyne, Stacey Sullivan, Tristan Brown, and Angela Cirucci. Keep in mind these are merely the earliest stages of work in this area, but we hope these papers and panels serve to reveal a deep and challenging interest among young thinkers.
Just think: if a single American university can produce this many young thinkers interested in cosmic media theory, then how many others might be out there in the world?
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