The Media Symplex: At the Edge of Meaning in the Age of Chaos

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. His
most recently published works include Biblical Religion and Family
Values: A Problem in the Philosophy of Culture, Competition in Religious
Life, Religion vs. Television: Competitors

This study in media theory focuses on a “paradox” related to
electric media culture. As our media technologies become increasingly
complex, our perception of reality becomes increasingly simple,
generally in deleterious ways, inasmuch as these technologies tend to
“suppress and inhibit the true complexity of reality.” Frank
Zingrone, a communications scholar affiliated with York University, has
been inspired by the work of Marshall McLuhan, with whom he was
associated. While recognizing the hyperbolic bias of McLuhan’s
controversial proposal that the medium is the message, Zingrone shares
McLuhan’s interest in the influence of media technologies on
perception. Though Zingrone makes more judicious use of McLuhan’s
ideas than most other disciples, he is more consistently cranky than
McLuhan, and he advances more explicit propositions. As McLuhan does, he
makes numerous references to popular culture, though less imaginatively.

A provocative device employed throughout the book is the use of small
boxes shaped like television screens that distil the insight of a
“complex” piece of analysis into a “simple” thesis.
Representative theses of this kind are: “By simplifying awareness,
media create mythic expectations”; “Dim apprehension is the mother
of invention”; “The onslaught of mass communications, especially
television, makes you do nothing about everything”; and, “Electric
process tacitly exposes and overturns explicit cultural conventions and
reshapes the meaning of morals.”

Despite his foray into chaos theory and some loose reflections on
gnosticism, Zingrone’s media criticism is largely conventional. It is
colored in places by a peculiar terminology which reflects in part his
experience as a poet. His book is intelligent and thoughtful throughout
but lacks a coherent philosophical vision, and he seems somewhat unsure
about his audience. The book sometimes appears to have been written for
communications theorists familiar with a wide range of scholarly
literature, but in other places it seems to have been written for more
general readers.