Reading Notes Deuce - MEXICO

I just finished up doing two things. First, I did this week's reading. Second, I was watching one of my favorite individual episodes of any television show ever, Wonder Showzen. If any of you have seen it, you know what I'm talking about. Think Sesame Street, but gear it toward adults, and then smoke some crack. That's about it, really. (Note: James Conrad does not advocate drug use. Not cool.) The pilot episode is named "Birth," and has overlying themes of "Mexico." Random graphical cutouts of Mexico fly across the screen during some transitions between scenes. When one puppet character asks a child what they learned from a short film just shown about Mexico she answers "Eat Nachos." Also, the picture seen here is also from the same episode. This child gives it to a man on the street, who is genuinely surprised by it. A giant puppet letter S has sex with a giant letter N, and give birth to a lower case I, and the family spells out SiN in a family portrait (as they are unmarried). Brilliance.

You may be asking yourself what this has to do with this week's reading. Surprisingly, I feel it has everything to do with Marshall McLuhan's article, "The Medium is the Message." In it, McLuhan states that objects (and later, media) shape society on how they are used, not just what they are. One example used is the electric light. Electric lights brighten surgeries and baseball games, but that surgeries and night baseball games came about because of the light bulb. This doesn't change the light itself. A factor throughout the piece is the notion of people asking what something is "about." My theory is this: Electronic media, which we've been analyzing for the last couple of weeks, is governed by use.

Let me explain. I've gone into depth previously about Wikipedia. It can be a cornucopia of knowledge, or a total lie. Who assemble the truths or the lies? Whoever put the page together. YouTube can be a place to find cool videos or a place to find illegally copied copyrighted material (talk about a gray area). What I'm saying is this: electronic media is a gun (which shoots to kill), whose purpose is set in stone, electronic media is a fluid idea of communication that has multiple ways of use. The light bulb is not a fluid idea. It lights up a room. The End. A blog can be a multi-faceted message. On the top most layer, a blog says, "Hey, I'm an internet writer!" On the next level, there's the actual words that the person writes, whatever that may be, good or evil. On an even lower level, there's sarcasm, and wit, and all those literary bits that we all know and love.

Electronic media is as multifaceted as the show I was just talking about. On the surface, it's just talking, kind of like how the show is absurd for the fact of being absurd. But, there is a deeper level of involvement with electronic media and other types of media than there is with a light bulb and a gun: rhetoric. The spin you put on things, just like WS does, is what separates media of communication, electronic or otherwise, from a light bulb and a gun. Material things just do what they do, communication does what it does, but spins it and adds layers to it. One must think about what is being relayed to him when talk to, but you don't really need to consider a gun being shot at you.

So this brings me back to where I began. I'm still wondering what Mexico has to do with a fake kid's show.