When Objects in Mirror Aren’t As Close As They Appear
People who look back for his-story to repeat itself are always facing the wrong way, and they forget to see what landscape of media(s) exist right in front of them.
Admittedly, I’ve held a lifelong disrespect for the “field” (read: colonial) of history. It was only until graduate school that I learned about critical strands of the field, and its cousins philosophy of science, philosophy of technology, philosophy of medicine, etc. that I saw the necessities in viewing past(s) to understanding musings of the present and possible futures.
As a media and communication scholar (and specifically as one of the new critical media ecologists), one of my main concerns now is that I constantly see people constraining their own orientations by looking backward, leading them to forget we exist in an entirely different media landscape. As especially critical cultural scholars of media and media ecologists have explicated, this assemblage of digital and algorithmic spaces has dramatically altered ways we can relate to our surroundings.
This is why, one of my biggest ongoing COVID-19 era envirusment pet peeves is that I constantly see/hear people talking about ideas, processes, institutions, and/or events of the past as if they might constrain and replicate what could be done in our future.
For two main reasons, I beg everyone who looks to the past for future insights to stop doing this. First because we have to remember that our foundations were equivocally corrupted by humans as media (specifically, the Enlightenment model). Thus, what has been done must not be referred to as a natural, Objective, or universal default for what is possible. Meaning, if we look to the past as what can be done now or later, we forget that the potentialities for any one of the schematic linguistic manifestations they wrought have always been little more than mythical constructs of “grandeur”. For example, the idea that we have identified the “greatest minds” of history is as much of a fiction as the idea that “time equals money”. This language usage as media, like a blueprint of ways we see and do, ideologically cover that in inequitable systems, one White cis-man’s beauty has always been another person’s breakdown.
Secondly, the ever-increasing speed at which advancements have been and continue to be made, have also dramatically changed how quickly — any and all — mediated changes (social, political, financial, structural) can now be made. In other words, especially now in the ongoing COVID-19 age (where, even before, Princeton researchers [2014] found that voting has little to no influence on policy in comparison to oligarchical monetary agendas), this goes to show we can and must restructure everything so that we can stop propelling towards an inhabitable climate apocalypse. From a critical media ecological standpoint these are “differences in media that make differences”, and why we require general strikes and mutual aid coalitions ASAP.
See Princeton Reference: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B