Media Life is a course intended for undergraduate students across campus. Its goal is to make people aware of the role that media play in their everyday life. The key to understanding a "media life" is to see our lives not as lived WITH media (which would lead to a focus on media effects and media-centric theories of society), but rather IN media (where the distinction between what we do with and without media dissolves).
plug-and-play communities where anyone can fit in quickly
"[the Invisible City] is itself an expression of the fact that the new world in which we have begun to live is not merely open on the surface, for beyond the visible horizon, but also open internally, penetrated by invisible rays and emanations, responding to stimuli and forces beyond the threshold of ordinary observation. Many of the original functions of the city, once natural monopolies, demanding the physical presence of all participants, have now been transposed into forms capable of swift transportation, mechanical manifolding, electronic transmission, worldwide distribution” (1961) Mumford's works share a common concern with the ways that modern life as a whole, although providing possibilities for broader expression and development, simultaneously subverts those possibilities and actually ends up tending toward a diminution of purpose. He shows in lucid detail how the modern ethos released a Pandora's box of mechanical marvels which eventually threatened to absorb all human purposes into The Myth of the Machine , the title he used for his two-volume late work.
creative citie: Canada (Vancouver); Hong Kong; Tucson