film quotes Flashcards
(30 cards)
Plato: “You have not discovered a potion [pharmakon] for remembering but reminding; you provide
your students with the appearance of wisdom, not its truth.”
Socrates’ rebuke of writing in the Phaedrus frames writing as a pharmakon—both remedy and poison—because it trades living, dialogic recollection for dead external symbols. The line crystallizes his fear that inscription gives only the appearance of wisdom: students can quote without internal understanding. In media terms, Plato inaugurates the critique that every storage technology produces epistemic prostheses that may erode embodied cognition. The passage thus anchors later anxieties about calculators, search engines, and generative AI “thinking” for us. It reminds us that medium-enabled memory always carries the cost of intellectual outsourcing.
Winkler, “Reversibility represents the promise that it is possible to liberate ourselves from the dictatorship of the time axis.”
Winkler’s claim that reversibility could free us from “the dictatorship of the time axis” underlines his thesis that media convert time into manipulable space (and vice-versa). By recording, rewinding, and editing, modern systems let users navigate chronology rather than endure it linearly. This spatialization of time underwrites everything from film montage to version control, transforming historical narrative into a rethinkable construct. The promise is emancipatory—hierarchies tied to irreversible succession can be contested—but also threatens infinite revisionism. Hence, media determine not just how we see time, but whether time governs us at all.
Innis: “Our knowledge of other civilizations depends in large part on the character of the media used by each civilization insofar as it is capable of being preserved or of being made accessible by discovery.”
Innis argues that the survival of cultural knowledge depends on the material bias of its media toward durability or reach. Papyrus promotes spatial empire but decays; stone endures yet limits dissemination. Thus, what we know of Egypt versus nomadic societies is less about their brilliance than about their inscription substrates and excavation luck. Media studies, for Innis, becomes archaeology of power: trace the medium to map a civilization’s memory. The quote foregrounds preservation as a political filter on history itself.
Jue: “Both old and contemporary media technologies allow us to look back at the environment and see the technological work it has been performing all along”
Jue flips the usual perspective by treating oceans as active media infrastructures shaping and recording human practice. Technologies from sonar to satellite imagery reveal that nature has long performed “technological work”—storing signals, patterns, and histories—before humans recognized them. This insight decouples media from strictly human artefacts and situates technological progress within larger environmental systems. It presses media theory to account for ecological co-production and non-anthropocentric agencies. Consequently, studying media means studying the planet’s own inscription capacities.
Siegert: “Successful seafaring is forgetfulness of the sea”
Siegert’s aphorism captures the paradox that to navigate oceans effectively, sailors must treat the sea as an abstract coordinate field, forgetting its material unpredictability. Successful media techniques (maps, sextants, GPS) thus rely on operational blindness to the medium’s raw contingency. The remark generalizes: media become transparent when mastered, concealing the infrastructures they embody. Such forgetfulness fuels both technological confidence and vulnerability—failure erupts when the suppressed medium resurfaces (shipwreck, network outage). Siegert therefore warns that every logistical triumph rides on a repressed material remainder.
Goudsblom: “Each increase in control entailed an increase in dependency.”
Charting fire’s domestication, Goudsblom notes that each new layer of mastery—cooking, metallurgy, steam—deepened human dependence on controlled combustion. Media theory inherits this dialectic: the more perfectly a medium extends us, the more catastrophic its withdrawal (think cloud storage outages). Control breeds infrastructural lock-in, converting optional tools into existential necessities. The observation complicates celebratory narratives of progress by foregrounding vulnerability. It implies that sustainable media design must weigh empowerment against systemic risk.
Mumford: “The clock is a piece of power-machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.”
Calling the clock “power-machinery,” Mumford reframes it as an industrial device whose output is standardized temporal units. Mechanical time divorced labor from natural rhythms, enabling factory discipline and capitalist scheduling. The clock thus functions as an ideological medium: it reshapes consciousness to fit quantifiable intervals, naturalizing new power relations. Its seconds and minutes become currency, traded for wages and productivity metrics. Media, here, is not content but a regulatory architecture of everyday life.
Sofia: “There’s no such thing as a technology [apart from the standing-reserve].”
Sofia insists that technologies are inseparable from the “standing-reserve” of resources, labor, and social relations that sustain them. A smartphone is not merely circuitry; it embodies coltan mines, data centers, and disposal sites. By denying ontological autonomy to gadgets, she denounces techno-fetishism and highlights infrastructural ethics. Media studies must therefore track supply chains and waste streams, not just symbolic functions. Her claim widens the media object to encompass global material ecologies.
Levy: “Writing is essentially the marrying of this ability to fix and preserve with the ability to symbolize or represent”
Levy distills writing to a fusion of fixity (physical marks) with symbolic representation (language). This dual nature lets writing transcend immediate presence while retaining interpretability across contexts. It grounds subsequent media—print, code, databases—in the same principle: durable form plus abstract signification. Thus, writing becomes the template for all external memory systems. Understanding media means tracing how later technologies tweak this marriage of inscription and abstraction.
Douglass: “I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing.”
Douglass testifies that literacy exposed the brutality of slavery, making him painfully conscious of his condition—knowledge without power breeds torment. Reading becomes a double-edged medium: it enlightens and alienates simultaneously. His experience embodies the broader thesis that media can radicalize social critique while intensifying suffering under oppressive regimes. The quote underscores that access to media must be paired with structural change to realize emancipation. It also prefigures digital divides where awareness does not guarantee agency.
Hayes: “I only intend to send word to my future
Self perpetuation is a war against Time
Travel is essentially the aim of any religion . . .”
Hayes’ sonnet riffs on writing as a message in a time capsule, framing creation as combat against entropy (“war against Time”). He links literary self-projection to quasi-religious quests for immortality—media as temporal travel devices. Poetry thus functions like algorithmic archives: it encodes a self to meet future readers. The lines exemplify contemporary artists’ reflexivity about media’s chronopolitics. They affirm that creative practice is always a negotiation with decay.
McLuhan: “. . . technologies are self-amputations of our own organs.”
McLuhan’s provocation labels media extensions—wheels, cameras, computers—as self-amputations, because we externalize functions (locomotion, perception, calculation) and dull the native faculties. This “narcissus-narcosis” makes technologies invisible and numbing even as they empower. The dictum reframes new tools not as additions but substitutions with psychological costs. It implies that critical media literacy requires conscious re-sensitization to the organs we have outsourced. Hence, every innovation entails a trade: gain of reach, loss of innate skill.
Mumford: “Glasses not merely opened people’s eyes but their minds: seeing was believing.”
Mumford cites eyeglasses as a prime example of a medium that expands both physical sight and intellectual horizons—accurate vision catalyzed empirical science. By literalizing “seeing is believing,” lenses turned observation into a trustworthy epistemic method. The quote illustrates how even humble technologies recalibrate mindsets and knowledge regimes. It supports the argument that media shape not just messages but standards of evidence. Optical aids paved the way for microscopes and telescopes, embedding a logic of visual proof in modernity.
Anderson: “Both nation and novel were spawned by the simultaneity made possible by clock-derived, man-made ‘homogeneous empty time’ . . .”
Anderson links the rise of nation-states and the realist novel to shared clock-time: print synchronizes dispersed readers into an imagined simultaneity of “meanwhile.” Homogeneous, empty time replaces sacred cyclical temporality, enabling citizens to picture themselves co-present with strangers. Media thus manufactures political community through temporal coordination. Novels teach readers to inhabit this new time, while newspapers daily rehearse it. The quote highlights media’s constitutive role in forging large-scale identities.
Holmes: “Form is henceforth divorced from matter.”
Holmes celebrates photography for severing “form” (visual pattern) from “matter” (physical object), allowing infinite replication and recombination. This ontological split heralds a shift to immaterial media economies where images circulate detached from originals. It prefigures digital sampling, NFTs, and virtual reality—all based on the divorce of appearance from substance. The insight also foreshadows debates over authenticity and aura (Benjamin). Holmes identifies early the radical plasticity that recording technologies unleash on cultural production.
Kafka: “Sometimes I wriggle, having the receiver close to my ear, full of restlessness, around the telephone on my tiptoes, but still can’t prevent to reveal secrets.
Kafka’s narrator circles the telephone in anxious tiptoe because the device collapses private interiority into a vulnerable channel that can betray him at any moment. In “My Neighbor,” the telephone literalizes modern paranoia: information leaks not through confession but through infrastructural seepage. The scene dramatizes how media transform secrecy from a moral to a technical problem—security hinges on circuits, not sincerity. It foreshadows today’s metadata angst, where presence on a network itself becomes disclosure. Thus, Kafka exposes mediation as a new theatre of self-exposure and powerlessness.
Kittler: “And only phonography can record all the noise produced by the larynx prior to any semiotic
order and linguistic meaning.”
For Kittler, phonography’s power lies in its indifference to meaning: it captures the pre-semiotic grain of the voice, the raw sonic event before language. This shifts media theory from hermeneutics to signal processing—machines store bodies, not ideas. By archiving noise, phonographs make unconscious tics analyzable, birthing disciplines like linguistics and psychoacoustics. The quote undergirds Kittler’s broader claim that technological inscription reorganizes culture by what it can record. Media, therefore, do not simply convey messages; they redefine what counts as data.
Carey: “The telegraph, then, not only altered the relation between communication and transportation; it also changed the fundamental ways communication was thought about.”
Carey argues that the telegraph severed communication from physical conveyance, turning messages into abstract signals that outran trains and ships. This rupture forced society to reconceptualize communication as instantaneous exchange rather than transported object, birthing modern information theory and finance. Time-space compression destabilized local temporalities and enabled coordinated national markets. The quote situates telegraphy as a cognitive as well as logistical revolution. Media, he implies, reorder thought itself by altering practical constraints.
Edison [Johnson]: “For the purpose of preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family–as of great men–the phonograph will unquestionably outrank the photograph.”
Edison’s prediction that sound recordings would eclipse photographs in memorial practice spotlights the intimacy of voice as a mnemonic medium. Unlike silent images, phonographs preserve cadence, emotion, and presence, offering a semblance of continued life. This hierarchy anticipates voicemail tributes and AI “voice cloning” for post-mortem interaction. The remark reframes media value around affective fidelity rather than visual likeness. It underscores how each new medium re-evaluates what constitutes authentic remembrance.
Andrejevic: “Body language ends up caught in the symbolic impasse it sought to avoid: as soon as it is portrayed as a language that can be learned and consciously ‘spoken’ it falls prey to the potential for deceit.”
Andrejevic notes that once body language is codified as a readable “text,” it re-enters the symbolic realm it sought to bypass and becomes forgeable. The dream of an unhackable index of truth thus collapses into another semiotic game of deception. Surveillance cultures that bank on facial affect or gait analytics face the same interpretive instability as speech. The observation critiques techno-solutionism that promises authenticity through datafication. Media, therefore, cannot escape ambiguity; they merely translate it into new codes.
Cheever: “The new radio stood among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder.”
In “The Enormous Radio,” the new set intrudes upon domestic space, personifying technology as an alien presence that reconfigures intimacy. The aggressive radio symbolizes post-war media saturation breaking the boundary between public gossip and private life. It enacts Siegert’s idea of operational invisibility gone wrong—the medium becomes too visible, too alive. Cheever’s image prefigures smart speakers listening in kitchens today. Media here operate as uncanny houseguests, altering social relations by their mere placement.
Pinchevski and Liebes: “Through radio, [Holocaust] survivors underwent a profound transformation: from bodies without speech to disembodied speech.”
Broadcasting survivor testimony converted persecuted bodies into circulating voices, granting them geopolitical reach and moral authority. Radio’s disembodiment neutralized courtroom hierarchies and allowed listeners worldwide to witness trauma. This transformation illustrates media’s role in re-inscribing agency for marginalized speakers. It also shows how technological form (aurality, liveness) shapes collective memory. The quote frames radio as both prosthesis and stage for justice work.
Malin: “The advertising deduction effectively diverts large sums of public money into an upside-down media system in which those who need that money the least benefit from it the most.”
Malin exposes the U.S. tax write-off for advertising as a hidden subsidy that reallocates public funds upward to media conglomerates and wealthy advertisers. The “upside-down” system contradicts the democratic ideal of an informed citizenry by financing persuasion over information. Media economics thus becomes an unseen policy arena governing representation and inequality. The deduction naturalizes market propaganda while starving public-interest content. Malin’s point urges media scholars to track fiscal infrastructures as vigorously as symbolic ones.
Katz: “By now, we are well on the road to segmentation, and there is little hope for the recovery of the center. We have all but lost television as the medium of national political integration.”
Katz laments the drift from broadcast unity to niche targeting, arguing that segmentation erodes a shared civic forum once anchored by network television. Without a common “center,” democratic deliberation fragments into algorithmically curated bubbles. The quote diagnoses medium-specific causes for political polarization, not merely content bias. It invites analysis of how platform logics supplant mass-audience rituals. In Katz’s view, media design choices sculpt the very topology of public life.
