Cuttings: August 2022

Why the medium really is the message – post by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “It was from [Harold] Innis that [Marshall] McLuhan picked up the germ of the idea that later made him famous. This was the proposition that the form of a dominant communications medium is far more important than any messages that the medium carries. The significant thing about media, he maintained, is not the information they carry but what they do to us in terms of shaping our behaviour, the way we think and even the way our brains are structured. McLuhan argued that this had been demonstrated by the media that had dominated society up to the 1960s – starting with print and culminating with broadcast television – and added the twist that TV was restoring the ‘sensory balance’ that had been disrupted by print. In Understanding Media (1964), the book that made him a global celebrity of sufficient status to appear in a Woody Allen film, he encapsulated this thought in one of the most celebrated – and misunderstood – aphorisms of all time: the medium is the message…. What McLuhan didn’t know (couldn’t have known), of course, was what neuroscience subsequently revealed about the amazing plasticity of the human brain – its ability to change its structure in response to different conditions. As Maryanne Wolf pointed out in Proust and the Squid, her riveting study of the reading brain, humans were not born to read — we evolved to cope with the task…. That’s why the brains of literate people are differently structured from those of illiterates. And it illuminates McLuhan’s other famous aphorism: ‘we shape our tools, and afterwards they shape us’…. In a strange way, McLuhan’s insights into media seem more relevant now than they were in the 1960s. The past few years, for example, have seen a series of angry and sometimes anguished debates about what our comprehensively networked digital ecosystem is doing to our children, our politics, our economies — and our brains.”

Younger viewers shun traditional TV channels as 90% opt for streaming services – article by Mark Sweney in The Guardian. “Watching traditional TV channels has almost stopped among younger viewers, with 90% of 18- to 24-year-olds heading straight to their favourite streaming service, according to a report by the media regulator Ofcom…. Viewers aged between 16 and 24 spend just 53 minutes a day on average watching traditional broadcast TV – a fall of two-thirds over the last decade – seven times less than those aged 65 and over. Those aged 65+ still spend about a third of their waking day, almost six hours, watching broadcast TV – slightly higher than a decade ago.”

12 of the funniest jokes from the Edinburgh fringe – “Eryn Tett: A spiritual guidance teacher playing hide and seek with kids: ‘All right, well, you guys go hide. And find yourselves.’ // Ignacio Lopez: I come from a long line of immigrants. No, seriously, the queue was massive – the first thing they teach you when you move to the UK is queuing…. // Ari Eldjárn: I never wanted a beard. But then it grew on me.”

Femina by Janina Ramirez: a revelatory study of medieval women’s lives – review by Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. “In 1878 a pile of ancient bones was pulled from the ground at Birka, near Stockholm, and confidently identified as the remains of a 10th-century Norse warrior. After all, the skeleton, known as ‘Bj 581’, was going into the next life surrounded by every kind of death-dealing instrument: spears, axes, arrows and swords, and a couple of strapping war horses.… Then, over the last 10 years, murmurs of doubt started to surface. The skeleton’s pelvis was suspiciously wide, the bones of his forearm remarkably slender. In 2017, DNA was extracted from a tooth and the truth was finally out: not a Y chromosome in sight. The Birka warrior was female. At a stroke ideas about Norse women, and about women in medieval culture generally, were turned upside down. Out went the wimples and the prayer books, the mute looks and downcast eyes, and in came something altogether fiercer and more interesting…. These accounts of how discoveries in the 20th and 21st centuries have allowed for the rewriting of ancient women’s lives are easily the best part of Janina Ramirez’s survey of current scholarship.”

Why Doctors Hate Their Computers – article by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. “Doctors are among the most technology-avid people in society; computerization has simplified tasks in many industries. Yet somehow we’ve reached a point where people in the medical profession actively, viscerally, volubly hate their computers.... [After installation of a new system at his hospital in 2015,] many of the angriest complaints ... were due to problems rooted in what [I call] 'the Revenge of the Ancillaries.' In building a given function—say, an order form for a brain MRI—... administrative staff and doctors had different views about what should be included. ... Now the staff had a say ... they added questions that made their jobs easier but other jobs more time-consuming. Questions that doctors had routinely skipped now stopped them short, with 'field required' alerts. A simple request might now involve filling out a detailed form that took away precious minutes of time with patients.... [A primary care physician] gave me an example of another difficulty. Each patient has a 'problem list' with his or her active medical issues... The list is intended to tell clinicians at a glance what they have to consider when seeing a patient. [She] used to keep the list carefully updated—deleting problems that were no longer relevant, adding details about ones that were. But now everyone across the organization can modify the list, and, she said, 'it has become utterly useless.' Three people will list the same diagnosis three different ways. Or an orthopedist will list the same generic symptom for every patient ('pain in leg'), which is sufficient for billing purposes but not useful to colleagues who need to know the specific diagnosis ... Or someone will add 'anemia' to the problem list but not have the expertise to record the relevant details... The problem lists have become a hoarder’s stash.... 'Now ... I have to go read through their past notes'... And piecing together what’s important about the patient’s history is at times actually harder than when she had to leaf through a sheaf of paper records. Doctors’ handwritten notes were brief and to the point. With computers, however, the shortcut is to paste in whole blocks of information—an entire two-page imaging report, say—rather than selecting the relevant details. The next doctor must hunt through several pages to find what really matters. Multiply that by twenty-some patients a day, and you can see her problem.... One of the fastest-growing occupations in health care has been ... medical scribes[:] trained assistants who work alongside physicians to take computer-related tasks off their hands. This fix is, admittedly, a little ridiculous. We replaced paper with computers because paper was inefficient. Now computers have become inefficient, so we’re hiring more humans.”

Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires is a radical analysis of cooking – review by Ellen Peirson-Hagger in The New Statesman, referenced in The Guardian First Edition. “In 1970 the philosopher DW Winnicott wrote that there are two types of cooks: ‘the slavish one who complies’ to a recipe and ‘gets nothing from the experience except an increase in the feeling of dependence on authority’, and the ‘original one’ who casts books or pre-supposed methods aside and surprises themselves with what they can come up with alone. Cooking from a recipe, he asserted, is the antithesis of creativity. Rebecca May Johnson wholeheartedly disagrees. In her first book, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, the British food writer argues that ‘in his haste to theorise, Winnicott mistakes the recipe text on the printed page for the act of cooking the recipe’. A recipe, she argues, ‘demands translation into praxis and hangs limp if left languishing in theory only’. If Winnicott had tied his apron strings, picked up a knife and tried out a Mrs Beeton recipe himself, he may like Johnson have learned that a recipe is in fact ‘the paradox of a constraint that liberates’. Small Fires is a radical and lively critical analysis of what it really means to cook… released at a time when writing about food feels exciting, largely thanks to a group of UK-based writers enjoying the flexibility that internet publishing allows. Food writing doesn’t simply comprise cookbook recipes and stuffy broadsheet restaurant reviews anymore – these writers insist that it is just as much about politics, culture, language, memory, place, who gets to eat what, and who doesn’t.”