Fourth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

The world of advertisements used billboards, and advertisements were canvased on surfaces, news was printed on sheets, information were laid out on surfaces in history; on stones, on walls, on papers, on tree barks living or chopped, on concretes, on the inanimate. The screen has been present since the advent of the television but it took a new functioning over digitization. The screen no longer remains an interface between the physiological demands for information and the technological production of it. Rather, from the mobiles to the laptops to the tablets it has become the glasses without which our myopic eyes cannot process any information. It is perhaps time to re-examine McLuhan’s medium, not as the technology grinding away our free will and making us subservient subjects of technological tentacles; but rather as the metamorphosis of the biological and the technological. Democracy holds new meanings when free will goes bionic, untempered hence by the old governance of power. For the body has become the new surface, and each neuron cells acting as pixels.