writing kinko's culture 01_history_theory new media ___peter lunenfeld home
	KINKO’S CULTURE What is media design? What is media? What is design and what makes a designer? Media can be almost anything and a designer can be almost anyone. Media design is a label used to define a complexity of conglomerations of people, their ideas, their relationships to a machine and how these inter-relationships affect them in society. Simplicity cannot be found in a world of ideological and theatric recycling. I am a media designer. I am an assimilation of old and new. Prophets who have helped to define the terminology behind media design are numerous but Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media facilitated our comprehension of what media really means in modern society. McLuhan is best remembered for his evaluation of the subliminal effects of the medium, its powers of hypnosis. He predicates his claims about the power of media on a belief in the indecision of man. McLuhan states we are the content of our media, therefore our ways of perception are abnormal. Conscious resistance is still possible in McLuhan's world. For example, it is by paying attention to advertisements that they lose their power. The actual product that is being advertised contains the oblivious aspects of communication, which is where the heart of the action is found. The advertisement (Nike) or the slogan (Just do it.) or the icon (the swoosh) will become a substitute for the product. The satisfaction will derive from the sexiness of the plastic ad and the purpose of the sneaker will be forgotten. In Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations he reinforces the concept of aura, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things closer so we can relate and so we can own. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Reproduction is incestuously used in the print and motion picture industries to remove the real out of society and package it in shrink-wrap. When we destroy an object’s aura we remove it from its original, which is the mark of a perception and the tactility of a modern Kinko’s reproduction. In our Thomas Kinkade culture we accept the making of many reproductions of the original that substitutes mass duplication for a unique existence, which hangs above our Lazy Boy recliners. In Guy Debord’s, The Society of the Spectacle, presents itself in a world vision, which has become objectified. The specialization of images is completed in the world of the independent image, where the copy has been copied. The spectacle is the independent movement of the sterile and it presents itself at the same time as a part of society. It is the part that gives attention to all viewers and their consciousness. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation, which is underneath a glossy veneer. Media design is purely a technology created for a society to recycle its stories. It is a vehicle to create a heightened sense of reality. It is only a duplication of the original.