MY EXISTENTIAL JOURNEY OF ART: GRAPHIC NOVEL

GRAPHIC NOVEL: The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone

Comments on the graphic novel, The Influencing Machine, written by Brooke Gladstone and illustrated by Josh Neufeld. For a graphic novel, the content is quite comprehensive, providing historical references from ancient times to the present regarding the impact of media on the people of a given culture and its era. She directly references key historical figures and events, including issues about freedom of the press, reporters and objectivity, political game-playing (manipulation of the truth) both in peace and wartime, etc. Contemporary media is especially scrutinized relative to the proliferation of the Internet, with commentary focused on both critics and proponents of mass information access, social networking, etc. The overall point, for me, is that with each generation and its prevailing cultural and technological innovations (especially in terms of communication), there have been accompanying benefits and disadvantages, along with the social/moral contexts that we, as human beings, must inevitably acknowledge and deliberate.

Marshall McLuhan said years ago, "The medium is the message." The medium of a culture influences/has the power to change the way people think and behave. From a historical perspective, think of culture and lifestyles/behaviors: pre-television / post-television. From a more contemporary perspective, think of culture and lifestyles/behaviors: pre-Internet / the Internet as the dominant medium of these times. Who is behind the creation and use of the medium at hand? Still people, I think, so we need to take responsibility for how and why we use it (as opposed to deny or negate its existence) and evaluate, individually and socially, the extent to which we incorporate it into our lives. Can we still make personal choices that go against the dominant, influencing machine should we wish to do so? In a similar vein, we might question how we view the broadcast news at home and from across the world --- do we accept everything we are told without question, or can we be critical? How it is presented, along with the amount of news presented to the public is a great part of the workings of the influencing machine.

There are scientists/philosophers who currently advocate for cybernetic technology, anticipating a not so distant future when humans will be implanted with devices that will render them capable of doing things, from the body so to speak, that we now do via computers. Critics of cybernetics fear the erosion of the existential, human condition; that humans of the future will be more robotic/less human.

How does "the influencing machine" of media figure into our humanity. Gladstone ends with the following (in bubble text, of course):
"I am generally a dark individual, but I think this is a great time to be alive" (p. 155).  > 
"Our limits are purely human" (p. 155) >
"Our enemies are not the digital bits that dance across our screens but the neural impulses that animate our lizard brains" (. 155) >
"We get the media we deserve" (p. 156).