Evie 11/3

 “What distinguishes the telephone from the other great media is its decentralized quality and its universal exchangeability of the positions of sender and receiver” (535)

I found our discussion on Mark Poster yesterday very fascinating. Before I unpack this quote, I would like to rewind back to the idea of rhysomic spectatorship. With rhizome meaning spreading and spectatorship meaning watching, this idea highlights the expansion of a kind of inactive observation. As we mentioned in class, cinema has trained us to be spectators. Directors and producers create perfect films that have been cut and edited for us so that our only job is to sit back and passively watch. As spectators, we are constantly being fed media and we have no active role in the production or how it's getting sent to us. 

Poster references that Walter Benjamin envisioned the democratic potential of the increased communication capacity of radio, film, and television. However, he goes to challenge Benjamin’s idea by arguing that the more radical communications potential was the telephone. This is because of its “decentralized quality and universal exchangeability.” In other words, we are no longer the spectator when it comes to the telephone. Rather than passively absorbing information, we are active contributors while communicating on the phone. Information is getting sent to us in real time and we have the ability to exchange ideas freely. Radio, film, and television enable us to be mere spectators. In those forms of media, there is only one line of communication; the message, constructed by the producers and directors, is sent to the audience and the audience’s role is to simply receive it. However, the telephone is a radical communication invention in that there are two lines of communication. Messages are not only being received, but they are commented on through responses. Therefore, the idea of rhysomic spectatorship is not present in the case of the telephone. Poster argues that the only technology that imitates the telephones structure is the Internet. Like the telephone, the Internet has multiple lines of communication that allows the audience to be far more than a spectator.