For our November 2022 issue of Hemispheric News, Jason prescribed me the following topic to discuss:

How do you view the expression of thoughts and ideas through…?

1. Voice
2. Written text
3. Photos
4. Videos

I absolutely love this topic, as it aligns with concepts and themes in the discipline of media ecology, which forms the major theoretical basis for my research project about tech podcasting. I will avoid being too academic and using jargon or direct quotes here, however the one axiom that I must mention is Marshall McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ from his 1964 text Understanding Media. McLuhan urges us not to be seduced by shiny content or think that it’s the most important thing; instead, we should appreciate that any given medium (or technology) influences and shapes the content that is delivered by or through it. Even light is a medium, whose availability or scarcity can influence our ability to see content around us. ‘The medium is the message’ underlies Jason’s topic idea, as the thoughts delivered as messages will take different shapes, depending on how they are communicated.

I will give my own thoughts on each medium under headings in the order that Jason suggested them. Please keep in mind that you will be digesting these thoughts through only one of the media that are listed; how does reading my thoughts in written form differ from the others, and how you interpret them if you viewed or heard them otherwise? For example, how did my use of italics for ‘written’ in this paragraph make you read that word?

Also, please note that I am communicating these thoughts as someone who can hear and see with very little difficulty, so my views represent the privileged majority. People who live with disabilities or have alternative sensory experiences may have very different views and should not be disregarded or forgotten.

1. Voice

Voice is the most essential means of outward human communication. Before we can read, write or interpret other images, we emerge with a voice that conveys our feelings to others. Before we are even born, we hear and begin to recognise sounds and human voices beyond the womb.

As we grow, we start to find and refine our voice—its sound, tone, confidence and our ability to use spoken language to construct thoughts and sentences. Even when we refer to writing or other forms of media, we refer to an author’s, artist’s or director’s ‘voice’ as the core component that represents their view or style. We feel moved by songs and the voice of a singer—written lyrics that are brought to life.

Unless one records a voice, it is instantaneous and ephemeral. It shakes the air, hits our eardrums and is then lost (only kept as a memory fragment that will likely degrade over time). Furthermore, spoken language is beautifully imperfect. When we engage in conversation with others, we make mistakes, leave pauses, insert ‘um’ and ‘ah’ filler and also perform speech repair. When we speak and listen to others, we are generally forgiving and our brains filter out a range of disruptions (both by our interlocutor and from the outside world) to interpret various complex messages. We can also apologise for thoughts that we’ve spoken aloud, which might have offended others or been incorrect. We can retract statements and learn from what we’ve said and heard.

What’s more, when we use our voice to convey our thoughts, we put more of actual ourselves into each statement. Every word is framed by inflection, tone, volume and emphasis, and is accompanied by visual cues such as facial expressions and hand movements. This is enhanced and preserved by audio media: listeners can hear exactly how we felt at the time that we were recorded. Although we can selectively include and omit our thoughts while speaking, it can also be more obvious when we are lying or don’t know something.

2. Written Text

To me, written text is a mixed bag, depending on whether it is handwritten, typed or transcribed. To start simply, however, the problem with text is also the thing that makes it so positive and powerful: its standardisation and permanence leads humans to interpret it as truth.

When we read a written statement on a page or screen, concrete and unchanging. It is difficult (and sometimes impossible) to remove, retract or edit a written statement once it has been read by others, particularly in our hyperconnected digital world. We interpret online services as virtual and immaterial, but they are in fact physical and material; they seem fleeting, but all data must be recorded somewhere. Should you be careful about what thoughts you publish? Text remains.

When we write by hand (rather than type), we slow down and give ourselves the chance to better articulate our thoughts. If using a pencil, we can use an eraser; if using a pen, we can use white-out. Either way, we seek to correct our thoughts in a way that is not possible with a live, spoken voice. That being said, our evidence of our covered-up errors are still visible on the page.

Typing is seen as somewhat more distant and cold than handwriting, and although I do enjoy handwriting, I feel much more efficient and productive while typing. I don’t seek to use the word ‘productive’ in an economic sense; here I mean that my fingers (while touch-typing) pour words onto the digital page in a manner that almost follows the speed of my spoken voice. It feels in time with my own thinking, which enables me to produce more (hence, ‘productive’). Typing allows a flurry of crazy thoughts to flow out, but also facilitates editing that completely removes mistakes made along the way. When people read the results of your typing, your highly-refined thoughts are much more likely to be interpreted as official—as truth.

This connects well to the idea of standardisation of spelling and grammar in language. Although I love correctness and consistency in writing, I must remind myself that it is an illusion, and one that can threaten our own capacity for free thought and diversity of thought. As the modern (and now postmodern world) has developed, off the back of the printing press, widespread dictionaries, reference materials, written journalism and now myriad online sources, the idea of global communication has taken hold. For example, in the English-speaking world, we know that there are actually many different Englishes. The English that you hear Andrew and I speaking on the podcast is somewhat different from the English that Jason speaks, both in our accents and use of varied terms and colloquialisms. When we speak on the podcast, we communicate our thoughts openly and accept what each other says (with jokes thrown in, of course). If the podcast were a written text first, like a shared story or essay with three authors all contributing, you would probably find our thoughts communicated in ways that are far more distracting.

Consider…

colour vs. color organise vs. organize the 23rd of December vs. December the 23rd

We say things like these all the time, and while you may notice them as listeners, you generally accept them and move on. In written language, inconsistencies such as these can be maddening. Comments and tracked changes often ensue. Written text in books and online, while powerful in their reach and ability to communicate long, complex thoughts, have unfairly facilitated an impossible goal for perfection. When we make a mistake while speaking, we laugh and move on; when we make a spelling mistake in a tweet, on a corporate slide or in an academic report, that’s embarrassing.

In writing, we take our thoughts perhaps too seriously. We try to be correct and standardised; we shun the differences in spoken language that make us interesting.

3. Photos

It is perhaps clichéd to say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I think there really is an element of truth to this. When we take a photo, produce a painting or interpret someone else’s image, there are many possibilities. Yes, we can interpret lyrics, speeches or written texts differently from what their creators intended, but when we view an image, there is a massive potential for each of us to focus on different elements included or omitted from the frame. Full stops can often restrict us to the meaning prescribed by the author 

When we take a photo, we’re selecting a moment to capture and what is or isn’t in the frame. I would also argue that unless we are engaging in a deliberate photoshoot (which may include a predetermined narrative or aim) photos don’t represent a thought, rather we move through our environment and take more notice of our surroundings, actively thinking about the elements in front of us. The act of taking a photo isn’t a thought, rather it is indicative of a thought process—a flurry of feelings and senses in the moment of composition. It is a response to everything that surrounds you.

All of this being said, like written language, photos are often interpreted as truth. This can be problematic as omission and chosen perspective can influence the thoughts of those viewing the image (think photoshopping, propaganda or not realising that the image that you’re viewing at was generated by artificial intelligence, with its own preloaded software biases).

Family photos also come to form thoughts and memories. What you initially experienced as a horrible day may solidify in your mind as a positive thought or memory when the present photographer asked you to smile in a group or with family.

Photos can replace the very thoughts that you had.

4. Videos

Despite the relatively passive act of viewing, movies, TV shows and music videos can be very thought-provoking (for better or worse) and involve a great deal of thinking and planning. Whereas taking photos can represent a thinking process, I believe that videos often replace thinking and feeling these days.

Although it’s fantastic to be able to record our memories in high resolution, we often lean on video in such a way that we don’t really experience the moment. I’m sure that you’ve seen it before: people taking videos of their event, meal or the concert in front of them, often mindlessly without actually feeling or interpreting the moment.

When we construct a video thoughtfully, it can powerfully present a narrative or set of ideas over time in a condensed format. We can give our thoughts life through video and sound in a way that is even more involving than any other media.

How many people are actually doing this though? Do you consider what you record or just react to the moment? Do you finish every video that you watch, or leave after three seconds if it doesn’t capture your interest?

Parting Thoughts

I’ll be honest: this article was written in haste to meet the deadline for our Hemispheric News. Some things may be obvious and some things may sound dumb. I didn’t have a chance to edit anything. Yay busy work and time management!

I’ve always been somewhat obsessed with refining my thoughts before putting them out into the world, whether they’ve been delivered through my own voice, in writing or in photos and videos.

What I’ve learnt but am yet to internalise is that no matter how much you edit, there is always room for interpretation or misunderstanding. Yes, the medium is the message but that final message will not be the same for everyone.

When we deliver our thoughts, we should learn to embrace that which is imperfect. When you write, photograph or record something, lean into your human voice. Be in the present and learn to accept your mistakes.

This post was originally written in November 2022 for Hemispheric News; subscribe at the Patreon site One Prime Plus to receive this monthly newsletter and other benefits that are linked to the Hemispheric Views podcast.

By now, many people have already written about Stage Manager, which is the new window-management tool that Apple introduced in iPadOS 16 and macOS Ventura (13.0). If you aren’t familiar with the feature, it is intended to provide a new way of navigating between active app windows and focusing on your task at hand, with your main window(s) in the middle and a shelf of other running apps to the left-hand side of your display.

Rather than go on forever about how Stage Manager works, which bugs or issues remain or whether it should have been developed in the first place, I want to communicate briefly how it makes me feel when I use it on my Mac mini and my iPad Pro respectively.

I’ve been using the Mac since I was five years old, and it’s fair to say that the accepted system of overlapping windows is laser-etched into my brain. Each day, I use a mixture Command + Tab, Mission Control, Exposé, SwitchGlass by John Siracusa and clicking on app icons in the Dock to navigate between my apps, depending on what I’m doing or how I’ve spaced things on my display. Magnet is also a great app for tiling windows and I occasionally use Final Cut Pro in full-screen mode. I like the fact that the Mac facilitates so many options for window management and navigation.

Stage Manager, however, poses somewhat of a challenge to my ingrained habits. Rather than being a transition or pathway between apps like the features that I mentioned above, it is an entirely new interface where one remains while working. The feature is toggled to stay on the screen, changing the behaviour of app arrangement and switching. Stage Manager presents a different way of using the same device. It’s not that I don’t like the feature—I will continue to try using it—but I wasn’t instantly sold on it like I thought that I would be, after watching Apple’s initial event demos.

Now we come to Stage Manager on iPadOS, which for me is a totally different story. The exact same feature, presentation-wise, feels completely different to me on my iPad Pro. It is still a mode to be toggled on and off, but rather than reimagining an existing window-management interface, it is offering something that never used to exist on the system, which has long been restricted to full-screen apps or arrangement in Split View and Slide Over. The ability to turn my iPad Pro into a faux Mac, with a persistent Dock and the constant visibility of my other running apps, feels like an absolute gift. When paired with the new ‘More Space’ option in display settings, Stage Manager makes it feel like I have even more breathing room for my writing and other work.

So why have I been hesitant in using Stage Manager on the Mac and so excited in my initial use on the iPad? The thought occurred to me that I am experiencing a bizarre case of severance, to cite the Apple TV+ show that depicts a dystopian future where people’s personal and working lives are separated through a chip implant, activating each part of a person as they enter different physical spaces.

I am Martin and I am an Apple user—yet, I use myriad Apple devices in different contexts, with various ingrained habits and levels of comfort, depending on the devices that I use, their history and their context. On the one hand, there’s the older, comfortable Mac that reaches back into my childhood. That is one half of me, which wishes that things would largely remain the same. On the other hand, there is the half of me that uses the iPad: a younger system that has seen more tumultuous experimentation and challenging of Apple’s own user interface guidelines. This half of my brain is more willing to accept difference and newness. Stage Manager, the exact same feature on two different devices, triggers entirely different responses in my own brain, based on my acceptance of each app environment.

This is the first time that I’ve felt like an old(er) person when using my Mac. You can tell yourself that you’re open to new ideas and technologies, but it’s not until you’ve been presented with a new way of doing something that you realise how much of an automaton you can be in your daily life. It also reveals how appropriate the ‘personal’ in ‘personal computer’ really is: these are machines, but like any artwork, medium, food or place, they are interpreted and used through the lens of our own subjectivity, and we’re not even consistent with our preferences. Depending on the context, each one of us can be multiple people with conflicting ideals and tastes.

This post was originally written in October 2022 for Hemispheric News; subscribe at the Patreon site One Prime Plus to receive this monthly newsletter and other benefits that are linked to the Hemispheric Views podcast.

Listeners of our members’ show, Hemispheric Views One Prime Plus, may recall that we spoke about the ad-free photo-sharing service Glass in episode 012, ‘TumblrJimbo!’. Quite amusingly, I was the only one left on the network after both Andrew and Jason decided to leave. I loved using the app, which felt right at home on the iPhone.

Feeling somewhat dejected and lonely after Andrew and Jason’s departure, however, I decided to leave too.

Well, well, well… fast-forward several months and suddenly, both of my co-hosts had rejoined! 😂 I was tempted to return as well but then thought, ‘Eh, do I actually have a reason to do this?’ I decided to forget about it and move on; life was fine without the service and I considered it a hassle to resurrect my account and hopefully keep my original username.

Well, well, well… fast-forward to September 2022 and I rejoined Glass too! 🤣 Fortunately, my username was also still available!

What was the tipping point? I bought a new mirrorless camera: the Olympus OMD EM-10 MK IV. I’ve had my Canon 500D DSLR for years and wanted to try something smaller and lighter for family shots and occasionally carrying around town. The EM-10 MK IV fits that bill and became a new motivation to return to the network.

I plan to speak more about the camera itself on an upcoming regular episode of Hemispheric Views—so stay tuned for that—but for now, I simply wish to express how happy I am that I’ve returned to Glass. The iPhone experience continues to be fantastic, however I’m thrilled that it now has an iPad equivalent, which is undoubtedly better for enjoying photos at a larger size.

Even with an iPad app, I still had an itch that needed to be scratched: a Mac app. I have no idea whether the makers of Glass intend to release a Mac version, so I took matters into my own hands. (I’m making it sound like I put a lot more work into it than I actually did.) Using the Mac app Unite, I simply transformed the glass.photo website into a Mac app that now lives in my dock, and the experience is wonderful. It’s lovely to dip into the feed occasionally on the Studio Display, have a scroll, then leave.

I find myself thinking about the early experience of Instagram; I joined when it launched in October 2010 as an iPhone-only app and thought that it was a terrific service. Sadly we’ve all witnessed how that’s gone since.

Anyway, if you haven’t tried Glass before, give it a go. If you have tried it before but weren’t convinced, perhaps the availability of an iPad app or the ability to make your own Mac version will see you return, as I did.

For now, check out my profile at glass.photo/martinfeld; I am by no means a pro photographer, so I welcome any feedback! 📷

This post was originally written in September 2022 for Hemispheric News; subscribe at the Patreon site One Prime Plus to receive this monthly newsletter and other benefits that are linked to the Hemispheric Views podcast.