David Lavery

FROM CINESPACE TO CYBER SPACE: Zionists and Agents, Realista and Gamers in The Matrix and eXistenz

Abstract It was for the construction of those micro-bubbles that human intelligence and science had evolved, that savants and engineers and whimsical caricaturists had put together the separate pieces of the great invention. In a roundabout, absurdly elaborated fashion–requiring special effects laboratories, wagonloads of art directors and prop men, years of systematic alchemical research–the brain had set about creating an image of itself, with a view toward projecting it into every corner of This Island Earth. Dutiful technicians and creative workers carried out their small pieces of the design, like the laborers on the pyramid. It was as if the technology of the movies had from the beginning been built at the behest of an inconceivable Overmind working through human agents.

Putting television on the map

The second edition of Jeremy G. Butler’s Television: Critical Methods and Applications is a textbook that succeeds superbly on a number of fronts. It covers its vast subject with true respect for its complexity. Though the reader is presumed to be a college or university undergraduate taking a course in television—Butler’s book, covering as it does both critical and technical aspects of the medium in depth, could certainly be beneficially adopted in a wide variety of such courses—much of its excellence might well be lost on such captive audiences. I read it not just as textbook but as a comprehensive introduction to the medium and discovered valuable insights on almost every page. Even when Television is merely summarizing and establishing what is already well known, it does so with such enviable clarity and sound organization that I continued to read with real admiration. Television is partly a collaborative effort, with chapters on “A History of Television Style” by Gary A. Copeland and “Music Television” by Blaine Allen. Though it may occasionally be too difficult for lazy undergraduates, it approaches all of its many subjects with a precision of purpose and style, almost never lapsing into jargon. Its applications of Bakhtinian dialogism and the methods of semiotics are executed unobtrusively but with substantial results. The name of Mikhail Bakhtin, for example, does not appear anywhere in Butler’s book, and yet the influential Russian theorist’s shadow is perceptible throughout. Polysemy, heterogeneity, discourses—these Bakhtinian terms appear with regularity in a book grounded in the basic faith that the cultural forum of television enables the interplay of a wide variety of voices and visions. The all-encompassing content of Butler’s book is, it must be admitted, THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 3.1 (January 2003): 79–80  2003 National Communication Association