Ways of Knowing

Text written with a typewriter is not the same as text written by hand, composed on a computer, sent in a text message, or generated by artificial intelligence. Like all media, the typewriter does not just transmit what a person wants to write. It is its own particular medium. In the 20th century, it changed the way writers write and the way people read—profoundly altering warfare, commerce, literature, and, perhaps most dramatically, gender relations.

Media Objects is produced in collaboration with Media Studies at Cornell University. With support from the college of Arts and Sciences and the Society for the Humanities. Editing and academic counsel from Erik Born, Jeremy Braddock, and Paul Fleming.

We increasingly interact with the world through the binary, on/off medium of buttons—from keyboards and appliances, to the digital interfaces of phones and tablets; but it didn’t have to be this way. “There is nothing natural or inevitable about buttons or the act of pushing a button. Various constituencies over the years—especially advertisers and manufacturers—have marshalled tremendous resources to make buttons popular and alluring,” Rachel Plotnick, author of Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing. With Cornell professor Roger Moseley.

Media Objects is produced in collaboration with Media Studies at Cornell University. With support from the college of Arts and Sciences and the Society for the Humanities. Editing and academic counsel from Erik Born, Jeremy Braddock, and Paul Fleming.

Guest in this episode is Cornell professor Roger Moseley.

While extensions are masculine coded and deal with tools that extend what human beings already do, containers offer a different and more feminine concept of media: something that selects, stores, and processes information. Containers primarily allow for preservation, but this goes far beyond things like food, water, or other materials. They also determine cultural and intellectual production. For a primer on how to think about the way objects around us select, store, and process information, we’re going to consider one of America’s most iconic objects of containment: Tupperware.

Media Objects is produced in collaboration with Media Studies at Cornell University. With support from the college of Arts and Sciences and the Society for the Humanities. Editing and academic counsel from Erik Born, Jeremy Braddock, and Paul Fleming.

Guests in this episode include professors Brooke Erin Duffy and Jeremy Packer.

Writing is an extension of our voice, cars of our legs, guns of our fists, telephones of our ears, televisions of our eyes…Marshall McLuhan considered all media to be technology that extended the human body. The arrival of a medium like writing can completely reorder social relations because it has the power to “shape and control the scale and form of human association and action.” McLuhan’s idea of extensions is arguably the beginning of modern media theory, but it is not without its limitations.

Media Objects is produced in collaboration with Media Studies at Cornell University. With support from the college of Arts and Sciences and the Society for the Humanities. Editing and academic counsel from Erik Born, Jeremy Braddock, and Paul Fleming.

Guests in this episode include professors Anna Shechtman, Andrew Campana, Jeremy Braddock, and Erik Born.

We’re surrounded by media—not just when we look at our phones, turn on the TV, or get on the internet. Everything from Tupperware and office plants to buttons and smartphone apps is exerting pressure on what we think, how we think, and what is even possible to think.

This is Media Objects, produced in collaboration with Media Studies at Cornell University. With support from the college of Arts and Sciences and the Society for the Humanities. Editing and academic counsel from Erik Born, Jeremy Braddock, and Paul Fleming.

While the U.S. Constitution is constantly invoked to justify how the country should be governed, it actually provides very few specifics on how that should be done. Instead, the designed ambiguities of the document require the imaginative powers of its citizenry to interpret it and decide which laws should be implemented and how they should be enforced.

Episode guest is George Thomas, professor of American Political Institutions at Claremont McKenna College. Produced with the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies and the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College.

Given the option to plug into a world totally free from conflict and struggle, most would choose to remain in their current reality. A true utopia would be too boring, stifling—with no problems to solve, there would be no outlet for creativity, for the imagination.

Episode guest is John Farrell, professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College. Produced with the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies and the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College.

If a person spends their entire life seeing only in black and white, is it possible for them to truly know what it would be like to experience color? Philosophers have debated this for decades, but one thing they have often overlooked is the power of the imagination. It is a skill, and like any other skill it can be honed, perhaps enough to allow one to achieve deep knowledge of an experience they’ve never had.

Episode guest is Amy Kind, professor of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. Produced with the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies and the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College.

Media are increasingly monopolizing attention: Your mind is prevented from wandering, from generating thoughts, having associations, coming up with ideas. Over time, this dulls the creative faculties and weakens the power of imagination, which is essential for the creation of art…as well as for a clear perception of reality.

Episode guest is Radhika Koul, professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College. Produced with the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies and the Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College.

Science is not some purely rationalist endeavor that exists in an isolated realm of objective observations and hard data that can deliver absolute truths. It is built on and intertwined with the modes of analysis, intellectual history, and ways of knowing in the humanities.

0:00 Intro

2:19 Part 1 –– Metaphors We Live By

5:52 Part 2 –– Metaphors in Science, an Ancient Paradox

10:32 Part 3 –– Embryology

23:10 Part 4 –– The Clockwork Universe

32:04 Part 5 –– The History of a Dead Metaphor: Cell

44:00 Part 6 –– Black Holes

51:10 Part 7 –– The Body

57:50 Part 8 –– Pain, in 78 Adjectives

1:05:29 Part 9 –– Natural Selection

1:09:47 Part 10 –– A New Metaphor for Science

1:20:22 Part 11 –– The Solar System Model of the Atom

1:24:35 Part 12 –– Uniformitarianism

1:31:35 Part 13 –– Glia, the Gendering of a Cell

1:39:15 Part 14 –– Light Bulbs and Seeds

1:46:04 Part 15 –– War and Disease, the Domination of a Metaphor

1:51:26 Part 16 –– Social Darwinism

1:55:05 Part 17 –– The Universe

2:02:08 Part 18 –– Anthropomorphism

An Inexact Science is a production of The World According to Sound. It’s part of our series, “Ways of Knowing,” audio works dedicated to humanities research and thought. It was made in collaboration with the University of Chicago’s Institute on the Formation of Knowledge.

Special thanks to Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer, who spearheaded the project at the University of Chicago. Editorial support from Hans Buetow. Academic advising by Andrew Hicks. Voicing work by Tina Antolini. Mathematical consultant, Steven Strogatz. Intro music by our friends, Matmos. And to see a complete list of musicians used in this show, visit our website: www.theworldaccordingtosound.org