Just as naturally as eyeglasses extended the eye, the electric medium -- electricity itself -- according to McLuhan, extends our central nervous system. The amputated, externalized spinal cord becomes embodied anew in those ubiquitous power lines that reach farther than any eye can see, aided or not. These cords unfurl into dizzying international arrays and transmit electric pulses globally, much as our own nerves transport their microcosm of electrochemical signals throughout the body at imperceptible speeds. Like the railway and the airplane, which revolutionized not only transportation, but also entire universes of economics, politics and arts, electricity revolutionized the ways people communicate, govern and survive. It also reformed and enhanced fundamentally our self-conception. As was McLuhan's habit of saying: we shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us. All of a sudden, entire societies were instantaneously and irrevocably plugged in, and as electricity reverberated through every aspect of humanity, it reconfigured our senses in its own image, propelling particular types of thought, sensation and invention. This, all originating from the harnessing of the electric signal, at least as much as the printing press harnessed the printed word before transfiguring all typographic culture.
I bring up electricity because our current tool, the networked computer, to a large extent resembles it; indeed, it must, as it is an electronically dependent medium. Among other properties it shares, which will be uncovered later in the essay, its primary use is as a transporter and processor of raw information or data. (The very software I am using to type this essay is called a "word processor," two nearly opposite words clumsily patched together for want of a descriptor, like our "Automated Teller" machines, reliably spitting out fast cash in the middle of the Sahara, with familiar hellos and thank yous.)
‘When IBM discovered that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines, but that it was in the business of processing information, then it began to navigate with clear vision.’
(Understanding Media, 8)
Computerized communication was produced not for the public sphere, but for governmental use as a way to aggregate databases and feed the centralized information to satellite computers (by satellite, I mean neither the trampolines of cellular data nor the orbital mega-eyes that act as surveillance cameras, but the older term, denoting a thing that revolve around a center, drawing energy and influence from it, such as in satellite countries). The United States government employed this technology in its surveillance and espionage activities during the Cold War; at the time there was only intranet. Outcroppings of intranets shortly began to appear in the academic and financial sectors, where they were exposed to private scrutiny and refining, until limited dial-up networks were constructed, allowing a specialized sort of people to transfer data to and from home computers. These networks were peculiarly called bulletin boards, a term that conjures up the mediæval archetype of a typographic Martin Luther nailing his treatise onto the public doorway or, in more contemporary (browser-friendly) terms, "posting" an announcement onto the "community portal." But the virtual bulletin board was fittingly named: for, as McLuhan would remind us, we drive forward using our rear-view mirrors, only able to perceive any innovative medium by looking back. Furthermore, if the content of any medium is simply another medium, as McLuhan states, then within the computerized framework lay the fiery medium of the printed circulation, the Gutenberg bulletin, activated by the printing press.
This all falls quite in line with one property of every extension of man, outlined in Laws of Media -- that it retrieves (or revives) at least one other archaic medium, previously obsolesced or buried -- in this case the parchment posted in plain view of a main communal square. What other properties can we distinguish in early computer networks? In order to probe and understand it, we ought to ask the following questions, says McLuhan, of any medium:
- What does the artefact enhance or intensify or make possible or accelerate?
- What is pushed aside or obsolesced by the new 'organ'?
- What recurrence or retrieval of earlier actions and services is brought into play simultaneously by the new form?
- What is the reversal potential of the new form?
(Laws of Media, 98)The obvious answer to (1) is that bulletin boards, like most media of the electronic age, enhance and speed up communication, over a multiplicity of distances and times. Since they were chiefly ASCII text-based, it might also be said that they accentuate the written word, down to the letter: emoticons (emotions signified by icons, in this case alphabet and punctuation) are just one outgrowth of this newly accented quality of playfulness in the typographic symbol. Obsolesced (2) are telephony and fixed meeting places, not to mention synchronic rhythms of communication and participation. As I discussed previously, (3) the earlier skeletal remains of the town crier/bulletin are exhumed, retrieved and revived by the new virtual bulletin board (powered, incidentally, by our externalized spinal cords). Further, the data-transmitting telegraph, which transmitted symbolic electric pulses until it was eclipsed by the telephone, is dusted off, "tidied up" and recommissioned, much as the fax did. As for question (4), as one might already guess, when pushed to its limits, the virtual bulletin board system of private computer networks utterly explodes into billions of fragments, which would comprise the inter-network we know today (or yesterday) as the ‘World-Wide-Web.’
Now that we are embedded firmly in the Internet's genetic heritage, we can go about the business of unraveling and delineating some of its particular, well formed features, and reconnect them with some of Mcluhan's key concepts. Firstly, we should ask what the content of the Internet is. If it must be, as McLuhan says, another medium (or other media), then we can build up from the basic media it encapsulates. At the core, behind all the bells and whistles and fancy link hover effects, computers -- both the receivers and the servers -- are based on binary code, unfathomably long strings of øs and 1s that represent sets of on and off, yes and no, one thing and not the other. At one time, when computing machines were still in their infancy, an elite group of some very dedicated hermits were fluent in this language. But this is no longer the case; all programmers nowadays use shorthand programming languages to simplify and accelerate the process of coding. Most of these have adapted natural-language cues that act as shortcuts for vast sets of binary code (in reality this oversimplifies the process, as programming languages are now actually shortcuts of shortcuts of shortcuts, ad infinitum). At least one feature can be thus culled: that already, computerized systems are based upon unintelligible layers of abstraction. Not only that, but the ratio of programmers who understand even these shortcuts, compared with the actual end-users of the medium, is tiny and dwindling. So we have a medium that at its most basic level can not be fully grasped by its consumers -- this is representative and extensive of most newer media, but intensified in computers by several orders of magnitude.
The Internet is also decentralized; it is situated precisely nowhere. Yet it is also manifested everywhere, at least potentially. There is nothing at all, save financial resources, preventing me from flying to western Egypt, plopping down (perhaps next to a friendly Automated Teller Machine) and accessing this network in its entirety with my Blackberry Personal Data Assistant (who can then go retrieve a cool bottle of Perrier for my parched throat). Similarly, I can transmit a picture of the sand dunes to my blog and receive immediate feedback from a subscriber in Antarctica, all without a single byte directly transferred between us. As a matter of fact, I probably have never met this Antarctic "pen"-pal, though I may know her far more intimately than I know my own sister.
Digital media, the content of computer communication, is immaterial, not even reproduced, only represented. Unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls, pens, Perrier bottles, or DVDs, digital content is the opposite of tactile. It is typically downloaded in bits, destined to be periodically purged from the viewer's temporary cache via virtual re-cycling bin. Or it is saved, tucked away into the recesses of computerized consciousness, awaiting the singular click that will revive it or corrupt it. In any case the digitized media will eventually be ruined, a certainty recognized and feared by the virtual curators behind the Internet Archive, who in their manifesto nervously state:
The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet - a new medium with major historical significance - and other "born-digital" materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to preserve a record for generations to come. Open and free access to literature and other writings has long been considered essential to education and to the maintenance of an open society. Public and philanthropic enterprises have supported it through the ages ... Internet libraries can change the content of the Internet from ephemera to enduring artifacts of our political and cultural lives. (archive.org, accessed 30 March 2008)
Fleshed out and properly dissected, the features outlined here can now be plugged back in to their electrical sockets, their electronic context. Archetypes, such as the village bulletin and town crier, are pixelated, .zipped into easily downloadable bits, and pumped through every artery simultaneously. Electricity, which contains itself as its only content, is in this way akin to the impenetrable binary code of on/off switches that regulate the flow and flux of energy. And just as McLuhan expected in an electronic society, the global network makes each one of us an access point: we, as eternal receivers and senders, through the extensions of our psyches that are computers. Our collected knowledge is open-sourced, uncovered, publicized, and remixed into wikis. To a much greater degree than television, we become interconnected and intimately involved with people we will never face, and we feel their moods pulsate throughout our nervous systems. Digital junk-static, the amateur content of myspaces and livejournals, the type of thing that used to be thrown away, is tidied up and preserved lovingly by the Internet Archive alongside New York Times hypertext, in fascinating accordance with McLuhan's principle that whatever media are surrounded by another become art forms.
It becomes evident that if we have not yet actualized McLuhan's vision of
‘the final phase of the extensions of man -- the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media’
(Understanding, 2-3)
-- that the Net brings us far closer to this conception than ever before. We seem to still be catching up with McLuhan, who beckons us always from the day after tomorrow, into ethereal space.Subsequently, "our tools shape us," the Internet creates us in its image. It is no longer just the computer that is networked -- each of us are 'worked' over by the 'net.' Typical sociability and friendliness has now been dissected and recast as social network-ing, traditional apprenticeships and work ethics implode into the ambivalent attitude becoming of business networking, as in the phrase, ‘It's all about who you know.’ Teenagers take a profuse amount of digital self-photos, accentuating their various physical parts, one after another -- transfixed, like McLuhan's Narcissus, by their unfamiliar, externalized bodies.
As for my Antarctic blog subscriber, maybe she even turns out to be a viable romantic prospect, in the true-to-life, tidied-up and refreshed mail-order bride tradition (one with roots in the Wild West, which now re-emerges, updated for our new global frontier). Just as the Internet Archive catalogs digital ephemera, so too would match.com survey, dissect, and interpret our personalities, effectively characterizing our compatibility "index" based on our amputated, externalized psychic traits.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment