Random Access Memory, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Mutual Assured Destruction
The Future of the Interent
Sonja S. Mongar
In the 50’s, the invention of the television was still fairly new, but the negative implications of technology on the quality and meaning of human life was not lost on sci-fi writer, Ray Bradbury. In Fahrenheit 451, books are burned and banned and walls full of televisions dominate its “futuristic American city,” where its citizens are managed through the constant bombardment of media. Thirty years later, in the undertow of White Noise, Don Delillo warns of the imminent downfall of humanity via technology, “Random Access Memory, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Mutual Assured Destruction” (Delillo 303.)
Marshall McLuhan’s “we shape our tools and they in turn shape us,” crystallized the concerns of modern man towards a seemingly insidious expansion of technology and what he termed “media determinism.” On the other hand, according to “Wired” magazine’s Gary Wolf, McLuhan also had held hope that “electronic civilization would provide a spiritual leap forward and put humankind in closer contact with God.” But, according to Wolf, McLuhan’s opinion had greatly degenerated at the end of his life, calling it “a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ.”
From the readings, it’s hard to tell exactly how McLuhan might have viewed the advances in the textual age. On one hand, McLuhan believed that Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press heralded a “fragmentation of society,” the act of reading a book alone as opposed to collective of community storytelling only contributing further to the isolation and alienation of Western Industrialized man. On the other hand his theory of the "global village" predicted “the ability of electronic media to unify and retribalize the human race.”
In any case, McLuhan provided us with an intensive scrutiny of electronic media. He claimed that electronic media is really “an extension of our own body,” of our central nervous system that “deals precisely in awareness, interplay and dialogue.” In this sense, fragmentation and specialization are replaced with collective consciousness. This would seem to support his projection of the positive possibilities of globalization attained through the shared experience technology could offer.
Writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin also died long before the possibilities of computers much less textual space had materialized but certainly his theories shed light on its political possibilities. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” He hypothesizes that the mechanical reproduction of aesthetic art, now transformed by the mechanical age from the ritualistic to the political, might lead to the end of Capitalism.
“the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition, which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.” (http://pixels.filmtv.ucla.edu/gallery/web/julian_scaff/benjamin/benjamin1.html)
Unlike McLuhan’s view of the printing press as a tool of social fragmentation, Benjamin
saw the potential of authorship expanding from the tradition of only a few writers to the thousands of readers where the gap between author and audience would “lose its basic character.” Art, according to Benjamin, would no longer be private property but would exist in the realm of public ownership. The Internet indeed reflects this idea of a public domain every time a citizen downloads music, images, poetry literature, etc. Based on this, it can be assumed that Benjamin might see the unlimited possibilities of public access to the unlimited possibilities of the textual universe as the prelude to a revolution.
For McLuhan, the freedom the electronic age might offer was clearly a matter of who was in control of the media it transmitted. In “A Last Look at the Tube,” McLuhan compared the computer to the television as “the only technology that lives on, and produces, the same material.” McLuhan warned that the television’s “electrical environment” engages and hypnotizes the user in a world between ”fantasy and dream” where the “the sender is sent and is instantaneously present everywhere. The disembodied user extends to all those people who are recipients of electric information,” This certainly would parallel the experience of chat rooms, email, discussion boards, instant messenger and any other active/interactive event via the Internet.
McLuhan called the user, the “discarnate man” who now bodiless, is “deprived of his relationship to Natural Law and physical law.” The outcome of the division or separation between mind and body is a loss of identity. McLuhan warned that the discarnate man is disconnected from the real world and lives in a fantasy world where his quest for private identity can only be satisfied vicariously through television. This seems to be where the dark side of electronic media rears it ugly head, chronically emanating a standardized version of life, a sort of media realism that threatens to turn globalization into a process of homogenized Western constructs.
McLuhan perceived this loss of identity as inherent in discarnate man from a Marxian viewpoint as he described the “megamachines of North America.” This adds up to “a sum of lifeless artifacts,” which further alienates the discarnate man. He becomes an automaton via a meaningless existence in a synthetic environment full of synthetic food and synthetic experiences.
McLuhan’s warnings of mass alienation at technology’s hand certainly echoed the times. The anti-industrialization, anti-technology sentiments of the 60s and 70s was fueled by the popularization of primitivism and embraced by poets, writers and artists as well as an entire generation of young people. In “Reading and the Future of Private Identity,” McLuhan discusses the “codifying experience,” of group ritual (as in a rock concert or jazz performance) or poetic performance that gives rise to “self awareness and identity.” It would seem that the quest for the primitive was an echo of the desire for a collective consciousness—a quest for carnation or reincarnation for the discarnate electronic man—a quest for identity.
This quest of self awareness and identity though the primitive certainly affected contemporary poet Jerome Rothenberg who in his anthology, Technicians of the Sacred, saw the emerging ideas about poetry “as the reflection of our yearning to create a meaningful ritual life” (Rothenberg xviii.) He began to analyze and translate these elements of the primitive through its poetry, which included sound, image, symbol and language. He called it ”ethnopoetics (1) A comparative approach to poetry and related arts, with a characteristic but not exclusive emphasis on stateless, low-technology cultures and on oral and nonliterate [nonliteral] forms of verbal expression.”
His work began to open (or suggest—as McLuhan quotes French poet Mallarme—‘to define is to kill and to suggest is to create’) new ways in which poetry might be composed, expressed, read and experienced on multiple sensory levels—a quest Modernist Imagists like Pound and Stein began almost a century ago as well as poets like Charles Olson with his theory of Projective Verse and Robert Creely’s “form is never more than an extension of content” had already undertaken. It would seem that electronic space would be the last place a primitivist like Rothenberg would choose to exhibit his collection of ethnopoetics. But, what better environment to experience sound, image, symbol, and language.
McLuhan’s explains this paradox perfectly in his discussion of resonant intervals, which is how he believed we perceive electronic space. Heisenberg’s “resonant interval” McLuhan explained, “is the world of touch, so that acoustic space is simultaneously tactile.” Resonant intervals also exist in what he called the “open mesh” image in television, and thus on the computer monitor—“ the simultaneous world of electric information is always lacking in visual connectedness and always structured by resonant intervals.”
In “Reading and the Future of Private Identity,” he shows that resonant intervals are not just present in electronic space but are more a product of how we have been taught to interpret space. McLuhan “suggests” for instance, that seeing sculpture is not just an experience of “visual space—uniformity, continuity, and stasis,” as we have been taught since the time of the Greeks, but an “audili-tactile” one of resonance and involvement. The “acoustic space” is the resonant and the “tactile space” is the interval or gap and resuggests points of reference from which we can derive meaning in art and also possibly new perspectives from which we can learn.
McLuhan compares examples of primal cultures’ lack of right-side up references, to our Western relationship between right-side up (the point of universal reference in visual space) and its relationship to literacy. Poet Brian Kim Stefans’ “Alpha Betty’s Chronicles” might be a good example of this challenge of traditional reference points. In the poem, he uses a variation in font size and colors in each word in the poem series forcing associations between letters other than what would be derived from normal left to right reading. My eyes tended instead to follow color and size associations over left to right linear word associations, instantly forming words that weren’t there. “dreamy incompetence” became “ice cream,” for instance.
This may be the process of concretizing abstract thought. In “Understanding the Tactile Nature of Electric Sensibility in Virtual Environments,” Rita Lauria explains that space in virtual reality surrounds the body creating a sensemaking environment, where the tactile experience offers ways to perceive and make sense of the abstract. In virtual space “abstract concepts are concretized as knowledge through interactive, direct engagement with virtual objects.” Thus, knowing becomes the sense of being. This may be why virtual space has become the most effective way to work with children with Attention Deficit Disorders and dyslexia.
McLuhan explained this sensory engagement in virtual space as a process of right brain engagement over left-brain engagement.
“Whereas the left hemisphere is sequential and logical, verbally connected and syntactic, the right hemisphere is simultaneous and acoustic, emotional and intuitive. The electric environment tends to give a lot of stress and power to the right hemisphere, just as the old industrial and literate environment had given corresponding dominance to the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere had been favored by the words of literacy, and of market organization with its quantitative goals and specialist structure. These worlds have been increasingly obsolesced by the instant environment and instant replays that enhance the simultaneous character of the right hemisphere.”
(http://ccins.camosun.bc.ca/~pculture/mcluhan/mc_12.txt)
Though this seems to suggest the positive possibilities of learning, communicating and connecting in a virtual environment. McLuhan clearly saw that right brain engagement made it extremely difficult for discarnate man to logically (a left brain activity) determine the fallacies of a political candidate, a party platform or even or government actions and policies. In terms of television media, he says the state assumes a “supernatural” aura.
“For discarnate man the only political regime that is reasonable or in touch with him is totalitarian - the state becomes religion. When loyalty to Natural Law declines, the supernatural remains as an anchorage for discarnate man; and the supernatural can even take the form of the sort of mega machines of the state…” (http://ccins.camosun.bc.ca/~pculture/mcluhan/mc_12.txt.)
So the question isn’t focused on how virtual and textual space might expand or limit us but more so, who will be in control of that space? McLuhan’s words overshadow the promise of technology. They ring more like an eerie prophecy “the media is the message,” (or mass-age) especially in light of the corporate mega mega-machines such as AOL/Time Warner gobbling up print, television and radio news group, communications companies and movie studios as well as the Internet. Not to mention Bill Gates’ and Microsoft’s almost total control over hardware and software.
Benjamin would say this is proof we are heading towards fascism. Because technology is not being utilized to free the masses but to preserve private property, it has forced “aesthetics into political life.” Technology then has only one purpose, says Benjamin, to make pleasure and beauty out of war.
“Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order (http://pixels.filmtv.ucla.edu/gallery/web/julian_scaff/benjamin/benjamin5.html.)
Certainly both McLuhan and Benjamin would agree that there is great promise and great freedom in the possibilities of textual space and the virtual universe. Einstein probably felt the same way when he theorized nuclear fission. Maybe that’s why at the end of McLuhan’s life; he referred to the media as the anti-Christ. That’s not to say there is no hope. There are always Bradbury’s’ “book people”—the renegade media hackers pirating the airwaves and computer hackers like Napster spreading the access of music to the people. And history reminds us of the revolutionaries like the Samizdat, a group of Czech writers who secretly published their work on typewriters while maintaining an audience of thousands of readers. This was in spite of strict Communist control of all the publishing media. In this case, a typewriter in the hands of the right people made a revolution.
McLuhan’s hope rested in the hands and souls of artists.
“I believe that artists, in all media, respond soonest to the challenges of new pressures. I would like to suggest that they also show us ways of living with new technology without destroying earlier forms and achievements. The new media, too, are not toys; they should not be in the hands of Mother Goose and Peter Pan executives. They can be entrusted only to new artists”
(http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_2art6.htm.)