Chapter 1
• • •
The Digital Revolution and Media Ecology
(Reflections on Marshall McLuhan’s Influence
in Digital Fine Arts and Multimedia)
By Iona Miller, 4/2004
New Media; McLuhan’s Message; Artistic Immunization;
Cultural Stress Test; Media Ecology; Cyborgs R Us;
Sense and Sensorium; Technological Humanism; Neo-McLuhanacy
"New communication theorists will arise, as if from straight out of the asphalt, the concrete, the vinyl tiles, or the PermaPour flooring. But one thing will not change. First they will have to contend with McLuhan." ~ Tom Wolfe, Introduction to MM’s Understand Me
“A theory of cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the changing sense ratios effected by various externalizations of our senses.” ~ MM, Gutenberg Galaxy
"It is debatable when exactly the history of digital art began. Artists have been experimenting with computers at least since the 1970's... As in the evolution of photography and video art, this new medium was often considered a threat to traditional art forms... Over the decades, art making use of digital technologies has taken many forms, and even today, the question of how exactly digital or new media art can be defined is still being debated." ~ Christiane Paul, New Media Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, FotoFest 2002 Catalogue Introduction
Media oracle, Marshall McLuhan <http://archives.cbc.ca/IDCC-1-69-342-1835/life_society/mcluhan/ became a pop culture figure in the 1960's with his seminal works, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964) and The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (with designer Quentin Fiore, Random House, 1967). Most of MM’s quotes used here to make our arguments are from these works, though some points were later attacked by Postmodern critics.
Polymath, Wyndham Lewis and McLuhan were close friends in the 40s and 50s. Lewis published America and Cosmic Man in 1948 (Britain) and 1949 (US). Lewis’s book on the United States as prototype Cosmopolis greatly influenced that pioneer exponent of electronic globalism, McLuhan, inspiring his famous phrase "Global Village". Lewis was a novelist, critic, philosopher, poet, sociologist, travel writer, autobiographer and, far from least, painter with galvanizing styles all his own.
''An explosive force'' is what Lewis required the artist to be. Some of the chief artists of that time, including Lewis, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, were among the first to probe and define the esoteric dimensions of media. These artists teach us to distinguish figure from ground and so allow a consciousness of the surround (ground) which shapes us. This new consciousness is a path to freedom from control by the new surround.McLuhan indicates that the advertiser is like the artist in wanting to get his effectacross (“McLuhan: What If He Was Right?”). Both are less concerned with what their audience thinks than with theories or with changes of mind, interested in shaping sensibility, in molding the individual's manner of experiencing the world. The advertiser is the artist of the “Electranascence,” having learned his techniques from the more “traditional” artists.Marshall McLuhan's central theory of the mass media as a global extension of the human nervous system is developed from Lewis's stated and published enthusiasm for and belief in the unifying role of mass communications, and their role in rendering the solitary human body obsolete.
He echoed R. W. Emerson who wrote that "The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent-office, where are the models from which every hint was taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses" (1870). McLuhan claimed, “Moving from print to electronic media we have given up an eye for an ear."
Famous also for coining the phrases "The medium is the message" and “the user is thecontent”, McLuhan’s prescient insight also touched deeply on the nature of creative process and creative freedom in the electronic era. He suggested artists are the cultural antidote to relentless technological future shock, which simultaneously dominates and emancipates us. For example, artists inoculate us against its effects by introducing technological innovations long before they mainstream and by jolting us out of our commercially programmed trances and mass-media social conformities.
There are historical, theoretical, aesthetic, conceptual and technical challenges presented by the relatively recent collision of art, culture and computing power. Through envisioning information as popular media, science fiction, computer games, marketing tool, and artist's projects, technology has been and will continue to be a key component of culture rather than just a digital wasteland.
Art itself can be a powerful communal stimulant.
In ordinary human perception, men perform the miracle of recreating within themselves - in their interior faculties - the exterior world. This miracle is the work of the nous poietikos or of the agent intellect - that is the poetic or creative process. The exterior world in every instant of perception is interiorized and recreated in a new manner. Ourselves. And in this creative work that is perception and cognition, we experience immediately that dance of Being within our faculties which provides the incessant intuition of Being. ~ McLuhan in “Catholic Humanism”
MM was a "crisis" philosopher on the razor's edge of the information revolution (or what he termed The Age of Information). This academic rebel's novel approach blazed new territory with world-class contributions to communication theory and cultural anthropology. His startling breakthroughs concerning cultural upheaval - commencing with Gutenberg's printing and complicated by the industrial revolution - reveal the unforeseen consequences of print technology's fragmentation of society. He elaborates on electronic media's ability to synthesize multimediated experience as well as unify and retribalize the human race.
McLuhan’s central message was that to understand today's world, one must actively study the effects of media. What are media? They are, simply put, any extensions of sense: of eye, of ear, of nose, of touch, of taste, of mind – the perceptual vortex of the cultural imagination. Culture is more than integrated spectacle.
Arguably, the first medium was consciousness or self-awareness, then speech, then expressive arts, the printing press, and now the digital revolution. The digital epiphany is releasing reason and imagination through the technological experience. It is both a technique of artistic and other discovery and a new angle of vision on the technological experience itself – the technological imperative with its multi-faceted point of view.
McLuhan thought that the preservation of the fullest degree possible of creative freedom in modern life is compromised within the unbound potentials of ars electronica. It is similar to the potential compromise of our humanity through genetic engineering.
The stress induced by technology keeps us in a constant state of emergency; we can’t adapt quickly enough. For example, we have replaced our music collections from vinyl, to tape, CDs, DVD, and MP3. In McLuhan's discourse, individual freedom as well as civil culture itself are wagered in this contest with technology, so recognizable civilization doesn’t disappear through its own ‘vanishing point.’
His thought strained toward defining how humanity could be liberated both from and through technology: the primacy of space over time; the fascination with the exteriorization in electronic technology of an "inner experience" which is electric, mythic, inclusive, and configurational; the primacy of "field" over event; the vision of "processed information" as somehow consonant with the perfectibility of the human faculties (technotopia).
In McLuhan's estimation, "technology is part of our bodies”. To the extent that corporations acquire private control over the electronic media, we essentially "lease out" our eyes, ears, fingers, legs, and the brain itself, to an external power.
As a consequence, in the electronic age, this era of collective and integral consciousness, those with control of technological media are allowed "to play the strings of our nerves in public." In a sense, even our thoughts are no longer our own.
It is precisely the control over the speed, dissemination, and implanting of new mind controlling technologies by the corporate command centers of North America which subverts the very possibility of an age of "creative freedom," with technocratic politics.
Buckminster Fuller pointed out that, "Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys — legally enacted game-playing — agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members." (Grunch of Giants).
Technological dependency leads to consideration of issues such as personal will, and at least potentially, the poetry of consciousness. Technostructure is leading toward hegemony of abstract media systems, along with the promise of enhanced flexibility.
For McLuhan, the advent of electronic technology creates a collective sense of deep distress, precisely because this quasi-externalization of the central nervous system induces an unprecedented level of stress on the individual organism. The "technological massage" reworks human biology and the social psyche at a deep, subliminal level.
McLuhan understood that we react to new media first with terror followed by numbing. This classic mind/body response to trauma is how we protect ourselves from the alien, the foreign, the Other. His task was to show how and why this occurs and how we can adapt. The media we fear need not be our enemy. As so-called modern people, we are not yet there. We are not yet electric, even though our media point in that direction.
The content is irrelevant; the medium is what is important. The medium is transforming how we think, how we live, how we are. The medium offers the hope of transforming and liberating us in time from the shackles, which have bound us since the dawning of consciousness, the dawning of art.
It is the artist who will articulate this new vision, adapting first to the technology, bending it to our will, making the universal into the particular, reviving the primacy of content, meaning, and value – reclaiming the human elements. The artist is the first who learns to dream in the new vernacular.
Artistic Immunization
McLuhan showed how the artist plays a critical role in this transition. It is the artist's role to anticipate and show us how to avoid media trauma and to prevent its numbing effects by producing what he calls immunity to the numbing effect of electric media.
The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs. The artist can correct the alteration in the sense ratios brought on by new media. McLuhan’s definition of art shows us how to ride with the punch, rather than taking a knock out on the chin: “Art provides exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own expanded facilities.”
His ideal value was that of the "creative process in art;" so much so in fact that McLuhan insisted that if the master struggle of the twentieth century was between reason and irrationality, then this struggle could only be won if individuals learned anew how to make of the simple act of "ordinary human perception" an opportunity for recovering the creative energies in human experience.
If we are to recover a new human possibility it will not be "outside" the technological experience, but must, of necessity, be "inside" the field of technology. The digital art revolution is beginning to reflect this. What is really wagered in the struggle between the opposing tendencies towards domination and freedom in technology is that which is most personal, and intimate, to each individual: the blinding or revivification of ordinary human perception.
For McLuhan, the "poetic process" - this recovery of the method of "sympathetic reconstruction," this "recreation" of the technological experience as a "total communication," this recovery of the "rational notes of beauty, integrity, consonance, and claritas" as the actual stages of human apprehension - was the key to redeeming the technological order.
If only the mass media could be harmonized with the "poetic process;" if only the media of communication could be made supportive of the "creative process" in ordinary human perception. Then technological society would, finally, be transformed into a wonderful opportunity for the "incarnation" of human experience. McLuhan viewed technological society as an “incarnation in the making.”
McLuhan saw no artificial divisions between "ordinary human perception" and the technical apparatus of the mass media or, for that matter, between biology and technology. In his discourse, the transpersonal value is reason. The creative process of human perception as well as the technologies of comic books, mass media, photography, music, and movies is viewed as relative phases in the working out of a single process of apprehension. "...The more extensive the mass medium the closer it must approximate to the character of our cognitive faculties." Or, on a different note:
As we trace the rise of successive communication channels or links, from writing to movies and TV it is borne in on us that for their exterior artifice to be effective it must partake of the character of that interior artifice by which in ordinary perception we incarnate the exterior world. Because human perception is literally incarnation. So that each of us must poet the world or fashion it within us as our primary and constant mode of awareness.
We no longer passively watch our TVs and computer screens. We program them, interact with them, and create with them at roughly the same speed with which we think. We already have many forms of technology that simulate experiential aspects of reality. The next phase of this revolution will take us further toward blurring the boundaries of subjective and objective, inner and outer, imaginal and real. It is the fully interactive world of full immersion technologies.
All media are related to and create anxiety as they reveal and externalize what is fundamentally internal. The medium of consciousness can be described as a fall into what has since become a state of universal anxiety. Media captures the moment of change and releases that energy dramatically.
There is a relationship between stress and numbness. A central theme in McLuhan's reflection on biotechnology was that under conditions of deep stress, the organism anesthetizes the area affected, displacing the shock to peripheral regions.
McLuhan always insisted that this age of electronic circuitry is a time of high stress. He asserts that the advent of electronic technology creates a collective sense of deep distress, precisely because this externalization of the central nervous system induces an unprecedented level of stress on the individual organism. The "technological massage" reworks human biology and the social psyche at a deep, subliminal level.
High-speed simultaneity fosters the idea that all things are connected, but fosters confusion because that connectedness remains unarticulated. This is the ambivalence that underlies technoculture. It thrills and repels us simultaneously, implying loss of our simple humanity in the act of externalizing our own nervous systems. It fills us with future shock – technosis -- the unspoken knowledge that we now have to ‘keep up’ with it or become the new illiterates.
In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan insisted that we cannot understand the technological experience from the outside. We can only comprehend how the electronic age "works us over" if we "recreate the experience" in depth – metaphorically and mythically -- of the processed world of technology.
All media work us over completely. They are so persuasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the way media work as environments.
He viewed all technology as the pushing of the "archetypal forms of the unconscious out into social consciousness." This is likewise what art does. When McLuhan noted in Counter Blast that "environment is process, not container," he meant that the effect of all new technologies is to impose, silently and pervasively, their deep assumptions upon the human psyche by reworking the "ratio of the senses."
For McLuhan, it is a processed world now. As we enter the electronic age with its instantaneous and global movement of information, we are the first human beings to live completely within the mediated environment of the technostructure. The "content" of the technostructure is largely irrelevant.
It was McLuhan's special genius to grasp at once that the content (metonymy) of new technologies serves as a "screen", obscuring from view the disenchanted locus of the technological experience in its purely "formal" or "spatial" properties. McLuhan invented a "new metaphor" so we can "restructure our thoughts and feelings" about the subliminal, imperceptible environments of media effects.
Media Ecology
Media ecology involves the study of information environments. According to the Media Ecology Association, media ecology can be defined as "the study of the complex set of relationships or interrelationships among symbols, media and culture."
In 1977, McLuhan said that media ecology "means arranging various media to help each other so they won't cancel each other out, to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television, but television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages. And so you can do some things on some media that you cannot do on others. And, therefore, if you watch the whole field, you can prevent this waste that comes by one canceling the other out."
McLuhan posed four laws framed as questions (his tetrad) as a model for media ecology as a new perspective on culture: 1) "What does it (the medium or technology) extend?" 2) "What does it make obsolete?" 3) "What is retrieved?" 4) "What does the technology reverse into if it is over-extended?" (i.e., hidden consequences).
An interdisciplinary field emerges, called Media Ecology, deeply inspired by McLuhan, Innis, Neil Postman, and Baudrillard. We now watch in amazement as the once revolutionary impacts of television collide with the subversive effects of interactively networked digital media.
McLuhan’s metaphors have new currency, as his clichés have become archetypes. His warning that "we become what we behold," also means that we do live mythically now. This transition is visible, for example, in the larger-than-life screen personas (“chip bodies” or “avatars”) many of us now inhabit online or in the game world. We have become identified with these hyperreal alter egos.
He asserted that each different medium affects the individual and society in distinct and pervasive ways, further classifying some media as "hot"--media which engaged one's senses in a high intensity, exclusive way, such as typography, radio, and film--and "cool"--media which were of lower resolution or intensity, and therefore required more interaction from the viewer, such as the telephone and the television.
The work of another revolutionary, the Italian artist Caravaggio heralded another societal shift. His “Judith Beheading Holofernes” in 1598 had a new and strange meaning when it was first created -- it signaled the liberation of individualism by the printing press -- which by then had infiltrated and permeated human culture.
Today we might process this image as symbolic of Caravaggio's vision of the fragmentation of Western man as he cuts himself away from the body of his past at the end of the Renaissance. This is the moment of the death of Renaissance Man and the Birth of Modern Man.
The birth of 21st century man is exemplified in the global citizenry of the World Wide Web. It is embodied in experimental electronic art work, such as that of fulcrum-artist Laurence Gartel, who pioneered the digital medium in the mid-70s.
If we aren’t "to go on being helpless illiterates" in the new world of technology, passive victims as the "media themselves act directly toward shaping our most intimate self-consciousness", then we had to adopt the attitude of the artist. “The mind of the artist is always the point of maximal sensitivity and resourcefulness in exposing altered realities in the common culture." McLuhan would make of us "the artist, the sleuth, the detective" in gaining a critical perspective on the history of technology which "just as it began with writing ends with television."
For McLuhan, Seurat deserved a privileged position as the "art fulcrum between Renaissance visual and modern tactile. The coalescing of inner and outer, subject and object." McLuhan was drawn to Seurat in making painting a "light source" (a "light through situation"). Seurat did that which was most difficult and decisive: he dipped the viewer into the "vanishing point" of the painting. Or as McLuhan said, and in prophetic terms, Seurat (this "precursor of TV") presented us with a searing visual image of the age of the "anxious object."
In his book, Through the Vanishing Point, McLuhan said of Seurat that "by utilizing the Newtonian analysis of the fragmentation of light, he came to the technique of divisionism, whereby each dot of paint becomes the equivalent of an actual light source, a sun, as it were. This device reversed the traditional perspective by making the viewer the vanishing point."
The significance of Seurat's "reversal" of the rules of traditional perspective is that he abolished, once and for all, the medieval illusion that space is neutral, or what is the same, that we can somehow live "outside" the processed world of technology. With Seurat a great solitude and, paradoxically, a greater entanglement falls on modern being. "We are suddenly in the world of the "Anxious Object" which is prepared to take the audience inside the painting process itself." (McNeil).
The lesson of Seurat is this: modernity is the age of the "anxious object" because we live now, fully, within the designed environment of the technological sensorium. For McLuhan, we are like astronauts in the processed world of technology. We now take our "environment" with us in the form of technical "extensions" of the human body or senses. The technostructure is both the lens through which we experience the world, and, in fact, the "anxious object" with which human experience has become imperceptibly, almost subliminally, merged.
We are already cyber-organisms. Our technology extends our biology, allowing human beings to extend themselves, affecting our relationships with one another. With technology we can now see beyond the stars into the birth of our universe, and deep into the secrets of the atom. McLuhan emphasized that, "An extension occurs when an individual or society makes or uses something in a way that extends the range of the human body and mind in a fashion that is new.
By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth, will be translated into information systems. Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. We must serve our electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which we once served our oracle, our canoe, our typography, and all other extensions of our physical organs. But, there is a difference here. Those previous technologies were partial and fragmentary. The electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. With the new media, however, it is now possible to store and to translate everything; and as for speed, that is no problem. No further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier. (McLuhan, Understanding Media - The Extensions of Man, 1963).
In this understanding, technology is an "extension" of biology: the expansion of the electronic media as the "metaphor" or "environment" of twentieth-century experience implies that, for the first time, the central nervous system itself has been exteriorized.
It is our plight to be processed through the technological simulacrum, to participate intensively and integrally in a "technostructure" which is nothing but a vast simulation and "amplification" of our bodily senses. Indeed, McLuhan often used the "narcissus theme" from classical mythology as a way of explaining our fatal fascination with technology, viewed not as "something external" but as an extension, or projection, of the sensory faculties of the human species.
Media tend to isolate one or another sense from the others. The result is hypnosis. The other extreme is withdrawing of sensation with resulting hallucination as in dreams or DT's, etc... Any medium, by dilating sense to fill the whole field, creates the necessary conditions of hypnosis in that area. This explains why at no time has any culture been aware of the effect of its media on its overall association, not even retrospectively.
All of McLuhan's writings are an attempt to go beyond the "Echo" of the narcissus myth, to show that "technostructure" is an extension or "repetition" of ourselves. He explored the numbing of consciousness in the technological massage. Confronted with the hypnotic effect of the technological sensorium, McLuhan urged the use of any "probe" - humor, paradox, analogical juxtaposition, absurdity - as a way of making visible the "total field effect" of technology as medium.
McLuhan's intention was to break the seduction effect of technology, to disturb the hypnotic spell cast by the dynamism of the technological imperative. He was in the habit of saying that the "inclusive" circuitry of the electronic age, was composed of "code, language, mechanical medium - all (having) magical properties which transform, transfigure." He also noted the consequence of the "new age", that its participants were daily "x-rayed by television images."
If, indeed, we are now "looking out" from inside the technological sensorium; and if, in fact, in the merger of biology and technology, which is the locus of the electronic age, "we" have become the vanishing points of technique, then a way had to be discovered for breaching the "invisible environment"within which we are now enclosed.
McLuhan's historical study of the media of communication likened it to the disease (dis-ease) process, structured by the three moments of semiology (classification of symptoms), diagnosis and therapeutics. His "diagnosis" was that the crisis induced by technological society had much to do with the "closures" (numbing) affected among the sense ratios by new technical inventions.
A new "closure" is occasioned in our sensory organs and faculties, both private and public, by new technical extension of man. McLuhan's "therapeutic" solution is the deployment of the "creative imagination" as a new way of seeing technology, and of responding, mythically and in depth, to the challenges of the age of electric circuitry.
For McLuhan, the stress syndrome associated with the coming-to-be of the technostructure could only be met with the assistance of educated perspective. If it is the human fate to live within its (own) central nervous system in the form of the electronic simulation of consciousness, then it is also the human challenge to respond creatively to the "dread" and "anxiety" of the modern age.
McLuhan's historical account of the evolution of technological media was structured around a (medical) account of technological innovation as "counter-irritants" to the "stress of acceleration of pace and increase of load." In stress-expert Hans Selye's terms, the body resorts to an auto-amputative strategy when "the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation."
In McLuhan's terms, in the stress of super-stimulation, "the central nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of amputation or isolation of the offending organ, sense, or function." Technology is a "counter-irritant" which aids in the "equilibrium of the physical organs which protect the central nervous system."
When McLuhan recommended repeatedly that cultural historians "trace and retrace" the field of technological experience, both as a means of understanding the "closure" effected upon human perspective and as a way of discovering an escape-hatch, he was only restating, in distinctly modern language, the experimental method of ancient medicine.
McLuhan's imagination always played at the interface of biology and technology. His discourse took as its working premise that the most insidious effect of technology lay in its deep colonization of biology, of the body itself; and, moreover, in its implicit claim, that technology is the new locus of the evolutionary principle.
For McLuhan the technological "sensorium" was precisely that: an artificial amplification, and transferal, of human consciousness and sensory organs to the technical apparatus, which now, having achieved the electronic phase of "simultaneity" and "instantaneous scope", returns to take its due on the human body.
The "sensorium" presents itself to a humanity, which has already passed over into "deep shock" over the inexplicable consequences of electronics as a practical simulation of evolution, of the biological process itself. This circling back of the technological sensorium, this silent merger of technology and biology, is the cataclysmic change in human history that so disturbed McLuhan.
His discourse on technology begins and ends with an exploration of the "possession" of biology by the technological imperative. Indeed, in McLuhan's estimation, technology works its effects upon biology much like a disease. It is also the tools of a doctor which are needed both for an accurate diagnosis of the causes of the disease, and for a prognosis of some cure which might be recuperative of the human sensibility in technological society.
Technological experience "wounds" the human persona by affecting a "closure" of human perception, and in "numbing" and thus "neutralizing" the area under stress. It was McLuhan's melancholic observation that when confronted with new technologies, the population passes through, and this repeatedly, the normal cycle of shock: "alarm" at the disturbances occasioned by the introduction, often on a massive scale, of new extensions of the sensory organs; "resistance" which is typically directed at the "content" of new technological innovations.
McLuhan's point was, of course, that the content of a new technology is only the already passé history of a superseded technology; and "exhaustion" in the face of our inability to understand the subliminal (formal) consequences of fundamental changes in the technostructure. It was his pessimistic conclusion that, when confronted with the "paradigm-shift" typified by the transformation of technology from a mechanical, industrial model to an electronic one, the population rapidly enters into a permanent state of exhaustion and bewilderment.”
In McLuhan's terms, the present century is characterized by an almost total unconsciousness of the real effects of the technological media. Without the education of perspective or, for that matter, in the absence of a "multidimensional perspective” on technique, it will surely be the human destiny to be imprinted by the structural imperatives, the silent grammar, of the new world information order. But it was also McLuhan's hope that the electronic age could be transformed in the direction of creative freedom.
In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan insisted on teasing out the emancipatory tendencies in new technologies. Against the admonitions of an "official culture" to impose old meanings on novel technologies, McLuhan sympathized with "anti-social perspectives": the creative perspectives of the artist, the poet, and even the young, who respond with "untaught delight to the poetry, and the beauty of the new technological environment."
The significance of the "poetic process" as the master concept of McLuhan's technological humanism is clear. It is only by creatively interiorizing (realistically perceiving) the "external" world of technology, by reabsorbing into the dance of the intellect mass media as extensions of the cognitive faculties of the human species, that we can recover "ourselves" anew. It is also individual freedom, which is wagered in McLuhan's recovery of the "miracle" of ordinary human perception.
Thus, McLuhan was a technological humanist in a special sense. He often described the modern century as the "age of anxiety"because of our sudden exposure, without adequate means of understanding, to the imploded, instantaneous world of the new information order.
In The Medium is the Massage, he spoke of technology in highly ambivalent terms as, simultaneously, containing possibilities for emancipation and domination. McLuhan’s critical humanism deals with the "central cultural tendencies"of the twentieth-century, confronting the technological experience in its role as environment, evolutionary principle, and as second nature itself.
Environments are not passive wrappings, but active processes which work us over completely, massaging the ratio of the senses and imposing their silent assumptions. But environments are invisible. Their ground-rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.
McLuhan's technological humanism was at the forward edge of a fundamental "paradigm shift" in human consciousness. In the 21st century we still await that global change in fundamental worldview, though we have made vast strides toward it. But, culture is more than integrated spectacle.
Postmodern media guru, Jean Baudrillard took off in the 1980s where McLuhan left off. His cyberculture theory rests on the key notion of the “cyberblitz” of new experiences inaugurating a new type of society: consumer, media, information, and technological societies with new values, meaning, and activities.
He sees media as the demiurge of a new society and type of experience, an all-powerful autonomous social force; social control and power are rooted in mass media. Simulations and simulacra, media and information, science and new technologies, and implosion and hyperreality become the constituents of a new postmodern world. In his theory, all the boundaries, categories, and values of the previous forms of industrial society are obliterated while establishing new forms of social organization, thought, and experience.
In 1967, Baudrillard wrote a review of McLuhan's Understanding Media in which he claimed that McLuhan's dictum that the "medium is the message" is "the very formula of alienation in a technical society," and he criticized McLuhan for naturalizing that alienation. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, McLuhan's formula eventually became the guiding principle of his own thought.
Furthermore, following McLuhan, Baudrillard interprets modernity as a process of explosion of commodification, mechanization, technology, and market relations, while postmodern society is the site of an implosion of all boundaries, regions, and distinctions between high and low culture, appearance and reality, and just about every other binary opposition maintained by traditional philosophy and social theory.
By the late 1970s, Baudrillard interprets the media as key simulation machines, which reproduce images, signs, and codes which constitute an autonomous realm of (hyper)reality and which come to play a key role in everyday life and the obliteration of the social. Baudrillard's analyses of simulations and hyperreality probably constitute his most important contributions to social theory and media critique.
Previously, the media were believed to mirror, reflect, or represent reality, whereas now the media are coming to constitute a (hyper)reality, a new media reality -- "more real than real" -- where "the real" is subordinate to representation leading to an ultimate dissolving of the real. In addition, in "The Implosion of Meaning in the Media," Baudrillard claims that the proliferation of signs and information in the media obliterates meaning through neutralizing and dissolving all content.
This process leads both to a collapse of meaning and the destruction of distinctions between mass media and reality. The proliferation of television reality shows demonstrates this. In a society supposedly saturated with media messages, information and meaning "implode," collapsing into meaningless "noise," pure effect without content or meaning. The medium has merged with the real. It is useless to dream of a revolution through content or through form, since the medium and the real are now in a single nebulous state whose truth is undecipherable" (SSM, pp. 102-103).
In “On Seduction” (1979), Baudrillard utilizes McLuhan's distinction between "hot" and "cool" media to describe the ways that media devour information and exterminate meaning. According to Baudrillard, the media take "hot" events like sports, wars, political turmoil, catastrophes, etc. and transform them into "cool" media events, which he interprets as altogether another kind of event and experience.
For Baudrillard, eventually, all the dominant media become "cool," erasing McLuhan's (problematical) distinction between hot and cool media. That is, for Baudrillard all the media of information and communication neutralize meaning and involve the audience in a flat, one-dimensional media experience which he defines in terms of a passive absorption of images, or a resistance of meaning, rather than the active processing or production of meaning.
In Baudrillard’s universe we enter a new form of subjectivity where we become saturated with information, images, events, and ecstasies. Without defense or distance, we become "a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence". In the media society, the era of interiority, subjectivity, meaning, privacy, and the inner life is over; a new era of obscenity, fascination, vertigo, instantaneity, transparency and overexposure begins: Welcome to the postmodern world!
From a Baudrillardian perspective, Internet is a kind of cybernetic terrain working to undermine the symbolic distance between the metaphoric and the real. It abandons "the real" for the hyperreal by presenting an increasingly real simulation of a comprehensive and comprehendible world. This heading points the way toward Baudrillard's "hypertelia," that fated catastrophe when the sophistication of a model outdoes the reality it attempts to comprehend. Tim Leary called it “hyperdelic.”
Baudrillard's concept of simulation is the creation of the real through conceptual or "mythological" models, which have no connection or origin in reality. The model becomes the determinant of our perception of reality-- the real. Homes, relationships, fashion, art, music, all become dictated by their ideal models presented through the media.
The boundary between the image, or simulation, and reality implodes (breaks down). This creates a world of hyperreality where the distinctions between real and unreal are blurred. For Baudrillard, the shift from the real to the hyperreal occurs when representation gives way to simulation.
Arguably, we are standing at the brink of such a moment, marked primarily by the emerging presence of a virtual world. For Baudrillard, the screen presents an example of the "satellisation of the real" by achieving the escape velocity of hyperreality: "That which was previously mentally projected, which was lived as a metaphor in the terrestrial habitat is from now on projected entirely without metaphor, into the absolute space of simulation" (Ecstasy 16). No longer a metaphor for change, the simulated highway of Internet becomes a form of virtual reality.
Baudrillard limited his critique to mass media, rather than extending it to the creative technology of new media. Interactive media used in the artistic process are of a different order, as a means of personal expression and creativity. The process connects rather than isolates, evokes rather than numbs feeling. Baudrillard argues an anti-hermeneutical bias that denies the importance of content and is against interpretation. Yet, technological artists capture that meaning hunting the future through new media and their subject matter. “Know brow” or technological artists are already stepping into the post Postmodern era.
The interiorization of media transmissions within the screen of our mind obliterates the distinction between public and private, interior and exterior space -- both of which are replaced by media space. Here Baudrillard inverts McLuhan's thesis concerning the media as extensions of the human, as exteriorizations of human powers, and argues instead that humans internalize media and thus becomes terminals within media systems. But that is not true of the interactive artist, who again reverses the process with alternative media, transforming the form and content of the media.
Jean Baudrillard, L'echange symbolique et la mort, Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1976.
Gartel, Laurence, "Laurence Gartel: A Cybernetic Romance". Gibbs Smith:Utah. Introduction by video guru Nam June Paik. 1989
Gartel, Laurence, "GARTEL: Arte & Tecnologia". Edizioni Mazzotta: Milano, Italy. Introduction by noted art historian and critic Pierre Restany. 250 pages; over 400 color plates. 1998
Kroker, Arthur, “Digital Humanism: the Processed World of Marshall McLuhan”.
M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
M. McLuhan, "Catholic Humanism & Modern Letters", Christian Humanism in Letters, Hartford, Connecticut: St. Joseph's College, 1954.
M. McLuhan, Counter Blast, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969.
M. McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage. (with Quentin Fiore), New York: Bantam,1967.
M. McLuhan, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting, New York: Harper and Row, 1968.
M. McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, New York: The Vanguard Press, 1951.
McNeil, Russell, “Is the Medium Still the Message?” Malaspina University-College, March 29, 1999.
Miller, Iona, “CybeRevolution: A Short Course in the History of Digital Media and Cyber Culture in Art”. Subcutaneous: Phoenix, 2004.
Suggested Reading:
Alter, Jonathan. "Bridging the Digital Divide." Newsweek 134, no.12 (1999): 55.
Amaral, Kimberly. The Digital Imaging Revolution: Legal Implications and Possible Solutions, University of Massachusetts. http://www.umassd.edu/public/kamaral/thesis/digitalimaging.html.
Anders, Peter. Envisioning Cyberspace. McGraw-Hill, 1999
Beuys, Joseph. "Political Reformation." In Art on the Edge and Over, ed. Linda Weintraub, Arthur Danto and Thomas McEvilley, 178-183. New York, New York, 1996.
Dyson, Esther. "Intellectual Property on the Net." http://www.eff.org/IP/ip_on_the_net.html
Durham and Kellner, ed Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. MA: Blackwell, 2001
Flanagan, Mary. “Digital Stars Are Here to Stay.” Convergence: the journal of research into new media technologies. Eds. Julia Knight + Alexis Weedon, University of Luton. Summer 1999. Print and internet. http://www.luton.ac.uk/Convergence/.
Flanagan, Mary. “Next Level: Women’s Digital Activism through Gaming.” Digital Media Revisited. Edited by Andrew Morrison, Gunnar Liestøl & Terje Rasmussen. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.
Flanagan, Mary + Booth, H. Austin, Eds. reload: rethinking women + cyberculture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.
Goldberg, Ken. The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology on on the Internet. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2000.
Hables Gray, Chris. The Cyborg Handbook. London: Routledge, 1996.
Haraway Donna. Feminism and Technoscience. London: Routledge, 1997.
Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theater, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1993 and The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, Addison-Wesley, 1990
Levine, Sherrie. "Unoriginality." In Art on the Edge and Over, ed. Linda Weintraub, Arthur Danto and Thomas McEvilley, 248-253. New York, New York,1996.
Lovejoy, Margot. Postmodern Currents: Art and Artist in the Age of Electronic Media. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1997.
Mann, Charles C. "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Copyright?" Atlantic Unbound http://www.theatlantic.com/ unbound/forum/copyright/intro.html. 10 September 1998 and "Who Will Own Your Next Good Idea?" The Atlantic Monthly, http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/ 98sep/copy.html. September 1998.
Mercedes, Dawn. "Digital Ethics: Computers, Photographs, and the Manipulation of Pixels." Art Education (1996): 44-50.
Norman, Donald, The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Currency/Doubleday, 1990, 1988.
Packer, Randall, and Ken Jordan, eds. Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality.. New York, London: WW Norton.
Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2003.
Picard, Rosalind. Affective Computing. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.
Plant, Sadie. Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture. NY: Doubleday, 1997.
Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen. New York: Touchstone Books, 1997.
Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1948.
Wilson, Stephen. Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.
Wolmark, Jenny(ed.) Cybersexualities: A Reader in Feminist Theory, Cyborgs, and Cyberspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
Zielinski, Siegfried. "Seven Items on the Net." Ctheory, http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=68 5/31/1995.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Transdisciplinarian, Iona Miller is a writer, hypnotherapist and multimedia artist, living in Southern Oregon, USA. She has developed extensive groundbreaking work on the relationship of chaos theory and negentropy to emergent paradigm shift or worldviews in philosophy, cosmology, biophysics, medicine, experiential psychotherapy, creativity, art, and society. Many of these articles are collected in her annual journal Chaosophy, available on her homepage.
•••