In the early light of morning, thunder rolled across the landscape. A strong clap, and then a rumbling that continued for some time. Last night the rain woke me, first a few drops, then a strong downpour. This isolated sound of thunder seemed directly connected to last night’s rain by way of the large storm system moving through our geography. Strong signals from the earth demanding my attention.
The sound of the thunder registered with my senses first. What was it? Thunder? An explosion? An earthquake? Do I need to react? Is this sound a harbinger? No, just thunder.
Just thunder. The emotional impact of the sound was immediate– my senses, my body, knew it was significant. Sound filled with meaning. Once my mind got into the picture I began puzzling over the scientific explanation for thunder.
Thunder is the sound made by lightning. Depending on the nature of the lightning and distance of the listener, it can range from a sharp, loud crack to a long, low rumble (brontide). The sudden increase in pressure and temperature from lightning produces rapid expansion of the air surrounding and within a bolt of lightning. In turn, this expansion of air creates a sonic shock wave which produces the sound of thunder.
The thought that there was a scientific explanation flattened out the emotional buzz running through my nervous system. Thunder drained of its power, reduced, explained by a physics equation. I began to think of the stories we tell ourselves about thunder. A Thunder God is generally the leader of the gods. Thunder and lightning are the physical signs of this god’s power.
A fortune teller might divine the significance of this morning’s thunder– unpacking and decoding a message from the gods. Brontoscopy is the art of divination by listening to the sound of thunder. Thunder coming from the left is a good omen, but thunder on Wednesday is related to bloodshed and the death of harlots. Hmmm… might be a good day to stay inside.
Thunder remains a powerful metaphor, but its power is in the language and poetry of men and women– not in the language of gods. And its scientific explanation stands firmly between the people and the interpretations of the brontoscopist. We turned a deaf ear to those messages, stopped tuning in to that frequency. As the 19th and 20th centuries unfolded, industrial man began to find his place, and we told ourselves the story of the Twilight of the Gods.
Twilight is a transitional period between light and darkness– not yet fully night. Scientific explanation operates under the energy-saving flourescent lights of the modern age. Light and darkness is a matter of flicking a switch. We don’t think of science as unfolding within the natural rhythms flowing from dawn to dusk. By creating clock time and the light bulb, science has extended its day to infinity. After all, it was only thunder. What else could it be?
“But almost everyone agrees that no one can make sense out of more than 10% of what McLuhan says..”
It occured to me that the linear quality of time shouldn’t be an obstacle to a good interview. And there are some questions I needed to ask McLuhan. There’s a sense in which questions and answers can address each other across time. This connected up to Jeff Jonas’s thinking on Perpetual Analytics or what he describes as real-time situational analytics– the idea of changing the time context of a database from polling to data streams. In his blog post, Sequence Neutrality in Information Systems, Jonas asks the question: “What if the question being asked today is not a smart question until next Thursday?”
In reading McLuhan’s work from 1964, I got the sense that he was providing answers to questions that his contemporaries could not yet formulate. Jonas posits a data ground where data finds data, and relevance will find the user. McLuhan’s answers seemed to be seeking out my questions.
echovar: The transition from visual space to acoustic space seems to be a key to understanding– among other things in your work, the oft-quoted fragment “the medium is the message.” Can you discuss the idea of acoustic space and what makes it different?
McLuhan: The new environment of simultaneous and diversified information creates acoustic man. He is surrounded by sound– from behind, from the side, from above. His environment is made up of information in all kinds of simultaneous forms, and he puts on this electrical environment as we put on our clothes, or as the fish puts on water.
Acoustic space is created by our ability to hear from all directions at once. Electric information arrives from all quarters at once. Thus, in effect, acoustic environments were created by the telegraph and began to show up in the press as mosaics of juxtaposed and discontinuous items all under one dateline. Acoustic space is all touch and interplay, all resonance and sympathy. Acoustic space is like the relationship of mother and child, which is audile-tactile, sound and touch. The cooing and handling and touching– this is the kind of world the electric media put around us. The electric media are a mom-and-child or rock-and-roll relationship.
The acoustic or simultaneous space in which we now live is like a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose margins are nowhere. Acoustic space cannot be cut up into pieces, as visual space can. It is both compressed and indivisible.
echovar: As your thinking matured, you migrated from the long form essay to the probe– the fragment and the aphorism. In the age of Twitter, we sometimes feel that depth is sacrificed to brevity. Can you address how depth is preserved in the compression of your thought?
McLuhan: In the work of Harold Innis, each sentence is a compressed monograph. He includes a small library on each page, and often incorporates a small library of references on the same page in addition. Most writers are occupied in providing accounts of the contents of philosophy, science, libraries, empires and religions. Innis invites us instead to consider the formalities of power exerted by these structures in their mutual interaction. He approaches each of these forms of organized power as exercising a particular kind of force upon each of the other components in the complex. By bouncing the unknown form against known forms, he discovered the nature of the new or little known form.
I call this method a probe. The probe is a means or method of perceiving. It resists any single point of view; it’s a better form than expository prose for examining our time because it works by gaps and interfaces. For instruction, use incomplete knowledge so people can fill things in– they can round it out and fill it in with their own experiences. There’s no participation in just telling: that’s simply for consumers– they sit there and swallow it, or not. These probes might easily be tweets:
“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
“The only cool PR is provided by one’s enemies. They toil incessantly and for free.”
“Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another.”
“A frontier is not a neighborhood. It is a gap, a ferment, an interface.”
echovar: What is the shape of the digital body in the globally networked village?
McLuhan: During the mechanical ages we extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as the planet is concerned.
My main theme is the extension of the nervous system in the electric age, and thus, the complete break with five thousand years of mechanical technology. This I state over and over again. I do not say whether it is a good or bad thing. To do so would be meaningless and arrogant.
Any medium presents a figure whose ground is always hidden or subliminal. In the case of TV, as of the telephone or radio, the subliminal ground could be called the disincarnate or disembodied user. This is to say that when you are “on the telephone” or “on the air,” you do not have a physical body. In these media, the sender is sent and is instaneously present everywhere. The disembodied user extends to all those who are recipients of electric information. It is these people who constitute the mass audience, because mass is a factor of speed rather than quantity, although popular speech permits the term mass to be uses with large publics. Mass man is a phenomenon of electric speed, not physical quantity.
echovar: Talk about the role of time– clock time and real time in the new media landscape.
McLuhan: As a piece of technology, the clock is a machine that produces uniform seconds, minutes, and hours on an assembly-line pattern. Processed in this uniform way, time is separated from the rhythms of human experience. The mechanical clock, in short, helps create the image of a numerically quantified and mechanically powered universe. By coordinating and accelerating human meetings and goings-on, clocks increase the sheer quantity of human exchange.
The point of the matter of speed-up by wheel, road, and paper is the extension of power in an ever more homogeneous and uniform space. Thus, the real potential of the Roman technology was not realized until printing had given road and wheel a much greater speed than that of the Roman vortex. Yet the speed-up of the electronic age is as disrupting for literate, lineal, and Western man as the Roman paper routes were for tribal villagers. Our speed-up today is not a slow explosion outward from center to margins but an instant implosion and an interfusion of space and functions. Our specialist and fragmented civilization of center-margin structure is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous reassembling of all its mechanized bits into an organic whole. This is the new world of the global village.
When you hear the word “progress,” you know you are dealing with a nineteenth-century mind. Progress literally stopped with electricity because you now have everything at once. You don’t move on from one thing at a time to the next thing. There is no more history; it’s all here. There isn’t any part of the past that isn’t with us, thanks to electricity. But it’s not thanks to print, it’s not thanks to photography, it’s thanks to electricity. Speed, huge speed-up, means there’s no more past. Now, there is no more history.
echovar: We seem to have a hard time coming to terms with our new media/social landscape. Why is it so difficult to perceive and talk about the environment we inhabit?
McLuhan: It is very hard to get a man in the print belt of culture to recognize that the form of print is itself cutural and deeply biased. The fish knows nothing of water.
Our typical response to disruptive new technology is to recreate the old environment instead of heeding the new opportunities of the new environment. Failure to notice the new opportunities is also failure to understand the new powers.
Nobody yet knows the language inherent in the new technological culture; we are all deaf-blind mutes in terms of the new situation. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us by referring to the previously existent, not to the present.
The environment is always “invisibile” and its contents is always the old technology. The guy who is going to use a superhighway thinks he is the same man who used the dirt road it replaced… He doesn’t notice that the highway has changed his relation to his family and his fellows.
In television (and computers), images are projected at you. You are the screen. The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point. (The fish knows nothing of water)
{McLuhan’s mosaic of answers culled from: Understanding Media, The Book of Probes and On McLuhan: Forward Through the Rearview Mirror.}
The 8th Internet Identity Workshop came to a close last Wednesday afternoon. Although, one could easily make the case the workshop is continuous with the semi-annual events simply marking a swarm of activity that enables the network of both people and technologies to become increasingly connected and interoperable. At any rate, the swarm has temporarily dispersed.
One of my tasks at the workshop was to think through what we mean when we say “identity.” When we talk about “internet identity“– we produce this floating signifier and hurl it in the general direction of a swarm of streams of activity. The signifier in question seems to have landed in a hall of mirrors. However, an infinite loop is not always an indicator of error or system deadlock. Douglas Hofstadter, for one, embraces this hall of mirrors and posits that identity in its essence is a strange loop:
Like Godel’s logical statements, the brain also exists on at least two levels: a deterministic level of atoms and neurons, and a higher level of large mental structures we call symbols. One of these symbols, perhaps the central one which relates to all others in our minds, is the strange loop we call “I”. By the time we reach adulthood, Hofstadter writes, “I” is an endless hall of mirrors, encompassing everything that has ever happened to us, vast numbers of counterfactual replays of important episodes in our lives, invented memories and expectations.
One of the tricks of language is that we can form anything into a proposition–“Identity is ______”. Realism and Surrealism have the same underlying structure, any two things can be stuck together in the form used by a logical proposition. When we speak of internet identity, we’re talking about a family of related issues and technologies– and like any family tree, it has many branches, along with an odd cousin here or there. Yet, we seem to think we’re talking about something in particular.
The task of Internet identity seems to be an attempt to “solve the problem” of the fragmentation of identity as it manifests throughout the Network. We appear to live a fragmentary existence– pieces of you, pieces of me, lodge in various corners of the Network. And these scraps of data exist unconnected, they are potentially network nodes; but currently they don’t have the capacity for connection. The substance of their security model is their quarantine.
If we take a closer look at these fragmented selves scattered across the Network; we see a picture of actions, of gestures— made across that mesh of connections. A book was purchased here, a birthday present for a friend over there, a bank account ledger viewed on this date, and a social network stream sampled at that time. Each of these transactions have to be bound to you in some way– a username and a password on your side, a set of database entries on the server side, and a cookie to tie the two together. Imagine each of these fragments as an organ without a body, functioning with a specific purpose but unconnected to a general organizing principle.
There’s an old joke in the philosophy of identity, it goes like this:
To do is to be
— Socrates
To be is to do
— Sartre
Do be do be do
— Sinatra
We’d like to be able to abstract “identity” from any particular transaction to create a transcendental identity. An identity separate from action, an identity that can be attached to no action or any action. When we speak in this way, we think of the “I” as something that can exist apart from the world, apart from the rough and tumble of our everyday concerns. We posit an “I” that can choose when and if it connects to the world. ‘User-centered’ identity systems tend to operate with this idea of the “I.” This is identity as a technical problem that can be solved by a higher level of indirection.
Before we get too far down that road to an identity abstraction layer, we might ask whether there can be meaningful identity outside of agency. Socrates, Sartre and Sinatra all associate being and doing. If we take a step back and look at the identity artifacts that we’ve collected, they all enable an action. My driver’s license enables me to legally drive a car. It also allows me to prove that I’m over 18 or 21. My credit card allows me to time shift capital from the future to the present. My passport enables international travel. My username and password at Amazon allows me to buy books and other sundry items.
If we continue to unpack this notion, we find that it’s a kind of practical identity we’re talking about. In these transactions and database records, we’re uninterested in who you are as a soul. We’re interested in current accountability and the risk characteristics of a transaction with a particular individual as it projects into future time. In this we stand with Locke’s understanding of identity: he thought the personal identity relation was, in effect, an accountability relation. Agency is accountable agency– meaning responsibility from this “now” moment to the next “now” moment for the collection of fragmentary organs without a body floating around the Network.
OpenID begins its life as a transcendental identity, potentially it exists as an unafiliated (user-centered) identity artifact within an identity meta-system. But as we begin to look at the uptake of OpenID and the usability of its workflow, we find something different. On the revised login screen, OpenID is covered over by the big commercial brands on the Network. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Financial Institutions have provided us identity artifacts based on an action we’ve taken– each of these identity relations have enabled some capability. We have no interest in operating at a new identity abstraction layer, we prefer to use an existing relation as the pivot point for identity across multiple relying parties. OpenID disappears from the conversation and we’re interested in where we can use our Google ID or Twitter ID– we want to know which identity is the most powerful and will allow access to most of the services we generally access from the Network. Google’s identity has purchase in its cloud and the apps built within its cloud. Alliances (or conquests) between clouds will extend the authority of a particular identity. While we started with a “user-centered” system, with this model we seem to have reverted to a version of the feudal identity system we already inhabit.
Let’s return to the corpus of identity, the body that might contain these organs floating within the Network. Is there a possibility that a digital body can be instantiated outside the custody of the dominant clouds? Samuel Weber opened up this question about the constitution of the digital body by exploring the work of Brecht and Benjamin:
I will close by asserting simply that the digitality of the digital, which, as Negroponte as suggestively asserted, replaces atoms by bits, in an analogous manner points us towards the ever-present necessity of reconstituting those bits and pieces into some sort of body or reality, be it virtual. The power of the media today lies both in the technologies of dismemberment (of the analogical) and the possibilities of reconfiguration that ensue. No digitality however will ever fully relieve us of the task of reconfiguring the analogical, a task in which bodies, as the site of citable gestures, pointing elsewhere, will always have a singular role to play. Not the least of these bodies , nor simply metaphorical, is that political body known as the people. Only when the body of the demos is recognized as the analogical alibi of an irreducibly heterogeneous digitality, will the question of digital democracy will be approachable. And it is the history of theatrocracy that will have set the stage for this approach.
The connector that establishes identity (session or statefulness) in the traditional web application model is the cookie. It’s the little bit of text that binds you to the data. At the IIW, Craig Burton posited that the Selector will be the next historical marker in the evolution of the Network. His whitepaper detailing the transition from cookies to selectors is available as a PDF. In addition to a rich form of identity management, the selector and information card model enables something called action cards. And this is where we get back to the corpus of identity, an action card enables a capability on the Network. It’s not transcendental identity– the card, combined with a ruleset and datasource makes a concrete benefit available. In this model, the selector works with our cultural practices for analog identity rather than against them. Identity is a side effect of an enablement– to do and to be (in that order) are linked through the selector. (Sinatra sang ‘do be do be do’ not ‘be do be do be’).
Creating a digital identity without a digital body might have been a reasonable approach prior to the emergence of the Network. Just as we think of freedom as “freedom to” or “freedom from”– identity is identity for some purpose. The action card has opened a pathway, the capacity for a practical connection that will yield a networked identity with a superior security and privacy model. At the moment when the digital body acts, that’s when it requires an identity.
These are provisional thoughts, a tentative exploration into what the words ‘real time personal identity’ might mean. (With apologies to Anthony Powell.) It’s often said, with some regret, that the Internet wasn’t designed with an identity layer. Personal identity is a fundamental element, not a simple widget that can be bolted on as an after thought. Although that does seem to be the road we’re traveling on. So we’re left with the observation that in the online world, personal identity is fragmented and dispersed. Facets of identity appear situationally where ever they’re needed to assure the consistency of a transaction or the state of an experience.
Since the Greeks, the common approach to thinking about time is to speak of a series of “now points.” In a stateless medium like the Web, tracking a personal identity from “now point” to “now point” requires additional apparatus. Each cloud-based domain, or application, takes responsibility for tracking personal identity within its sphere. Although one can easily imagine a consolidation as each cloud application platform begins to offer identity, privacy and audit services. National identities dissolve and re-form under the flags of Google, Microsoft, Amazon and a convergence of financial institutions and telecoms.
Let’s slip the bonds of the Network for a moment and take a look a personal identity in our daily life. As I walk down the street, is there a moment when I am without personal identity? Walking through the crowd, I am anonymous– just a face in the crowd. But I am specifically anonymous– I’m not a blank shell, a default avatar moving through space. I look the way I look. I wear the clothes that I’m wearing. I walk with a purpose that is my own.
Was life itself designed without an identity layer? In the instances in which we transact with other people, businesses, organizations and governmental agencies– additional apparatus have always been required to track us from “now point” to “now point.”
At this particular “now point,” let’s change the frame of reference. Rather than viewing time as a series of discreet points, let’s now think of time as a continuous stream. This is akin to what physicists do when they think of light– now as a particle, now as a wave.
Moving back to the Network, if we view the concept of an application polling another application for status or a data transaction, we have the equivalent of a discreet “now point.” When we begin to discuss “real time” on the Network, there are two separate frames in which the conversation unfolds.
If time is a series of discreet “now points,” then “real time” is a higher number of “now points” per unit of time. Here perhaps, we run into Zeno’s paradox— What is the total number of possible “now points” between this moment and the next moment? If the metronome ticks at 120 beats per minute and we crank the dial up to 200 beats per minute– the music of time becomes much more frantic. To approximate a flow, the “now points” must have a dense frequency (24 frames per second).
The opponents of “real time” often rely on this argument. The music is too fast to dance to– In our haste we’ll make a mis-step. If only the tempo were turned way down, so that each step could be measured, considered, and thoughtfully taken. One wonders if the result of this prescription could even be called dancing.
The idea of time as a continuous flow also has a Greek origin. The fragments of Heraclitus compare our experience of time to stepping into a stream. If we unpack this metaphor, we might ask: from whence do we step, when we step into a stream? If we are to think of our experience of time as a stream– when is it that we stand outside of time? We are always already standing in one stream or another.
Now let’s switch the channel and move back to the idea of “real time” and streaming time. Some streams move at a faster pace than others. This is undeniably true, but is the lazy river rolling along any less “real time” than the raging torrent of flood waters? Is the tightly packed schedule of the executive more “real time” that the couple taking a late summer afternoon off to eat strawberries and drink wine under the shade of a tree? Something that already flows doesn’t need to increase its tempo to achieve the appearance of a real time flow.
Perhaps we’re ready to think about the phrase “real time personal identity,” and what it might mean. Is there a moment when I’m logged out of my personal identity in daily life? As a social being, I have a use for three different modes of connection: the anonymous, the public and the private. The value of these modes seem to be independent of whether I’m on or off the Network in any given moment.
Thinking of on or off surfaces the question of the pervasive and ubiquitous Network. Is there ever a time when I’m logged out of the Network? Is there a moment when I have no presence whatsoever? To check on a person’s presence, I can Google them to see what’s visible on the Network according to Google’s index of things that are. My presence on the Network begins to have the character of an instant messenger status message. I’m there, I’m always there– I may just not be available to listen or to speak.
A reciprocal exchange of identity artifacts, a la Skype or IM, can establish a public and/or private channel. We subscribe to each other’s messages, and this subscription is persistent with different status settings. The status setting serves the function that space/place does in the physical world.
In a relationship within a continuous, real-time network– why would I need to log in more than once for the term of the relationship? When would I actually be logged out? My presence and my online presence might be the same.
