Midway through a series of thoughts on gluttony, violence, numbness and the Network, I found myself leafing through Robert Pinsky’s verse translation of The Inferno of Dante:
Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
in dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard—so tangled and rough
And savage that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
And yet, to treat the good I found there as well
I’ll tell what I saw, though how I came to enter
I cannot well say, being so full of sleep
Whatever moment it was I began to blunder
Off the true path…
The train of thought started with the asymmetric publish-subscribe social network model popularized by Twitter. In a symmetric model, there must be assent by both parties for a connection to be forged. In an asymmetric model, a person may follow an unbounded number of other people. Like a kid in a candy store, we greedily subscribe to this one and that. Oh, and the one over there looks very interesting. Our virtual stomachs and appetites have an unlimited capacity.
As we sit back to digest the stream of messages, we find ourselves looking into the business end of a firehose. Each person we subscribe to may produce a manageable flow, but if we aggregate all these messages and make them march single file through a small opening the velocity becomes violent. The senses are pummeled with a raging torrent of voices from all quarters of the globe.
The response to a violent overstimulation of the senses is numbness and withdrawal. It started out so innocently, a few friends gather round a bar and swapped one liners. Every joke was heard, and each built on and referred to the previous one. Now the messages move by so quickly we can barely grasp the words they contain. We grow numb, distant, we hold the stream at arms length, our emotions disengage.
What does the defender against this battering look like? Is he the one who decries this new-fangled firehose of messages? Dismisses it as unneeded, as superfluous? The one who lovingly points to the old ways and speaks eloquently of their sufficiency?
Or perhaps it is the one who points the way, showing us evidence of a path that seems to lead over the horizon. Telling of us of a wondrous time and place where the new technology is perfectly integrated—all friction resolved. The one who expectantly points to what is absent and asks us for our present for the sake of the future.
If media is an extension of our central nervous systems; if these subscriptions are extensions of our eyes and ears, our sense of touch— then each of these sensors serve to collect impressions, translate them into words, images and sounds and relay them back to us.
But when we first come upon them we don’t recognize them as parts of ourselves. Perhaps we see them as just another commodity in the corporate marketplace of entertainments—an amusement to occupy our time. Sense organs detached, packaged, and sold back to us on a subscription model.
At this present moment, we walk like a drunkard, numb to the world around us, filled to the gills with firewater and lurching to and fro. We promise we’ll only dip in from time to time. But we find ourselves, eyes glazed, mouth open, staring at the flow racing through the glowing rectangle. Unable to comprehend, unable to pull ourselves away. Comfortably numb.
What would it look like if we used those subscriptions as purposeful extensions of our senses? Our senses serve us as we navigate and discover the spaces of the Network. We share, create and connect. We might extend our senses through subscriptions to those with whom we share an affinity. The shape and value of the social graph would be measured not by its sheer size, but rather by its sensitivity to our circle of concerns. Is there a road we can travel to reconnect to our own sensibilities?
…This hollow where we stand. There is below
As far from Beelzebub as one can be
Within his tomb, a place one cannot know
By sight, but by the sound a little runnel
Makes as it wends the hollow rock its flow
Has worn, descending through its winding channel:
To get back up to the shining world from there
My guide and I went into that hidden tunnel;
And following its path, we took no care
To rest, but climbed: he first, then I—so far,
Through a round aperture I saw appear
Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.
When we talk about internet identity, it seems as though we’re only speaking of consenting adults. We discuss women and men of free will accepting or rejecting products from the open market place of identity. The user of identity products is a consumer, shopping for the best deal on identity– as though it were a suit of clothes. (We can make inferences about the politico-economic environment of such a free agent, but let’s bookmark that for later discussion).
Those of us who are digital immigrants view the Network as something selected, a destination we chose. And as the Network is optional, so too is the digital suit of clothes we call internet identity. For the digital native, the Network merely is. It’s a quality of the environment into which a person is born. It’s a bell that cannot be unrung.
Can internet identity restrict its sphere to the population of adult consumers? Is identity really only a matter of commerce? Sitting across the table from Doc Searls at the recent IIW, we were discussing the future of digital identity. The extent of the lifecycle of digital identity has its origins in the discussions of the adults who’ve freely taken on the responsibility of shepherding the direction of the discussions on identity. Doc quotes Lakoff on the embodied mind, our metaphors– our frameworks for thinking are hard-coded into original equipment manufacturer’s hardware.
…we produce moral metaphors that equate light and up with good and dark and down with bad because we are diurnal animals that walk upright.
When we use the word “we,” we also make assumptions about who we are and who we aren’t. Let’s take a moment and enlarge the set of all those with a digital identity. Each day, some number of people are born and some number of people die. When a baby is born, it is given a name. That name is entered into a database on the Network. At what point does digital identity bind to a new person? Is it at the moment of conception? The quickening? At birth? Or is digital identity more like a contract or an oath with suitability requirements.
I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion
Children begin life as a part of their mother, and then they live within the identity of the family. During the teenage years they go through the painful process of separating and establishing a unique identity. They visit the thrift stores of our culture and try on various suits of clothes in various combinations. An adult identity is fashioned from the iterative process of finding the pieces that seem to work.
Phil Windley told me that he’d reserved gmail addresses for his children. I wonder if a digital native, when thinking of names for a new baby will consider what’s available in the dominant digital identity name spaces. One can imagine the middle name gaining a new prominence in this kind of economy.
At what point do we teach our children about the Network and the digital identity they already have on it? A librarian friend told me that, in addition to teaching children how to find a book in the stacks of the library, she teaches them how to search for things online. Is learning about the Network still an elective course of study for the digital native?
At the other end of the spectrum, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil— what is to become of our digital identity? When our affairs are put in order, will that include signing out of the Network? Shall our last will and testaments specify the dispensation of our blogs, waves and twitter streams? Shall they be withdrawn from the Network (to the extent that anything can be withdrawn) and cremated? Or shall they be embalmed and left as a standing monument to one’s sojourn? Will the digital identities of the next Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean be reincarnated into corporate entities that will continuously animate them as long as they are profitable? Will each person’s 15 minutes of fame be cataloged, indexed and searchable for the rest of eternity? A kind of eternal recurrence of the same?
Martin Heidegger writes about human beings (dasein) as a thrown project. We are thrown into the world and land with a particular trajectory. None of us select the world into which we emerge.
Heidegger proclaimed that we are ‘thrown’ into the world and that our Being-in-the-world is a ‘thrownness’ [Geworfenheit]. To Heidegger this concept is a primordial banality which had long been overlooked by metaphysical conjecture. Humans beings are thrown with neither prior knowledge nor individual option into a world that was there before and will remain there after they are gone.
The digital natives born into this time will pull on digital identity like a well-worn leather jacket. They’ll put on their Sunday best when trying to make a good impression. They’ll wear a t-shirt with a company logo while out for a Saturday jog. They’ll wear an orange vest, picking up trash on the side of the road, doing public service. They’ll carry a handbag whose primary design is the maker’s logo to impress their friends. They’ll resent wearing the uniform of the fast food worker for their first job out of high school. They’ll be proud to wear the uniform of the military of their country. They’ll create fashion out of the thrift shops of the streets of the inner city and watch it reflected on the runways in Paris and Milan. They’ll settle on a comfortable daily uniform and declare that style is too much trouble. They’ll declare that they won’t wear fur because it troubles their conscience. After buying their first custom tailored suit of clothes, they’ll look in the mirror to take in the full effect, and then smile and nod. They will judge and be judged by the clothes they wear.
He’d lugged his case back and forth, up and down that long dusty road. It’d become a lot lighter once some of the atoms were exchanged for bits. But for a long time various sequences of atoms were still used to encase the bits. Every few years, they’d come out with new model of the arrangement of atoms. Some better way to get at the bits and play them with greater fidelity. To a guy lugging a case around, that meant everytime a new model came out, the case got lighter.
It had pretty much been a transport and titling business. Bits encased in atoms moved from “here” to “there,” the title of ownership was transferred from the seller to the buyer for a monetary recompense.
When the real estate prices in the cloud got cheap enough, the bit warehouses were moved there. The old atom-based bit cases were dispensed with altogether. That’s when the business really changed. There were no more separate bit containers to lug around. The bits just flowed directly into the players and were stored there. There was still a “here” and a “there,” and the title still transferred– so the fundamentals remained the same.
These new cloud warehouses were able to store a lot more inventory– certainly much more than could be stored on a customer’s bit player. For a while, there was a pretty good business in selling players with larger and larger bit storage containers. But the same low prices that motivated the bit sellers to move their warehouses to the cloud began to attract their customers as well. Customers started renting container storage units in the cloud and storing excess bits there. In response to this the bit players stopped growing larger bit storage containers and started playing bits directly from the storage warehouse.
This was another change in direction for the bit business. The idea of “here” and “there” was disappearing from the equation. Even the idea of moving bits from the seller’s warehouse to the buyer’s warehouse didn’t quite make sense. To the customer’s bit player, all these warehouses were the same. The bit salesman’s business was now just keeping track of who had bought access to which bits in the warehouse. Shoe leather virtualized into a voice over the wire.
Of course some customers still wanted local delivery of bits. Usually they were interested in chopping up the bits, recombining them with other bits to make new sequences. These new bit sequences were then shipped off to the warehouse, ready for redistribution.
While there are plenty of things that can’t be turned into bits, anything that can be, will be. The image of the lonely bit salesman pounding the pavement, moving bits from “here” to “there” with shoe leather and a big sample case is now the stuff of memoir, museums and fiction.
“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.}
