This post is in response to my challenge to Bob McDaniel on identifying events or facts that would indicate our society is at a point of change. I had been looking forward to your answer and I have not been disappointed and with your permission, perhaps we can extend this conversation for awhile. Somedays, God is good, I went to the library last week and behold, two new McLuhan books, one, a very comprehensive biography entitled Marshall McLuhan by W. Terrance Gordon and the other titled ON McLuhan by Paul Benedetti and Nancy DeHart who identify themselves as being involved in a CD Rom production on McLuhan's ideas - what a feast. Surely my cup overfloweth, along with that I picked up The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra. Bob said: The Tofflers (and others of their ilk) have been telling us for years their answers to these questions I take it that you don't believe them. McLuhan observed that what we're experiencing isn't a breakdown, but rather a breakthrough (presumably to something better). Thomas: Not only do I believe them, I've being doing my best to understand them. The fact that you know of them belies your caustic tone. McLuhan's basic insight on which most of his later development flowed was the understanding that different media effect us in different ways creating different histories. How do the effect us? Certain media's are easier for humans to perceive with one sensory modality more than the others. For example, you can see print and a big invention was when the blind could feel print, but we haven't been able to hear print yet. Therefore McLuhan would say that print created a societal sensory bias towards viewing the world visually. When Guttenburg invented the printing press, making print available to everyone, what was really happening, according to McLuhan was that a whole period of time was reorienting their sensorial basis. And as that happened, the world was perceived in a different way and certain things became obvious. We now call them scientific discoveries. However, reason, logic, mathematics, statistics, the straight line, perspective, efficiency all became important and led to changes in how cities existed, money and trade, law and punishment, in other words when Western Europe changed sensorial basis - everything changed. Now, as to your insightful comment re "breakthrough", I take that to mean that society is not breaking down, but is breaking through and if I can follow your unspoken thought "into a new sensorial basis". Bob said: How would we know? After the fact archaeologists/historians have attempted to explain other shifts: hunting/gathering to agriculture, agriculture to industry, church to nation-state, woman as property to woman as person, USSR to CIS, etc.. I suppose that in every case the dominant paradigm simply became irrelevant. A few prescient individuals at the time, viewing things holistically, might have perceived the pattern in events. McLuhan thought that to be the role of artists of various stripes (societal radar operators!). Unfortunately their insights were usually recognized post facto. Thomas HOW WOULD WE KNOW? This is absolutely the right question. One way, as you identify, is to try and go back in history and make assumptions about why they changed and how would you identify the results of that change. Another way is try and find those individuals that are able to view/feel/hear the same world as we do but identify it differently. I choose to believe that McLuhan was one of those individuals. McLuhan, being modest, assigned that task to "Artists" and because we have a nice visually based society, everyone ran around looking at paintings. It's not the medium that makes the artist, it is the artist being able to express in a medium that makes art. McLuhan said all our creative people (artists?) are in advertising. Bob said: I rather like the notion that we are moving from an electromechanical pattern of livelihood towards a bioelectronic pattern. This motivates me to look around for biological models (explanations) of what may be happening. The evolutionary process that has produced the individual human being may be moving on to incorporate the environment. Internally our physiological processes are highly automated and do not greatly concern us, under normal conditions. Each cell receives its logically necessary entitlement. As I see developments in biology and electronics converging on information it has occurred to me that we may be seeing the externalization of these internal processes. Thomas: So, after the generalizations comes your best guess. I like it and I like your explanation. In a technical sense you are alluding to the possibility that we may be "cells" in an environment and that "Each cell receives its logically necessary entitlement." I.E. The basic income could be one way if that is what is decided is the necessary entitlement? Bob said: Books by Beniger (The Control Revolution) and Kelly (Out of Control) suggest, to me, the popularization of the ideas of cybernetics (communication and control). Absorption by the general populace of such ideas, reflected in current art (drugs and music (forms of control!)), may inspire the changes in consciousness that you seek. Thomas said: "Absorption by the general populace of such ideas may inspire the changes in consciousness you seek." Let me try a McLuhan metaphor. He said that TV will change a whole generation of children from visual predominance to auditory/tactile predominance because of the nature of presenting electronic information in binary code. Let's say for practical purposes the TV did not start changing significant numbers until 1960, and that we are now approaching a generation of scientists, politicians, thinkers who are influencing the critical mass of visual sensorial based people. Many of those are dying or retiring and the first generation of TV watchers is beginning to see the world and describe the world in a different way than could have been accepted in a visual world. If we were looking for signs of that, we would look for those areas of stress and tension where there is a conflict. One of the places we are finding that stress is in our economy. No matter what we do, we do not seem to be able to make the corrections which would make the economy stable and satisfactory. What changes have been significant? One of the last changes was from a gold standard which reflected the old feudal tactile values which has hung on as an anachronism for 500 extra years. We jumped from that into a numerical system in which the value of the economy is not expressed in gold but in dollar value against other currency. In other words the value is visual. But the problems we seem to be having are relationship ones. What do we use as a standard to establish a relationship value with other currencies. Currently we are using the American Dollar, but if for any reason, faith was lost in that, there is no other standard. Reading the Web of Life, has presented to me a major conflict in our scientific world. Though I had known of it before, it is the combination of your answer and this book and two McLuhan books that have given me the insight. If we are looking for signs of change and we accept McLuhans hypothesis that it is sensorial, then we should start to see signs, dim at first, just like Galileo stood out by himself in his time, of the shape of a new emerging way of seeing the world. And yes, those who learned the old truths and have found their niche in the old society will find it very difficult to even learn there is a new way of seeing the world. The Bookmen returneth. System Theory is a way of looking at the world that can use and make sense of new findings like chaos theory. It is a way of thinking that looks at life as relationships and levels, at wholes rather than parts. It's history is out of biology rather than physics. Physics is the epitome of visual thought. Listen to some of the descriptions McLuhan gives for the conditions that develop an auditory predominance. 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 clothes, or as a fish puts on water. or Acoustic space is created by our ability to hear from all directions at once. Thus, in effect, acoustic environments were created by the telegraph and began to show up in the press in mosaics of juxtaposed and discontinuous items all under a dateline. Acoustic space is all touch and interplay, all resonance and sympathy. Acoustic space is like the relationship of mother and child, or With electronics, any marginal area can become center, and marginal experiences can be had at any center. Perhaps the city (is) needed to coordinate and concert (as in draw together) the distracted sense programs of (the people) in the global village (and) will have to be built by computers (virtual cities) in the (same) way a big airport has to coordinate multiple flights. or We (have) take(n) the print culture for granted for over two thousand years, and then suddenly it all ended with our abrupt entry into an electric world of circuitry in which all of the careful organization and continuos and connected patterns (of the visual culture, i.e. nation states) were suddenly interrupted by instant circuits that involved us not just in ourselves, but in everybody. (else) So, to summarize this lengthy essay, I concur with your observations and I hope my interpretation is similar to the meanings you meant to convey. The beginnings of an outline are becoming apparent. Whether there is a quick and dramatic shift or whether it is going to take several more generations is unknown at this moment. One of the distinguishing features may be the item in today's Ottawa Citizen, I'll type it in because I want it electronically. Ottawa Group to create speedier Internet (subtitle) 'We are going to blow everyone away,' project director says. by Tod Mohamd. Article from Ottawa Citizen, Page A5 March 1, 1998 Canada could be King of the Internet by the beginning of next year. An Ottawa-based high technology group has been given the go-ahead to build a "Next generation network" up to a million times faster than the current commercial Internet service. "Canada is going to be a world leader. We are going to blow everyone away," said Bill St.. Arnaud, director of network projects for the Ottawa-based Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and Education (CANARIE). The group is leading the creation of the blisteringly fast "third-generation Internet." "But this is the Internet - things move quickly, and the Americans could come along with something a dozen times better," he added. The federal government announced $55 million in funding for the next generation network project - tentatively dubbed CA*net3 - in Tuesday's budget. Those who haven't even heard of the second generation Internet can be forgiven. Just last June, CANARIE and a host of university, business and government partners launched CA*net2, a so-called second generation Internet that links about 40 research institutions across the country. CA*net2, like its American counterpart known as Internet 2, is a project designed to take the Internet concepts back to its roots as a research tool. It's a response to feelings that the Net's research potential was being lost as the so-called "Information superhighway" became clogged with millions of commercial users. "On the commercial Internet, it's always rush hour. On the new network there's no rush hour and there are thousands of lanes," said Mr.. St. Arnaud. CA*net2, and now CA*net3, will make possible new applications that couldn't be done on the commercial Internet." When completed, CA*net3 will be the first Internet run solely on fiber optic cables. Andrew Bjerring, president of CANARIE, said the system will make use of "Wave division multiplexing networks" - jargon for using multiple colored lasers to pump more information along a given fiber optic wire. Technology like that isn't being applied to the commercial Internet Right now, but the idea is that it will eventually "seep" into commercial networks, experts say. "Roughly speaking... We are aiming for many a factor of a thousand over what CA*net2 is - speeds a million times faster than what people have at home," said Mr. Bjerring. In practical terms, that means "if you want to download a whole movie... on a commercial Internet connection, it would take you a couple of hours; on CA*net2, it would take five minutes. With CA*net3, it would take you maybe half a second," Mr. St. Arnaud said. "The capacity we're talking about for CA*net3 could equal the combined capacity of all existing Internets. That's our target; we'll see if it's possible." The high speed network will make all kinds of real-time multi-media applications possible, including sophisticated medical diagnostic techniques where patient and doctor are thousands of kilometers apart. Mr.. St.. Arnaud said CA*net3 will put Canada at least six months ahead of Internet 2 project in the U. S., which is still not completed. "Somebody has to be first," said Raymond Neff at Case Western Reserve University, one of the partners of the Internet 2 project. "The competition is wonderful." There are plans to link up the new Canadian super Internet with Internet 2 via a junction near Chicago. But some researchers are still wondering when all the next generation Internet will benefit them. "At the moment we are not officially using see CA*net2, although it could still be used somewhere on the campus," said Carleton University's new information chief, Sally Hansen. "And hooking up to CAnet2, and eventually CA*net3 could also be prohibitively expensive," said Carlton Prof. David Coll Pretty interesting stuff, eh!.
