The big easychair

Here is a set of quotes I found at Kevin Kelly’s Technium blog. Kelly was the first to use the word technium to describe the inseparability of man from technology. That is, being technological is what makes us human. He believes that as time goes on we will become more and more entwined with our technology because technology is an extension of us. Kelly is quoting from Douglas Coupland’s, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work. McLuhan is most famous for having said, “the medium is the message.”  If you have ever given up television for a couple months, and upon watching again for the first time felt your muscles and mind relax, this is what McLuhan meant. It is not what you watch, but that you watch.

In 1962 McLuhan wrote, "Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence."

“The medium is the message” means that the ostensible content of all electronic media is insignificant; it is the medium itself that has the greater impact on the environment, a fact bolstered by the now medically undeniable fact that the technologies we use every day begin, after a while, to alter the way our brains work, and hence the way we experience our world. Forget the ostensible content, say, of a television program. All that matters is that you’re watching the TV itself.

Marshall’s other cliché, “the global village,” is a way of paraphrasing the fact that electronic technologies are an extension of the human central nervous system, and that our planet’s collective neural wiring would create a single 24-7 blobby, fuzzy, quasi-sentient metacommunity. And one must remember that Marshall arrived at these conclusions not by hanging around, say, NASA or IBM, but rather by studying arcane sixteenth-century Reformation pamphleteers, the writings of James Joyce, and Renaissance perspective drawings. He was a master of pattern recognition, the man who bangs a drum so large that it’s only beaten once every hundred years.

And here we are, 50 years later living out his prediction. How worried should we be? Should an alarm be sounded, or shall we go gently into this brave new world?