What defines our conception of technology, asks the write?
From the McLuhanist perspective, Facebook resonates with the myth of Narcissus.
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We are missing the message. I have, on several occasions, spoken about technology — at times in relation to the media, at others, linking it to democracy and culture.
Recently, I spoke at a seminar themed Science and Values on the topic of human rights in digital and cyber space.
My discourse narrowed down to Man and technology. And my question is: how do we understand technology?
My concern is our affair with technology, and with technology as a built-environment.
Have we educated ourselves correctly on this “thing” called technology? We are efficient consumers of technology. Some 59 per cent are Internet users and slightly more than 39 per cent of Malaysians have Facebook accounts (www.internetworldstats.com/asia.htm).
Technology is not only defined as inventions and innovations within the confines of Information Communications Technology. It is just about anything that aids us as human beings. And we are defective beings.
We are handicapped in our perfections. A pair of spectacles extends and perfects our sight — for those long- or short-sighted.
Radio extends our ear. Television, the Hubble space telescope and Google extend our vision to the ends of the Earth and the frontiers of the physical universe.
Transportation — land, sea and air — extends our limbs. Technology is prosthetics.
But what is this “thing” that defines our conception of technology?
Marshall McLuhan termed it as the extension of Man, our nervous and sensory systems.
The medium is the message, so I stated in my last column (New Sunday Times, Oct 30).
It was deliberately meant for Steve Job’s innovations as well as the keroncong.
I taught a Science, Technology and Media course centred on Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan more than a decade ago. McLuhan and technology were also central to the Graduate
Seminar course in Mass Communication during the same period.
And I would always emphasise that we are media/technology par excellence. And inherently, technology has contributed to the dynamics of human civilisation.
At different stages the various media such as clay, papyrus, parchment and paper generated and monopolised knowledge which was used to build, and also destroy thoughts and ideas.
But those media need other technologies, perhaps more fundamental and portent. These are the alphabet, language and writing traditions.
The computer or the mobile telephone cannot function without language. How technology affects us and how we are affected by it lies in language — a technology and a tool determining who we are and how we think.
In another dimension, language as technology pulls together other ideational forms — of culture, the intellect and aesthetics, extending ourselves. Technology as the extension of Man, and the medium as the message.
These are print-based representations of information. A medium simply offers different ways of representing information. Each medium is different – not equal or superior to each other.
Using McLuhan’s analysis of technology and the modern media leads to an awareness of the media environment and provides an understanding of technology and social life.
McLuhan’s career can be divided into several periods: his early years as a traditional literary critic, ending with the publication of his first book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951); a transitional phase in the 1950s during which he adapted the work and edited the journal Explorations; and the mature stage of the 1960s, when he published his theories in the
Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962 and Understanding Media two years later, followed by several lesser works.
In McLuhan, we see form over content and form as content. Media empiricists and social scientists would frown at McLuhan.
His explanation of “pure information” as manifested by the electric light is the epitome of a “medium without a message”, and which can only have content when interrelated with another medium.
McLuhan comments in Understanding Media: “The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no ‘content’ and this make(s) it an invaluable instance of how people fail to study media at all. The message of the electric light is like the message of electric power in industry, totally radical, pervasive and decentralised.
“For electric light and power are separate from their uses, yet they eliminate time and space factors in human association, exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone and TV, creating involvement in depth (1964: pages 24-25).”
Those among the mainstream media and communication academic community with a fetish for content would want to pause and reappraise their approach to inquiry.
The “content” of any medium is always another medium; or the content of media is less important than the impact of each medium at social, psychological and sensory levels. McLuhan’s famous phrase, “the medium is the message”, refers to the change of scale, pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.
The effects of media technology occur not on the conscious level of opinion and concepts, but on the subliminal level of sense ratios and patterns of perceptions.
I first studied McLuhan more than three decades ago. Then he was a pop-culture celebrity, popular among hippies and the counter-culture movement. He repeatedly referred to “numbness”,
“trance”, “subliminal state”, “somnambulism” and “narcosis” induced by the media as extension of Man. The media, as he had described it, is psychedelic.
McLuhan’s argument falls back to the significance of the Greek myth of Narcissus.
In chapter four of his Understanding Media, titled The Gadget Lover, McLuhan refers to the youth Narcissus who mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. “The extension of himself by mirror,” writes McLuhan, “numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of himself and had chosen a close system.”
McLuhan, who graduated in Engineering and later completed a MA and a PhD in English Literature from Trinity College, Cambridge University, died on the last day of 1980.
Digital emergence and cyber cultures such as Facebook were just a metaphor back then.
From the McLuhanist perspective, Facebook resonates with the myth of Narcissus.
He should be re-read in the original, more so due to the deliberate obfuscation and lack of linearity in his writings. The prophecy of technology has arrived.
The spirit is in the medium, not the content.
Sources : New Straits Times
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