TOOLS EXTEND BODY / MIND FUNCTIONS INTO THE WORLD, OBVIOUSLY. THEY RESHAPE THE WORLD, THE PATTERNS OF OUR LIVES AND OUR MINDS, INVISIBLY.
The relationships between human beings and the planet have crossed a dozen completely unprecedented thresholds. Each represents a global crisis: population, climate change, fresh water, ocean health, agriculture, weapons technology, resource depletion, child mortality, the abuse of political and corporate power, toxins in everything, and a host of other public health problems. These crises may seem separate. We may try to fix them one at a time. But in combination, as they compound and accelerate each other, they represent a "meta-crisis" that threatens global civilization. We have come to take for granted a model of "progress" that is actually suicidal.
A RECKONING ...
... means coming to terms with the fact that our destruction and excessive consumption, in the name of progress and plenty, must stop. We must settle our debt to the planet and to each other by learning to live more simply. We will come to respect technology and use it appropriately. We will design for sustainability and anticipate the consequences of every invention.
The fact is that most of us fail to see the essential nature of our relationships with the planet. We fail to notice or care about the increasing speed of change. We ignore the massive consequences of our technologies. These represent fundamental flaws in our thinking and keys to the different thinking we'll need to survive. We cannot seem to summon the mental perspective to understand or manage our impact on the planet.
Marshall McLuhan's four "Laws of Media"...
were spelled out thirty years ago. He coined the term "Global Village" and the catch phrase "the Medium is the Message." He was a little too glib in my opinion, a little too willfully oblique, a little too eager to force people to comprehend his unique jargon. He was also, in my opinion, a genius of the highest order, at least within the context of cultural criticism, media analysis and Information Theory. His ideas are vitally important today, ever more prescient, yet they are absent from the public dialog.
He promoted an entirely new context from which to view and evaluate technology. He defined a powerful form of Information that operates independent of messages and meaning. By adapting our lives and social systems to new technologies, the argument goes, we transform ourselves more dramatically than anything the technologies actually accomplish. Longer discussions of information are HERE and HERE.
McLuhan claims that EVERY technology is an EXTENSION of a human limb, trait or skill. Every technology expands, extends and empowers some natural aspect of human physiology. We adapt to new technologies without realizing that they are changing our basic relationships with the world: the immediate environment, food and shelter, family and tribe, conditions for survival. We focus on the benefits, the new powers they give us and ignore the side effects. By adapting to new technologies, without even trying to predict their long-term impact, we alter our reality in ways that are not apparent until after the adaptation is complete. If this is true it has great significance for our uses of new technologies and for the security of our future.
But this truth exists inside a cultural blind spot the phenomenon itself has created. More on blind spots HERE.
Let's take the newest handheld technological wonder, the Smart Phone, as a point of departure. By McLuhan's Laws, we can observe, sooner or later, four distinct phases of adaptation and types of impact.
MCLUHAN'S FOUR LAWS OF TECHNOLOGY:
1. Every new technology will ENHANCE,
... expand, accelerate or otherwise improve upon one or more existing technologies. The smart phone enhances "land line" technology and the now fading cel phone. It also enhances a number of record keeping functions: address book, note pad, map, budget calculator, snapshot folder etc. It assumes some of the functions of the personal computer, but in a hand-held mode. This may be obvious and mundane to older users, but is probably unnoticed by kids, who have taken to the smart phone like they did to the breast. Scary.
When we factor in the larger impact of the Internet (which McLuhan predicted in 1965) the smart phone expands our access by making it more portable and flexible. It brings to the fingers, the eyes and the mind the expanding global encyclopedia and web of connections. McLuhan said the Internet would extend our nervous systems and consciousness across the planet. Can you imagine? Is it possible? Could we adapt to this new global / mental connection WITHOUT it changing our fundamental reality?
2. Every new technology will REPLACE
... or make obsolete one or more existing technologies. This too may be mundane and obvious. This is what we want new technologies to do. The smart phone replaces or obsolesces the notebook, the land line, the cel phone, the ipod, the walkman, the portable radio, and on and on. (McLuhan has a lot to say about how we turn obsolete technologies into Art, but you have to go dig that up on your own.) OK. On to the less obvious and the un-mundane.
Why mention these first two at all? In an age of ever-expanding and accelerating technologies, particularly information technologies, we need to remind ourselves how they came into being, their history, why we want and use them, to be able to understand how they change us. We cannot examine their less obvious, less mundane impacts, wihout this foundation.
3. Every new technology will RETRIEVE,
... recall or revive some earlier skill or activity that has fallen out of practice. In a tribal village or in a typical family of the 40s, a sense of community and a matrix of instant communication were fundamental components and advantages (obvious, mundane and taken for granted, but vital). Personal feedback, emotional or objective, were instantly available. A sense of continuity, role identity and security were the glue that held those kinds of groups together, all taken for granted and unremarkable.
The smart phone revives these, dynamically, powerfully, but without the direct perception, the local connection, the sensory, holistic human / environmental interface. The Smart Phone provides , or SEEMS to provide, a sense of community, emotional feedback and identity reinforcement, in coded dialects that offer a kind of social membership. But the relationships are virtual, at a physical (and often temporal) distance (I'll answer this text message now, leave that email for later.)
Our sense of interpersonal community began to diminish during the 50s, 60s and 70s, when other social and technological revolutions reset the basic format and fabric of social interaction. TV is the most dynamic example. It is no surprise that we adapt so easily to electronic attachments that retrieve family and tribe in virtual form.
4. And most critically important, every new technology will NEGATE
... or reverse some important aspect of its function, usually long after we have adapted to it and incorporated it into our existence. In other words, this is the law of unintended consequences, as it pervades and impacts the entire culture unconsciously. It represents a lack of foresight that is inherent in our irresistible attraction to the new and powerful.
It's not too early to think about the negative impact of the smart phone. It's clear they have an addictive affect. It allows us to feel and be connected to so much of the world beyond our immediate location; the impression and the fact of this connectedness are extremely powerful, in positive and destructive ways. On the negative side, it fragments our immediate experience (even more than it is already fragmented by other distractions and connections), divides our attention, shortens our attention span, and makes it ever harder to filter important information from trivia, truth from fiction.
Further examples? Seriously? How about the four most powerful technological innovations of the 20th century?
The automobile has restructured the landscape and reorganized our lives around the commute, the parking lot, the mall, the freeway, the traffic jam, and climate change.
The nuclear weapon. If it had not been wartime, we might have imagined the atom bomb without building it. But it was probably inevitable either way. Technology development follows a distinct sequence. Each step leads irresistibly to the next. Once prototyped it must be tested. Once tested it must be produced in quantity, then improved and expanded, until delivery systems and a whole infrastructure must be built around it. And only then does it become possible to begin to evaluate its long term impact. It's important to observe that the nuclear power industry arose as an offshoot and a justification for the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
The television. A harmless "toaster with pictures" or a "vast wasteland"? An amusement? Or an addictive device and a potential instrument of mass mind control? A new focus for family sharing, or a set of stereotypical images that redefined the family and society, excluding whole segments of the population? A sponsored "gift" of free entertainment or the imposition of a new public identity, defined in terms of materialist imagery, spending power and shopping habits?
And the electronic network. The internet, the world wide web and our local connection to it. Both: an extension of the individual nervous system - perceptions, needs, thoughts and knowledge - across the planet. And: an addictive system that hides more information than it presents, destroys concentration, fragments attention and substitutes myriad "virtual" "realities" for direct, holistic experience. Of the many worst cases, it trains gamers to drive robotic weapons to kill innocent civilians on the other side of the screen .... er, um .. the planet.
