| The New Science Via Marshall McLuhan |
Page 4 of 6 While WIRED takes its mission seriously, MONDO 2000 does not. MONDO 2000 is a tongue-in-cheek sarcastic publication writing about fringe science and technology. In MONDO 2000 A User's Guide to the Edge there is a page describing McLuhan's contributions, with a picture of him on the opposite page. "McLuhan is speaking of the transition from the industrial (hardware) age, to the information (software) age, in terms that the rest of us wouldn't start using until the mid-eighties. This guy was way ahead of his time. Read everything by him that you can find!"(Rucker [Ed.], 1992, p.166) Virtual Reality provides acoustic and visual perceptions to a user to create a new reality. It is currently a technology in it's infancy. A user dawns a helmet which provides sensory data, a suit provides information about body position. Jaron Lanier is the name most associated with virtual reality. He was the founder of a multi-million dollar company which has developed some of the technology. John Barlow interviewed Jaron Lanier in an issue of MONDO 2000 (1991, p.44-51). Lanier on virtual reality: It's the hottest. In fact, it gets out of the hot-cold continuum entirely. It's not even a medium. It's a new reality. I don't think you can talk about it in McLuhan's terms for that reason. Virtual Reality is not going to be the television of the future. It's going to be the telephone of the future. And that's the key thing. Common wisdom would say that television's brought us the world and created a Global Village. But actually it separates us from the actual experience of the world. Instead, it gives us instead a little denatured version, and one that we're not in control of...so we lose our activity. That's where we really lose the world, because activity is everything. Virtual Reality is the first medium to come along that doesn't narrow the human spirit. That's the most important thing about it. McLuhan would appreciate Lanier's views, but McLuhan laid the foundation in which one can discuss virtual reality. Without McLuhan's contribution it would be most difficult to analyze technologies. Many of the criticisms of McLuhan's during the early 1980's suggest that his work was not in favors among scholars and was on the decline, due to his lack of a theoretical basis. This course seems to have changed in the 1990's, one cannot say whether it is due to the Laws of Media and The Global Village, or to Marshall McLuhan's relevance in today's digital world. I propose that McLuhan's work can be understood as a series of more or less successful attempts to explain a reality that had only partially come into existence even at the time of his death in 1980 and that therefore eluded a clear description even by a wordsmith with McLuhan's talents. McLuhan most frequently referred to this reality as `acoustic space.' Today, we call it `cyberspace'-the `place' we enter when we talk on the phone, listen to the radio, watch television, or communicate in immediate and lasting ways via computer networks.(Levinson, 1990, p.170) Cyberspace is a term coined by the Science Fiction writer William Gibson. It would probably not surprise Marshall McLuhan that pop culture has adopted his theory more readily than the scholastic community. Donald F. Theall a Professor at Trent University notes the similarities between Gibson's writing and McLuhanism: All the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn't, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to the particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry called that. (Gibson, 1989, p.16) "McLuhan's hieroglyphics certainly more than anticipated Gibson's iconics and McLuhan's particular use of hieroglyph or iconology, like that of mosaic primarily derives from Joyce and Giambattista Vico."(Theall, 1992, p.2) Science fiction writers are not the only ones to embrace this notion of cyberspace. The researchers at MIT's Media Lab develop VR(virtual reality) and have conceived "of a VR composed, like the tribal and collective `global village', of `tactile, haptic, proprioceptive and acoustic space involvements.'" (Theall, 1992, pg.3) "Cyberspace is a medium that gives people feeling they have been transported, bodily, from the ordinary physical world to worlds purely of imagination. Although artists can use any medium to evoke imaginary worlds, cyberspace carries the worlds themselves."(Rucker [Ed.], 1992, p.264) John Naisbitt, in the chapter Industrial Society to Information Society from Megatrends, attributes the satellite with creating the global village not the television. Although the style and methodical approach are different, Naisbitt reaffirms the shift from hardware to software through a variety of sources.(Naisbitt, 1982, p.13) Mark Poster using a poststructuralist perspective feels that McLuhan does not go far enough with "the medium is the message". He seems to push the entire issue to an extreme destabilization of all the variables (Poster, 1990, p.15) In Technoploly, The Surrender of the Culture to Technolgy, Neil Postman picks up were Ellul and Mumford left off warning of the dangers of technology. Postman asserts "that it is a mistake to suppose that any technological innovation has a one-sided effect. Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either, but this-and-that."(Postman, 1992, p.4) |
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