The completion backward principle

Another one from the Archives…

I have this theory that digital technology marks the turning point of human communication.

I don’t think it’s ‘a’ turning point – I said ‘the’ turning point. Theorists argue whether or not the internet is revolutionary. If they’re talking revolutionary in the sense that it’s turned things around so they start to move in the opposite direction, then I’m inclined to take the affirmative.

The history of communication has moved through seven main stages, as far as I can figure it. At the different stages, a human’s ability to communicate, for example, ‘something to do with apples’ would appear like this:

- facial expression and body language of hunger, perhaps some crying
- pointing to the apple and grunting enthusiastically
- saying ‘Would you mind passing an apple’
- drawing a picture of an apple, and a man pointing to his mouth
- leaving a handwritten note on the fridge saying ‘don’t forget apples’
- publishing a book about the health benefits of apples
- hosting a television reality show called ‘When Apples Go Bad’

Does digital space need to mimic physical space?

Where do you want to explore today?

I’ve been going back through some of my earliest notes for this project, and struck this one, which raises some interesting ideas around online geography. It’s good to note that we have moved away from such overt travel and movement metaphors, which were always an ill fit, though a useful bridging metaphor until we worked out exactly how to conceptualise digital space as natives (or settlers) rather than tourists.

Wednesday, April 10, 2002
I said yesterday I’d give some thought to spatial relationships in as much as they reflect upon the question of how we know where an ‘Information Society’ starts. Manuel Castells seems a good kick-off point in this regard. His conception of the ‘space of flows’ is an interesting one – far more so than the frontier metaphor espoused by the likes of John Perry Barlow, Alvin Toffler, Howard Rheingold, etc.

Despite the fact that the internet fails to stack up against ideas of ‘staking a claim’ and ‘declarations of independence‘, you can’t get away from the point that human beings inhabit physical space. To go online does not obsolesce the human body, however much it expands or extends the human mind. Castells’ ‘space of flows’ takes this into consideration, while observing that communication between parties happens in the space between – in the movement of information from physical place to place.

From industrial society to informational society

Here are some notes I wrote when I first started thinking about these issues (and, thankfully, started blogging so I still have those notes) back in 2002. As you might expect, I no longer agree with everything I wrote, and I’ve developed my thinking about this stuff over the last 7 years – but since I’m using this blog as a scrapbook and a single place to capture all this stuff, it would be useful to throw it up here.

If you can think of any texts that would be useful along any of these lines, or have any thoughts on any of this, please be sure to let me know in the comments.

Why you can’t predict the future

I’m reading Ray Kurzweil’s ‘The Singularity is Near‘. It’s an interesting book. Fascinating, even. It’s full of insight and explanations of some of the most important technological advances in human history – and some of its predictions may well come to pass in some form or another. The man, frankly, is amazing.

But I’m reading it as speculative fiction rather than as a guide to the future, because I simply don’t believe that you can extrapolate like that.

Essentially, Kurzweil’s premise is that the way things are going, what with the exponential acceleration of technology, we will at some point in the very near future reach the point where artificial intelligence and human intelligence combine to provide a utopian world, where our thought, wealth and creativity will know no bounds.

I suspect an obstacle around the corner.

Where you stop and I begin

I was particularly interested in a small article in the latest issue of New Scientist magazine, which outlined how the human brain understands tools as part of our physical body.

When we brush our teeth, for instance, the brain conceives of our limb being slightly longer, which is how we map the information about where the end of our brush is, so that we don’t knock our teeth out in the process.

It makes sense, of course, but this is, theoretically, the first instance of a scientific underpinning for McLuhan’s now 30+ year old assertion that media are extensions of ourselves. And in altering the media forms (ie: the tools we use) we thereby alter ourselves and the ways in which we understand our relationship to the world around us.

Cars are an interesting case in point. As we become familiar with driving and the brain is able to map the car onto our physical conception of our place in physical space, we actually have a sense of our width, velocity and proximity as if the car was a part of ourselves.

Changing stories, changing people

I bookmarked an article from New Scientist this week about how storytelling shaped our evolution, and the ways in which narrative is connected to our brain development.

Of course, the obvious thing to point out here is that the ways in which we tell stories, the form they take, the types of stories they are and the ways in which we take them in also change over time – so not only do narratives and storytelling shape our brain, changes in which those stories are manifest alters the kinds of change that result.

Digital narrative differs from printed narrative, which is different again than oral tradition. The hypertextual, interactive nature of storytelling, and the more chronology-independent tales we now tell are characteristic of a digital mode. Digital stories also tend to be far more collaborative than the private world of books, or the rehearsed myths of the campfire storyteller.

And as the stories we tell about ourselves change – and as the myths that guide our beliefs and behaviours change – so too do we change. Humans are not only creatures of communication, we are completely hard-wired for narrative.

And so, we not only evolve in response to the stories we tell, but we also evolve in response to the ways in which we tell stories. This is going to be an interesting thread to watch.

The Sonic Museum and 4-dimensional perception

I’ve been listening to Sonic Museum today, and blogged about it at New Music Strategies.

It got me thinking about how we experience things through our senses, and the way in which (as McLuhan would have it) new media extend our senses.

Simply put, television lets us see things that are much further away than our eyes would ordinarily allow. Radio does the same for our ears. But just as we can extend our senses in terms of distance, we can also extend them in terms of our relationship to time.

Recording can extend our hearing back through time. Digital editing and, in particular, hypertext changes the relationship of our senses to time and space. In a way, digital technology allows us to perceive in 4 dimensions, travelling up and down, side to side and jumping around in the chronology as we see fit.

We can see some of these things being explored in narrative. This is, admittedly, not new – and experimental cinema has messed with sequence for some decades. However, our capacity to process multi-linear and non-sequential narrative has changed with an increasing familiarity with the 4-dimensional perception that comes with digital media.

Mental note made to explore and research this further – and I’d welcome any links to work that may have already been done in this area.

Book report

I left this book idea alone for a while, which was both necessary, and kind of a shame, because it is still very much a book I want to write – but a book that’s going to take a lot of research, writing and fact-checking.

I still think that the premise is not only an interesting one – but an important one: that we ourselves are quite literally changing and adapting in response to our technological environment. And I think it’s one that we need to think more clearly about because those responses and adaptations should be deliberately selected rather than haphazard.

But interestingly, it’s only because I’ve started work on another book – one that will take a great deal of time away from any chance I ever had of working on this one – that has spurred me to revisit Now We Are Different and pick up the story. Sometimes you just get into the right frame of mind for things – and something as simple as discovering a new WordPress theme can galvanise you into action.

So – actually, I’m writing three books right now: this one, Deleting Music and a co-authored undergrad text book called ‘Understanding the Music Industries’.

Memory and evolution

I’ve been reading a lot about memory this past week, and one of the things that strikes me is that we don’t yet have a good enough model for equating the biochemistry of the brain with the experiential phenomenon of memory.

When I say I remember my 10th birthday or I remember what happened at the party last night, you know what I mean. But there’s an amazing array of processes that go into that – in terms of imagery, emotional connection and recall of facts and impressions.

However, although you can remember an event that took a long time to transpire, the act of rememberance happens in a very short space of time.

Humanity lobotomy

Yes, this is definitely related.

I get accused from time to time of being a Technological Determinist. It’s sort of true: I believe that technology affects history. But I don’t believe that we are powerless in the face of our technologies. The whole point of evolution is that it is a creative response to an environmental change.

Computers don’t make us send emails, they allow us to. The fact that we send and receive so many of the damn things is not an inevitable consequence of digital technology, but the fact that we approach it uncritically and strategy-less.

So I guess the central purpose of the book (and this blog) is to underline the notion that it’s impossible to have a useful creative response to change unless you actually understand what’s going on. Ignorance killed the dinosaurs.

In the interests of adaptation to media shift and active resistance to unwanted technological change, please watch this video.