As someone who is frequently asked, "What's coming next?" I find that talking about the future is perhaps one of the easiest things to do: you are never wrong, because the future never actually arrives. Marshall McLuhan used to say, "Never predict anything that hasn't already happened", because – and this is most important – "The future of the future is the present".
Aye, there's the rub – the problem is not one of seeing the future, but of perceiving the present. The present is a very tricky thing, because it has a habit of getting away from us and very quickly becoming the past. When I ask people to speak of the present, most often they will speak of anything but the present. They will speak about the future – what they're about to do. They will speak about what they have just done – the past.
It is actually very difficult to speak about the present since most of our language is geared towards these other two temporal orientations. This is not surprising, since, for the last 3,000 to 4,000 years, we have designed and developed our culture almost exclusively for the purposes of recalling the past, or attempting to impose our will on the future.
Harold Adam Innis, an influential colleague of Marshall McLuhan, described how certain technological innovations had an inherent bias towards either "binding" or spanning time, or spanning space. For example, think of the Ancient Egyptians. They constructed the great pyramids and the Sphinx, inscribed and painted hieroglyphics on the walls. Such technologies and artefacts were not particularly designed for efficient transport, except perhaps to be conveyed to the underworld.
Such artefacts have the ability to transcend time as, indeed, they have conveyed much about the society of Ancient Egypt to our modern time. Innis observed that societies that created cultural artefacts that bind or transcend time were often those with a primarily oral culture, rooted in tradition, with a hierarchical social order that controlled access to knowledge. These societies developed specific technologies from which emerged both the tangible and intangible artefacts that would allow them to pass the stories from generation to generation.
Compare this with a society that developed technologies that were relatively easy to transport, and additionally, the technologies of transportation itself – from wheeled chariots to radio waves and receivers. These space-transcendent societies tend to be literate cultures, meaning that they not only possess a phonetic alphabet – an incredibly powerful and magical piece of technology –, they tend to be dominantly influenced by the effects of societal literacy.
This enables a society to crystallize its past, in other words, to create a relatively immutable history that can stand by itself. Influence at a distance necessitates the separation of the word from the person that uttered the word. With the written alphabet, space-transcending, literate-dominant societies tend to focus on the future – and telling their stories to the future – since they need not worry about preserving the past. Space-transcendent societies, possessing the phonetic alphabet and mass literacy, are visually dominant. In the 20th century, we were almost overrun with visual domination: advertisements, photographs, television, magazines and books. In order to have intellectual credibility in that visually-dominant world, you must be a published author – you must, in other words, have command of the book.
To have mass appeal, you can be a famous movie director or actor, in other words, a master of the silver screen or the glowing television screen. But does the visual bias remain dominant in its effects on the creation and evolution of culture today? Is seeing still believing, or has the predominating visual orientation of the past, say, 600 years been pushed beyond the limit of its potential, and is now revealing its reversal characteristics? Have we yet learned to "see through" much of the visual trickery perpetrated by Photoshop magicians? And, on the other hand, have we conditioned ourselves to only see that which we already believe, ignoring what might otherwise have been mind-altering evidence – if I didn't believe it, would I have seen it?
Multi-way, instantaneous, and mystical
It is clear that something has changed in the way we perceive, and interact with, our world. In the visually dominated world linearity, sequential causality, and order ruled the day. In most endeavours there was almost always a starting point, a middle, and an end. I can remember when I first experienced the mind shift from linear space to an electrically-accelerated something else – at the time I couldn't even describe it. In 1993, someone first showed me the World Wide Web on what was then the Mosaic browser. Naively, I asked, "Where does it start?" "On the home page", was the response. "And where is the home page?" I asked. "Wherever you start", came the almost mystical reply.
Under conditions of multi-way, instantaneous communications, our conventional notions of space and time are called into question. Any artefact that we create in this space is but one click away from any other object or person – anything and everything in this omni-centric sphere of connections is immediately proximate to anything and everything else. We do not bind space as in Innis's conception, since there is no space to bind. Similarly, our experience of artefacts and creations under conditions of pervasive and instantaneous communication always occurs now – immediately in the present. The first time we encounter anything or anyone it has just flashed into existence, at least as far as we can tell. So, just as we do not bind space, neither do we bind time.
It seems that the 21st century has arrived in the context of a spherical field of experience that binds neither time nor space, but rather, transcends both. In a ubiquitously connected world the experiential reality becomes one of "everywhere is here and every-when is now". What is the nature of the artefacts that are characteristic of our pervasively connected culture? What is the focus of our cultural narrative? To whom are we telling our stories?
I had been puzzling over this paradox for quite some time. It seems to be the "Cultural Riddle" of our era, almost worthy of an electronic cyber-Sphinx: what binds neither time nor space, but transcends both? What is neither fixed in place nor transportable, but exists everywhere at the same time? It occurs to me that the defining characteristic of artefacts of our time is ephemerality. An ephemeral artefact exists precisely in the present, and can only be experienced at the moment of its creation. It defies conventional descriptions of magnitude and is pervasively located. I submit that the cultural artefacts of our time are characteristically experiential in nature and create a unique form of narrative by which we are telling our stories to ourselves.
For the November 2003 opening of the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Japan, artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer created an interactive installation called "Amodal Suspension". A network of 20 robotically-controlled searchlights sent sequences of flashes into the night sky. The flashes were actually coded SMS messages from mobile phones or websites that had been contributed to the exhibit by being sent from one person to another, intercepted by the installation, and held "suspended" in the sky. The intended recipient instead received an email stating that a message was waiting for them in the sky of Yamaguchi. "Amodal Suspension" was a cultural artefact that could only be experienced through direct participation in its creation. Unlike traditional cultural artefacts that can stand alone and possess an intrinsic value apart from their creator, an ephemeral artefact like "Amodal Suspension" not only requires people for its inception, but also for its continued existence. It is continual acts of participatory creation that imbue ephemeral artefacts with their value. Today, we are no longer merely consumers of culture or cultural artefacts. We are instead – all of us – producers of our indicative cultural creations that exist for as long as we are experiencing them – and no longer.
One of the most important effects of massively multi-way, instantaneous and ubiquitous communications is pervasive proximity. We experience everyone to whom we are connected – and conceivably everyone to whom we are potentially connected – as if they are exactly next to us. The effect is that of hundreds, or thousands, or millions of people coming together in zero space, so that there is no perceptible distance between them. This ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity is the ultimate expression of McLuhan's "global village".
Ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity accelerate what has, until recently, been a project on the time scale of centuries, but now occurs in days or – given the right meme – in hours or even minutes. Electricity accelerates communication in a way that transcends both time and space. For example, the use of sound accelerated and extended by electricity enabled us to "reach out and touch somebody" regardless of where they were, whether we used telegraph, radio, telephone or something else. Indeed, communication accelerated by electricity has recently made the experience of the instantaneous relatively common in our contemporary world, be it instantly connecting with another person via mobile telephone, instantly connecting with information through the internet, or instantly connecting with someone else's immediate experience, vicariously seeing through their eyes and tapping directly into their memory, through digital photography. Thus, the dominant sense in this UCaPP world is no longer vision, despite the fact that many, but not all, of the portals to this world are screen-based. The dominant sense in this world is touch.
A UCaPP culture that is increasingly comfortable with living precisely in the present is changing its cultural artefacts to reflect the subtle shift from visual dominance to a "touching culture". Here is a simple example. An older generation grew up familiar with the cliché of the "Kodak moment" – a scene or experience that has to be captured as a snapshot so that the moment is preserved for the future as a remembrance. This sort of "moment" is a characteristic artefact of the literate/visual age. Contrast this with the "Bell moment". In Canada, there is a television advertisement that runs every Remembrance Day in which a teenager, walking along a desolate beach, pulls out his cell phone to call his grandfather. "I'm not in Paris, grandpa", the young man says. "I'm in Dieppe. I was calling to say 'thank you'." The teenager is connecting and sharing his experience of that beach by instantly "reaching out and touching someone" very close and special to him. The act of sharing that experience is a characteristic artefact of our time that is ephemeral in nature – it exists for the duration of the experience and no longer.
As our society increasingly turns to digital media, recording both our lives and our culture, the "snapshot generation" that captured experiences and created archival remembrances has changed to become a generation that instantaneously shares experiences. We are driven to create ephemeral artefacts that "bind the present", and seamlessly connect physical and cyber spaces in ways that correspond to our perceptions and experiences of transcendent reality. We ourselves are the embodiment of those artefacts – simultaneously the actors and the audience, the performers and the performance, the spectators and the spectacle. It is not the global village that we inhabit, but the global theatre on whose stage we play. Photographs, clippings, scrapbooks, and even works of art and sculpture as forms of cultural memory give way to ephemeral artefacts that exist for a brief instant in the span of time, as a sharing of experience itself. If they are captured at all, they are as arrangements of electrons buried within ultimately disposable devices.
When a hard drive fails, or the memory card is erased or misplaced, or when a future computer can no longer read today's media, our culture becomes a little more forgetful, and a little more forgotten. The consequence of our technological advancement is that, centuries from now, historians may well look back on our time as a type of dark age. Compared to earlier generations, very little of our cultural history is being recorded so that it will actually exist into the future. We will literally be a forgotten culture, because those who will come after us will have technologically "forgotten" how to read, or even locate, our ephemeral artefacts. If we want to be remembered at all, we must additionally create artefacts that will travel through time, as the writings, art, and photographs of our forebears have come to us.
Tags:
analysis, mcluhan, pervasive proximity, prophecy
Posted at: 12:49 PM | Add Comment
