by Maria Monteiro

Lately I have been assaulted, like so many on the brink of a new century and, in this case, of a new millennium, by thoughts about what the future has in store for us as we plunge past the hopefully not too hazardous Y2K bug. In order to try to fathom it, and as a little exercise, I’m trying to blank my mind and register the first things that come to it, and this is what’s coming out:

The war in the Balkans and how we seem to have lost touch with the fact that we’re all human and identical on some essential basic human level.

Linnédata and Cell shack up together (the news in this morning’s Svenska Dagbladet) — yet another case of the M&A frenzy that’s been hallmarking the digital communications and media industry for quite some time.

The cantaloupe that I bought yesterday and discovered this morning half rotten in my fruit bowl. That makes me so incredibly angry, how supermarkets in a supposedly high-standard country get away with selling half rotten products to hurried shoppers like me.

The Oklahoma school kids murder spree that I re-read in a Newsweek still lying about — how the kids looked like any other gangly pimple-faced male teens going from falsetto to baritone, yet they collected this impressive arsenal that reminds me of the computer game Doom that I play when I’m too tired to do anything but mindless virtual killing

My seventeen year-old nephew by marriage handing over to grandma on Mother’s Day (yesterday, as I write) this drawing of a black guy alone on a big white page wearing a T-shirt displaying the text ‘Fuck The Whites’, and explaining the symbolism of the uniform dead-pan white surrounding area, while my fragile, well groomed mother-in-law (his grandmother) tentatively mouths the words ‘fuck’-‘the’-‘whites’.

I better stop at this point because the direction this is taking is all too depressing and clear. Anger, disconnectedness, short history memory span. And my field of work — media — sure bears a good portion of the responsibility.

Think about it: our media, or better said, our mass media. We got respectable daily newspapers popularizing themselves like Imelda Marcos suddenly giving away her shoe collection. By popularizing I mean: going popular press style. More, bigger pictures with shorter captions saying exactly, no more no less, what the picture says, or vice versa. Reporter bylines pushed to the back pages, which erodes the authority and sense of context that journalistic analysis used to have once upon a time. We got commercial broadcast TV running on a diet of soaps, games, series, movies, so-called reality shows, some vaguely exotic docutainment info bytes and news dieted to sound bytes into tight airtime schedules.

This is what we got: an all time record of mass commodification of information that is no longer information, but an experience of information. Surfing TV channels to catch my most favorite program at the moment. Scanning newspaper pages for a romantic tactile experience of the information absorption image from once upon a time when there was more time. Surfing the Net for gratification of need now. Not need in general in a grander scheme of meaning. Not curiosity. Need now — invisible yesterday, gone tomorrow.

This is what we got: an all time record of media fragmentation, which is augmented, not diminished, by the convergence and consolidation of media and communications companies. After all, we’re all human. We all function on an anti-dissonance brain principle: in the presence of a mess, take the route of fewer disturbances. In the presence of messy media, just fill it all with uniform, minimum risk content. Stuff that is familiar, ergo easily digested. How’s this for an example: go to any online version of a Swedish newspaper and check it out for bylines. You won’t see any — or if you see some, it’s probably there by accident. Check out the number of things to click — buttons, icons, hypertext. You’ll see plenty. The experience of scanning a newspaper as more valuable than the experience of actually absorbing information content is epitomized by most online newspapers. You don't read the news, you just click through them, and the clicking experience has become ersatz for the reading experience. Now go to the New York newspaper www.villagevoice.com, and check out the difference. Not that the gone byline syndrome has never affected America, quite the opposite. Not that they don’t know that digital information can be made clickable. But the Village Voice seems to have recognized an opportunity to get back those old values that newspapers used to have. Credibility, authenticity, authority, by virtue of bylines, interpretation, and a careful arrangement of more and less significant information so that the layout matches significance. This is the opportunity that the Village Voice, in my view, has recognized: in a commodified alienated world, individuals hunger for identity. In a world where broadcast media is reduced more and more to entertainment and news bytes, print can win back its role as a prime source of self-identity and social belonging.

It is now, what, more than three decades ago since the issue of media affecting all levels of our private and social lives was raised by the Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan. In his book Understanding Media from 1964, McLuhan writes that we increasingly turn away from the content of messages to study the total effect — the effect of a total situation, which is the medium, the context for the message. In the same book, McLuhan remarks on how a new media is never new. A new media always appropriates an older media as its content: novels were the content of movies, movies the content of TV. (Likewise, mostly print, but also TV and radio, are the content of Internet, and Internet will as surely as we breathe air be the first content of interactive digital TV.) The same book analyzes how specialist media technologies shatter societies to smithereens. The immediate and self-evident interdependency, mutuality, touching and hearing of tribal societies is pulverized when it encounters any specialist medium — a medium that is mechanical, uniform, and repetitive. Specialist media, by speeding up exchange and information, both commodifies knowledge and breeds specialist, fragmented knowledge and action, leading to the collapse of the tribal structure. Specialist media has resulted in today’s society: linear, open, atomistic, compartmentalized, bureaucratic, individualistic, lacking commitment to one view, one god, and to each other.

However, for McLuhan, there was an antidote to specialist media: namely, ‘electric circuitry’. Electric circuitry enables the implosion (from margins to center) of the once exploded (from center to margins) tribal society, since the speed of transmission — the speed of light — makes all events on the planet simultaneous. Electric circuitry, a non-specialist technology, reunites the atomistic world into a one big Global Village — a simultaneous happening. In an age of such simultaneity of information, all walls between people, age groups, nationalities, economies come tumbling down (McLuhan on McLuhanism, 1966).

Nobody can deny how remarkably prophetic McLuhan was. Much of what he said in the early sixties remains quotable today — and much more obviously so today than in the early sixties where he appeared as obscure to plenty. But the concept of electric circuitry as the retribalizer doesn’t quite hold. Today, we have the advantage over the people of the early sixties of experiencing the electric circuitry phenomenon. CNN can be seen by virtually anyone around the globe. A non-specialist technology that closely resembles his electric circuitry concept, namely, the Internet, has spread its reach to the most remote corners of this world and permeates the daily lives of a good share of people on this planet. Yet, I fail to see the walls come tumbling down. In fact, and in many ways, the opposite is happening. Watching the war in the Balkans on TV, the school murders in Oklahoma, the mad cows in the UK, we become acutely aware of our difference — of our different place, our different nation. When the rest of the world enters our homes, we are grateful for not being them. For being different. Moreover: we want to stay that way. The rest of the world is a threatening place. We may join an online Kosovo discussion group. But we don’t want any true intimacy with that. We don’t want to belong to that Village.

The Internet as today’s daily reality of McLuhan’s electric circuit society also perpetuates in many ways the atomistic, fragmented nature of the detribalized world. The medium is not specialized: it can accommodate any media, any genre, any author. The medium itself reflects a key feature of tribal societies, mutual interdependency and interconnectivity. Its digital nature makes it possible to implement interconnections and interdependencies of all sorts of information more easily than ever before. The Internet, apparently, ought to be the messiah that unites the planet. But I fail to see this happening on any massive scale. Certainly, there are small tribal pockets of chat and multiplayer games. But this is the exception rather than the rule. The rule is rather a strengthening, or one could say an exaggeration, of what has been true for the media that preceded the Internet.

Further fragmentation and commodification of information hallmark the Internet as we know it today. Both of which contribute to strengthen what French social theorist Jean Baudrillard described as the alienation of post-modern society. An alienated society is a society where people have lost touch with reality and have replaced it (the consumption of) symbols of reality. An alienated society is a society without history — a society where neither producer nor context are important. Two examples of Internet consumption and application strike me as excellent examples of this alienation. One of them is personal homepages. Personal homepages are not just fragmentation in extremis: they are also the Greek legend of Narcissus gone mass reality — the boy who saw his own representation as distinct and more endearing than himself multiplied endless times all over the Web. The other is online newspapers: exaggerations of the alienating flatness of the popular press. Exaggerations because online newspapers are even less authentic and less authoritative than the popular press. Online newspapers are not authentic because the media itself has a short history, they are not tactile, and there is no sense of what is on any given page at any given time since news can easily be altered throughout the day. The medium is less authoritative because bylines are (also) hidden and the stories are aligned on an equal relevance basis in a typically left-sided frame. And, as previously stated, the clicking experience — a symbol of reading — provides the reading experience. Had Descartes been around, he would have revised his ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ (I think, therefore I exist) to read ‘delibo, ergo sum’. I nibble, therefore I exist.

The consumer-driven nature of the medium further enforces the alienation from self and society — or, in other words, from history and context. An interactive medium that is globally fed and globally accessible around the clock stimulates the absence of context and history. Context becomes individual need. History becomes now. The motivation to consume the interactive medium is individual need now. Perhaps this would be different if broadband Internet access becomes universal and inexpensive. Or perhaps not. There has never been enough broadband. And the medium would still have been fed, in the absence of better ideas and in the natural, instinctive avoidance of dissonant realities, with the content of other media: TV, radio, newspapers, corporate marketing materials, ATMs. A content which will soon enough be fed to gadgets of life beyond Internet: digital TV, WAP mobiles, refrigerator doors and what not. The content of this media will be the Internet.

At the about the same time that he recognized how instant circuitry causes the Global Village, McLuhan also recognized how merely stating the existence of this phenomena — this stunning new proximity — wasn’t very useful. What is important is what it will mean to me, to each individual. What was important was the significance and consequence of the wired planet. One consequence that he identified was the violence that is implicit in a mass media age.

In the late sixties, McLuhan had gone from the ‘Medium as Message’ to the ‘Medium as the Massage’. Medium as massage is about how every new medium gives the culture where it exists a complete, unexpected and unintended work over (a massage). It is also about how the medium is the mass age: its content is the mass audience. Unlike its common use in the day-to-day workings of media agencies, McLuhan didn’t see a mass audience as a function of a (large) number. A mass audience is rather a function of speed and disembodiment: in an electric medium like, e.g., TV or radio, the sender is sent and instantly present everywhere. This makes, in turn, for disembodied users everywhere — the individual recipients everywhere, items whose individuality is erased by the simultaneous wide scale happening. In Interview magazine in 1974, McLuhan declared that being surrounded by all this information, as enabled by electric circuitry, reduces individuals into nobodies by merging each with everybody. He extended this further to the electronic media world in a letter to Clare Westcott in 1975, ‘today, the electronic revolution, the wired planet, and the information revolution, involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.’ The following year, in a Canadian Forum interview, he stated that the loss of individual, personal meaning via the electronic media ‘ensures a corresponding and reciprocal violence […] for violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence’.

The content of the Internet today is the disembodied, alienated user. It’s an anonymous user in a simultaneous user mass. It’s an alienated user in a producer-less, history-less environment, where products only have value (or not) for their ability (or not) to satisfy a particular need now. It’s a disembodied symbol of the user represented by the user’s personal homepage and aliases in chat groups, all of which are more thrilling than the user himself. If McLuhan’s prophecies hold, then the content of post Internet interactive media — digital interactive TV, WAP and so forth and so on — will be the content of Internet. McLuhan postulated in Understanding Media that the content of a medium — which is an older medium — is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the new medium is then made strong and intense because it is given another medium (something familiar) as content. But the Internet is largely alienation in extremis — the symbol of the symbol of reality that was already here thanks to television. Will such content be juicy enough to shut off the alarm systems of the mind?

I think not. I think that McLuhan is right when he said that, due to electric circuitry, we will witness an implosion of the society, a reversal to tribalism. But not because of the instant speed with which information reaches us, thus uniting us all in a somewhat chaotic interdependent soup. Rather because interactive media digesting itself will cause an awareness, an awakening from the alienated stupor where we’ve been dwelling for quite some decades now. As McLuhan put it, new media not only appropriates an older medium as its content, but also doesn’t leave it in peace. It’ll oppress it and find new shapes and positions for the older medium. This is the oppression that I believe that new interactive digital media will impose on previous media: a reversal to values that bring back identity. A sense of distinction between what’s important and what’s new, what’s important and what’s now. A thirst for true knowledge that is not satiated by the experience of surfing a commodified crest of knowledge. A hunger for meaning and for its subtle shades of interpretation. A longing for the reality of our physical, time-bound bodies, which is brought to us by interaction with physical people and physical environments with all our senses, especially those left to pasture since the advent of sight-and-sound dominant media: smell, taste, touch.

Some of this awakening is already taking place. Some media, like the online version of The Village Voice, have recognized it and chosen to move early. It remains to be seen how much longer it will take for enough Snow Whites to get the wake-up call so that enough commercial interests start filling the media with content that brings us back our lost identity. Until then: keep tuned for more juicy, violent news and thrills at a TV, Internet, radio or computer near you…