Humanity lives in an era of information and interdependency within the global sphere. According to Hamid Mowlana, information is the most distributed good within this era of globalization and globalism.[1]
Information on the global is available and transmitted through media institutions. A medium connects and makes accessible, in other words, mediates at least a pair of “worlds”; the outside macro-globe and the inside micro-space. The outside world is thus indirectly experienced through a two-dimensional paper or even three-dimensional screen, transmitted letters, voices and sounds. In the words of Walter Lippmann, founder of the public opinion theory, derived from the very first chapter The World Outside And The Pictures In Our Heads of his 1922 published Public Opinion:
The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined. [2]
The primary medium connecting us to the (global) outside has evolved from spoken utterances, the printed newspaper, radio sounds, the cinema and television screen, to virtually available images and sounds in cyberspace. The internet combines all preceding media forms–the printed word, the spoken utterances and sound waves, photo-graphs, and moving imagery as well as audio sounds of television and film–in a hybrid and virtual mode.
Marshall McLuhan refers to a medium as an “extension of ourselves“.[3] While Modern Times have always indulged in the man-machine visionaries, in cyberspace, (wo)man and machine merge into a cyborg.[4] This merging has been preceded by the discussion of “biomechanics” with the advent of technology.[5] Donna Haraway describes in her Cyborg Manifesto that those (bio)technologies “are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies”:[6]
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction.[7]
Describing (changing) human perception are corporeal experiences with which this outside world is experienced. The sensual experiences Lippmann describes in 1922 basically have not changed, but they have expanded. Predominantly, the sensual Cyber experience consists of the acts of watching and listening. However, in the cyber chronotopos or the Cyber-Spheral[8], and with the specific novel prod-user experience that is explored later, it is not only the eye and the ear that opens those worlds, but the fingertips that type, seeking other texts and writing one’s own, the mouth that speaks into a microphone, the face that is put in front of a webcam, and the body that performs for a clip; broadening the cyber experience to an almost holistic[9], almost synaesthetic bodily experience; transmitted, however, through the means of a machine. In the Cyber, images are digitally produced and uploaded, becoming virtually available, and therefore infinitely reproducible.
Returning to the modes of perception, most accounts focus on what is lost within the cyber. However, some tasks are (re)gained. Producing one’s very own internet webpage outlet, one’s own film clip or audio material without an elaborate studio, and digitally editing one’s photo- and soundwork and endowing them with virtual features have been made possible with the advent and accessibility of technology.
[1] Mowlana, Hamid: Global Information and World Communication, p. 26.
[2] Lippmann, Walter: Public Opinion.
[3] McLuhan,
[4] Haraway, Donna: A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, In: Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html, <15.>.
[5] Siegert, Bernhard: There are No Mass Media. In: Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich/Marrinan, Michael (eds.): Mapping Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Digital Age. Stanford:
[6] Haraway: A Cyborg Manifesto, p. 164.
[7] Haraway: A Cyborg Manifesto, p. 149.
[8] Looking for a term that combines the dimension of time and space, such as the Greek chronotopos, I create the term spheral, via blending of the terms sphere and era. With this term, it is stressed that the virtual is a continuum between time and space, i.e. that the internet is a medium space that continuously changes throughout time.
[9] Tasting and smelling have not been part (yet) of the cyber-experience. The human being, even when being immersed and submerged into the Cyborg, (s)he remains an organum, not a machine.
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