Professor Alexander Kuskis, Gonzaga University
I get up in the morning, switch on a couple of lights, pour my coffee, prepare my toast, brush my teeth with an electric toothbrush, turn on my cell phone, wake up my computer, and I am ready to start my day. But after reading through Bill Mckibben’s two readers from The Age of Missing Information, I am ready to throw on my backpack and set off to Yosemite for a week of solitude in the High Sierra to find the secrets of literacy and rebuild community. At a deep primordial level, nature still calls us to listen to its insights on balanced community and intelligence. McKibben (1992, p. 10) suggests bike riding, walking, or hiking in nearby hills to modify the “target of our drift” away from electric media. He reflects that by visiting nature, Americans can modify their electric media habit and find useful remedies to dispel melancholy, and activate natural literacy, empathy, and happiness (McKibben, 1992). Like McKibben, I am living proof of this so-called truth. However, I approach the human-technology dynamic with a balance John Naisbitt calls for in his book Megatrends: high tech/high touch. My favorite thing to do to relieve stress after keeping my head in the books and sitting at the computer for hours is to retreat just two miles from my house to Rancho San Antonio, a nature preserve in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains that is secluded enough to let me clear my thoughts, find new inspiration, and forget about my worries. But then, while running up the mountain, it hits me. I believe people entrenched in our gluttonous American culture who survive on fast food and electronic bits of information could also use the healing forces of nature to improve media literacy and community. Mckibben’s dualistic thinking is a practical approach moving forward from the present—multiple fluid layers of electric media—to an uncertain future. In a 1969 Playboy interview, Marshall McLuhan tags our modus operandi as “the rearview-mirror view of their world…we are always one step behind in our view of the world” (Playboy, 1969, para. 22). If we look more carefully, we might just see the devil at play in our rear view mirror and up ahead. But there is an idea we can use from nature—it’s called adaptation using high tech/high touch. Just as animals adapt to their environment, “human knowledge evolves in an analogous way: people come up with new ideas; these ideas are then exposed to criticism, testing, discussion; and those that survive criticism are published, taught in classrooms, and cited in further publications” (Levinson, 1999, p. 25). What are some other options to consider besides rearview-mirror logic and adaptation?
Taking McLuhan’s lead, “I don’t explain, I explore…what’s going on?” (Levinson, 1999, p. 24; Benedetti & DeHart, 1997, p. 10). This essay’s scope will not give answers on how to maintain literacy standards of yesterday—but will instead briefly explore how we may view our literacy in today’s dynamic environment. Howard Gardner, Professor of cognitive psychology at Harvard Graduate School of Education, offers this insight. In order to understand what is happening to our literacy, “we need to be able to triangulate: (1) to bear in mind our needs and desires, (2) the media as they once were and currently are, and (3) the media as they're continually transforming” (Gardner, 2008, par. 15). Since information moves at the speed-of-light in multiple media and technology evolves daily, I also agree with Gardner.
For humankind, slow or rapid adaptation to change is a mysterious transformation process. There is no one correct balance for everyone. Electronic fluid speed-of-light change to any technology requires us to live in the present with greater understanding. Long before Gardner advocated triangulation, McLuhan’s and Bruce Powers’ (1989, p. x) research at the Centre for Culture and Technology in Toronto “uncovered a tetradic structure” approach to help us understand technology (media) through communication. It consists of a “four-part metaphor: (a) intensify something in a culture, while at the same time, (b) obsolescing something else. Tetrads also (c) retrieve a phase or factor long ago pushed aside, and (d) undergo a modification (or reversal) when extended beyond the limits of their potential” (McLuhan & Powers, 1989, pp. x-xi). This is a cross quad matrix model top-left (intensify) to bottom-right (obsolescing), and bottom-left (retrieve) to top-right (reversal) (Mcluhan & Powers, 1989). The laws of McLuhan’s and Powers’ tetrad model are much more involved with left-right brain hemisphere, visual-acoustic space…but deeper analysis is beyond the scope of this paper. We can see the four-part metaphor in action through this image and these four examples—
Television
(a) Enhances (regional) simultaneous access to entire planet—everybody: “On the air you’re everywhere”
(b) Obsolesces wires, cables, and physical bodies
(c) Retrieves primary and secondary orality in tribal ecological environments: echo, trauma, paranoia, an also brings back primacy of the spatial, musical, and acoustic
(d) Reverses into global village theater (Orson Welles’s Invasion From Mars: no spectators, only actors), and mindless amusement
Airplane
(a) Amplifies vertical and horizontal locomotion
(b) Obsolesces the wheel and the road, the railway and the ship
(c) Brings back aerial perspective with the aura of miniaturization
(d) Reverses into guided projectile (A la 9/11); transforms planet into extended city; urb orbs
Computers-Global Media Networking
(a) Accelerates logical sequential calculations to speed of light; Instantaneous diverse media transmission on global basis: simultaneous planetary feed and counter-feed
(b) Erodes or bypasses mechanical processes and human logic in all sequential operations; Erodes human ability to code and decode in real time
(c) Highlights “numbers is all” philosophy, and reduces numbering to body count by touch; Brings back Tower of Babel: group voice in the ether
(d) Flips into the simultaneous from the sequential; accentuates acoustic over visual space to produce pattern recognition; Reverses into loss of specialism, programmed earth (McLuhan & Powers, 1989, pp. 175-178)
Turbo Tax/eFile
(a) Extends speed, control, calculability, efficiency, predictability, and green movement
(b) Obsolesces paper, traditional mail service, tax professionals and should reduce government IRS work force
(c) Retrieves tribal universality of knowledge placing the power of the U.S. tax code in normal citizens hands
(d) Reverses into George Orwell's 1984 maxim, automated big government has massive data files with individual bank account information.
If we consider McLuhan’s ideas, we see that “the computer is the most extraordinary of man’s technological clothing; it’s an extension of our central nervous system…But despite our self-protective escape mechanisms, the total-field awareness engendered by electronic media is enabling us—indeed, compelling us—to grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious, toward a realization that technology is an extension of our own bodies” (Playboy, 1969, para. 18). In the electronic world, this concept makes man the core “content of the message of the media, which are extensions of himself” (Benedetti & DeHart, 1997, p.155).
By the time I reach the top of the mountain, my mind is clear. From the hills you can see all of San Jose, across the bay to Oakland, north to Stanford University, and sometimes as far as San Francisco. Stopping to think at the top is the most therapeutic part. A look down at the bay from an aviator’s vantage point puts everything into perspective. “The total-field awareness engendered by” nature enables me—“indeed”, compels me—“to grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious” (Playboy, 1969, para. 18). Whatever it was that had me stressed out turns into just another item on the agenda. From the top of my high touch world, I can see just how far I have come by miniaturizing the city below.
References
Benedetti, P., & DeHart, N. (1997). Forward Through the Rearview Mirror: Reflections On and By Marshall McLuhan. Ontario: Prentice-Hall.
Gardner, H. (2008, February). Gardner: Reading, R.I.P.? Retrieved October 11, 2008, from http://www.northjersey.com/opinion/moreviews/Reading_RIP.html
Levinson, P. (1999). Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. New York: Routledge.
McKibben, B. (1992). The Age of Missing Information. New York: Plume.
McLuhan, M., & Powers, B. (1989). The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford.
Playboy Enterprises, Inc. (1969, March). The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Magazine. Retrieved on October 11, 2008, from
http://www.columbia.edu/~log2/mediablogs/McLuhanPBinterview.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment