Just thinking out loud…

My proposed Masters thesis topic concerns the advent of ‘Digital Man’. Briefly, Marshall McLuhan suggested that the development of the printing press impacted on the psychology of literate culture. Likewise, the electric ground for media created another shift. A technological determinist, McLuhan stated “The Medium is the Message” – that is to say, the way in which a message is received is at least as important as the content of that message itself. McLuhan died in 1980 – just slightly too early to witness the early years of the new digital ground.

My theory is that having existed in a ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’, and then in an ‘Electric Galaxy’ – man is beginning now to operate in a ‘Digital Galaxy’ – a distinct psychological framework from previous eras, characterised by a distinct and discrete ‘mode of being’. The medium changes our ratio of senses and our way of experiencing the world around us.

From time to time, I’ll jot some notes here as they come to mind – thinking out loud. Feel free to email me, but be aware that these are not complete and coherently structured thoughts. I’m just batting ideas around. I work on the 90/10 rule. 90% of all ideas are crap – but the more you come up with, the higher the yield of the 10% variety. Fingers crossed.

So here we go – some thoughts on the advent of Digital Man. In today’s episode – How do you measure the point at which an ‘industrial society’ becomes an ‘information society’?

Digitisation

The reduction of knowledge to binary data marks a significant shift from analogue, linear, sequential and continuous thought patterns, to non-linear, non-sequential and discrete thought. Technology itself does not does not distinguish a significant break in societal patterns (how do you measure when there is sufficient technology to make for a break from one to another?) – otherwise what we would be living in would be a ‘high-tech’ (or possibly ‘high-mech’) cuture. Digitisation – moreover, binary digitisation – leads to an informational society.

Economy

In fact, since the development of labour capital, economy has always been informational. Money is an exchange of value – or of perceived value. An amount of work is assigned a value, then exchanged. This representation of labour in fiscal terms is no more than informational, despite the direct, tangible effect of its exchange (food, clothing, shelter, freedom of movement). Arguments over whether an ‘information economy’ has superceded a goods and services economy overlook the fact that all economy is, by definition, informational. However, at the basis of this economy, labour is no longer the sole or even primary means of deriving value. Knowledge, thought, ideas, creativity – these become the basis of a knowledge-based informational economy. That information can be codified and transmitted at light speed around the world provides a seemingly significant break. Ideas have always been exchangable for money. But money, unlike those ideas, has always been tangible. In an ‘information age’, finance is no more real or tangible than the thoughts for which they are exchanged.

The economy of a computer gaming community – Everquest, for instance, with its Platinum Points, or the Neopets web community, with its neopoints monetary system – is freely convertible (often sold for US dollars on e-Bay) and of as much tangible value as any other currency. The monetary system – an abstract construct like any other monetary system (at least since the removal of ties between the US dollar and gold bullion) – is represented as an exchange of value for time spent labouring online in the context for which that economy exists – no longer geographically place-bound, but set in the context of the space of the online game or web community.

Occupation

The point at which an information society commences can be perceived, at least in part, at the point at which the majority of employment becomes informational. However, this too overlooks certain key criteria of the digital mode. “Digital Man” is defined not in terms of what he does, but how his reality is interpreted and mediated.

A farmer still grows crops, but these are now configured in calculated yield ratios, price per hectare and so on – and these ratios are even analysed in a paddock-by-paddock analysis with the aid of GPS devices; linked to multinational conglomerates and computer-mediated accounting practices. That said, a farmer’s existence, whilst dominated by day-to-day activity, is still shaped by forces outside the manual labour engaged in as ‘work’. He is not his job. Recreational time is largely computer-mediated. Satellite TV, the Internet and mobile phones all play their part. The isolationism once experienced as a West Coast farmhand is intruded upon by an ability to participate in global events. He is brought face-to-face with murderers and politicians, the world of the celebrity and the arguments of the political dissident. Compact discs, DVDs, email – a proliferation of digital media impacts as significantly upon the thought processes of the manual labourer as on his white collar information sector counterpart.

A knowledge-worker is not necessarily someone whose livelihood depends upon the movement (or storage) of information – lawyer, accountant, teacher, librarian, network consultant – but someone whose daily activities are bound in informational representation. While your activities and the fruit of your labour may well be completely organic, tangible and physical, the conception of that labour is typically understood and configured digitally.

Lifeworlds

‘Digital Man’ speaks of lifeworlds – interior existence configured digitally, rather than merely behavioural exteriors. ‘Information Workers’, though – both information providers and information distributors (perhaps even information storers – and information gatekeepers) – are not distinguished hierarchically in this analysis. The sheer ratio of info workers to non-info workers does not provide any information as to the perceived importance of what it is they do. As more people enter the digital “priesthood” (priests were perhaps the only real pre-Gutenberg information workers), the social status of these latter-day priests is devalued – or rather, revalued – to be no more or less significant than that of their non-info counterparts. The de-mystification process that mass media provides impacts heavily on this: the curtain behind which the priesthood operates has been drawn back.

Education

The electric ground came into its own when the first generation of children grew up watching TV before learning to read. The digital ground seems likely to follow the same path, as the first generation of children grows up using digital services (playstation, the Internet, CDs, DVDs) before attending school.

Interestingly, the new mindset is not reinforced – or even reflected – in the school system. While nobody would argue that text literacy should be phased out in schools, they remain largely immune even to the electric age – let alone the digital age.

New forms of intelligence are being exhibited by the Playstation generation. For instance, the ability to cope with simultaneous multiple strands of problem solving goes far beyond the mere hand-eye coordination advantages typically ascribed to the medium. Complex problem solving skills operating with multiple variables goes beyond the print-bound, ’cause and effect’ single strand analysis currently favoured in scientific schools of thought. Is it possible that a cure for AIDS or cancer could result from an approach that does not simply look for linear causality from within a print-bound culture?

That’ll do for now – though I’d like to explore this question further in terms of spatial and cultural analyses. Perhaps tomorrow…

As a springboard to this line of reasoning, I’ve been reading a book called ‘The Media Reader: Continuity and Transformation’, edited by Hugh MacKay and Tim O’Sullivan (1999, Sage Publications, London), which includes an essay by Frank Webster called ‘What Information Society?’, with which I have significant issues, but enjoyed a great deal nonetheless.

Currently listening to ‘Maxim’s de Paris’, mixed by Albert de Paname & Felix (Wagram Records). Beats working for a living…