A few years ago, I was engaging in some friendly banter and repartee with a colleague when she turned toward her office wall and said, “You see what I have to put up with?” Of course, I immediately knew that she was talking to an imaginary camera; it’s the imaginary camera that’s available to virtually everyone living in our culture, pretty much everyone who is likely to read this blog. It also occurred to me that what my friend did would have made little or no sense, short of a diagnosis of madness, a century ago. As Herbert Marshall McLuhan was well aware, new technologies remake our sense of the world. Probably in ways that we are not fully aware of, the pervasiveness of television has remade our sense of what it means to be human. Our world is electronic, and we humans interface with the world of electronics in multiple and shifting ways.
It seems to me that it’s a very late date to need to remind ourselves–though I find such reminders useful–that art, artifice, and artificilaity all come from the same root, as our word ‘technology’ has its roots in the Greek word techne, which commonly translates as ‘art.’ As one of McLuhan’s students, Walter Ong–to whom I seem to be referring often lately–was fond of saying, it’s natural for humans to be artificial. We make things, we invent things, we experiment with what we can do with the things we’ve made and what we can make of the things we do. Thus, the old binary opposition between art and nature quickly breaks down. What the breakdown of this opposition means for the electronic world we constantly make and remake–and which constantly makes and remakes us–is that this world of technology is both quite artificial and deeply human. Technology poses no necessary threat. There is no Hal, the computer who will conquer us. Nor do I think that technology in and of itself dehumanizes. In fact, I believe that we deepen and extend our humanity with technology. What is music–whether played on a computer or a lute–but finely honed technology? What is writing–whether inscribed with a quill or a laptop–but technology again? Because the lute and the quill have been around a long time, we can forget that they are as much human inventions as computers. They are products of what the Greeks called techne, the art, artifice, and technology that we continue to produce. We continue to make and remake the human lifeworld that in turn shapes us.
I belong to a generation that grew up with television. When I was young, I could tell time by what shows were on. My mother recalls a time when I was in kindergarten. She had just dropped my sister off at the high school and was taking me up the hill to drop me off when I leaned over the seat–this was before the big campaign to get everyone to wear seat belts–and announced, ‘I don’t think I’ll go today; it’s just reruns.’ She says she knew then what a profound impact television was having on me; my world was a television show, and the program listing for that day was not promising.
Television did have a profound impact on me. I was born in 1961 and grew up in a small town in southern Indiana. I vividly recall watching the news and seeing footage of anti-war demonstrations and of the experiences of troops in Southeast Asia. One of my favorite guests on The Tonight Show was Truman Capote. I learned plenty about other parts of the world when I watched the 1972 Olympics; many readers will no doubt recall that this was the Olympics during which the Israeli athletes were taken hostage. This was also the Olympics during which Olga Korbut, the great Soviet gymnast, turned new attention to the sport of gymnastics. I was eleven years old, and I wanted to marry her. I was learning how very far indeed the world extended beyond the borders of my hometown on the Ohio River. It helped that I had adults in my life to talk with me about what I was seeing on our glowing screen. But then the glowing screen also gave us a lot to talk about.
Of course, recent technologies can become objects of obsession, and they can be used for destructive ends. But then the same holds for any technology through the ages. Both fire and the wheel can be used for constructive and destructive purposes. I suspect, however, that given our technology-saturated world, one in which our knowledge and self-awareness constantly grow and become meta-awareness, we now know things about the effects and influences of our technologies that we could never have known in the past. Not only do data-bases proliferate, but the styles of meta-awareness that our technologies of communication enable have brought us into new modes of awareness and language, modes such as those encountered in the work, for example, of Ong and McLuhan, and more recently in that of such a scholar as Lance Strate, whose Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a Field of Study (Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2006) provides a sophisticated introduction to many of the perspectives that I have been trying to articulate in this blog. It’s a book that I recommend. A member of what is arguably the first true television generation, I remain enthusiastic not only about television, but also about the older technology of the book. Both grow out of and comment on human experience.