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Communication Theory As an Anti-Environment for Understanding the Effects of Technological Environments Upon Cultural Change

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Communication Theory As an Anti-Environment for Understanding the Effects of Technological Environments Upon Cultural Change 612 DIGITAL APTITUDES + OTHER OPENINGS Communication Theory as an Anti-environment for Understanding the Effects of Technological Environments upon Cultural Change ISAAC LERNER Eastern Mediterranean University INTRODUCTION In these cultures it is the dominant communication systems, which qualify changes while concurrently Marshall McLuhan’s work provides a communication shaping identity and social patterns. However, the theory of cultural change as a operational analysis of perception of the effects of a cultural paradigm shift the effects of technological environments in the aid remains subliminal to most people, because of the of heightening human perception regarding these scale, pace and complexity of change; except to effects on the development of psychological traits those individuals who delight in adapting their per- and social practices. For example, he offers a gestalt cepts and identities in sync with emergent condi- analysis of the status of the dominant infrastructural tions. McLuhan concurs with the poet, Ezra Pound, or media ‘environment’ in the information age; the who claimed that artists were the “antenna of soci- age of cyberspace as an environment constituted ety” and that their art-work, as forms of education by the convergence of information technologies and which McLuhan referred to as anti-environments, global systems of telecommunications. In the current are a means of perceptual attunement to the trans- age, where the digital infrastructural environment formation of the social environment.1 He also refers of cyberspace envelopes and transforms all pre- to the work of the poet and engraver William Blake existing cultural and natural habitats, the scale and as well as James Joyce borrowing their insight that, pace of this transformation and its psychological, although ‘we shape our tools which in turn shape sociological as well as material effects escapes us’, this remains a highly subliminal process. There- perception. McLuhan’s prose-poetic style and his fore, art as anti-environments provides the means mosaic form of discourse satirize, or as he says for altering perception and extending consciousness, “puts-on”, the reader in order to attune perception so in order to safeguard survival as a means of navi- that understanding the effects of media is facilitated. gation through cultural transformation. Today, it has This is an understanding, which provides a gestalt become cliché to remark that the one thing that is or figure-ground analysis, as a means of ‘standing- constant is change itself, but due to the accelerating under’ the figurative surface of daily fluctuation in degree of change (a major theme in Alvin Toffler’s order to perceive the formal cause or ground-works book Future Shock) therefore, merging perception shaping fundamental or cultural paradigm shifts. through understanding is increasingly becoming crit- ical for social survival. McLuhan’s theory of cultural transformation associ- ates social evolution with technological innovations ANTI-ENVIRONMENTS AS A MEANS OF and their concomitant sustaining and consequently PERCEPTION self-qualifying infrastructural environments. In this regard, he has bracketed the evolution of the West- A major concern for McLuhan, in War and Peace in the ern tradition between the past pre-literate, pre-his- Global Village2 and in his book Through the Vanishing toric societies and the present post-literate, post- Point3, was that art as anti-environment has been industrial cultures of the emergent global village. used to either train perception within a culture or to COMMUNICATION THEORY AS AN ANTI-ENVIRONMENT 613 merge perception in the context or con-text (with- ‘eye-I’ bias. This prejudice exemplifies the dualistic the-text) of an evolving society. The latter role of dichotomy between subject and object, thereby art as an act of merging perception with the social precluding an understanding of change when the environment (i.e. as a con-textual interpretive act) object of change, as formal cause, is the ground- is characteristic of non-literate collective societies works of the cultural environment. (as in the ritual performance), which includes both pre-literate and post-literate cultures. Whereas, A communication theory of cultural change provides the notion of training perception has predominantly a discourse resolving the Cartesian dichotomies in been the role of art in the Western individualistic the manner of a phenomenological stance which is tradition; a tradition whose aesthetics was in-formed predisposed (as opposed to the scientific natural by a cultural environment accommodated to the use stance implicating subject-object dualities) to an of phonetic scripts (both chirographic and mechanic inherent dialectical unity and identity between the modalities) in which human beings, with regard individual and culture. This identity is the sustaining to embodied sensory interplay, have biased visual quality provided by technological environments perception. These cultures have, by means of the understood as forms of extensions of individual and evolution of various scripts, progressively intensified corporate embodiment; i.e. cultural environments the abstract ability innate to written codification as co-formal and co-creative operative extensions systems; thereby transcribing pre-literate oral of human senses, faculties and organs. When this and organic cultures initially into civilized, modern shaping dynamic does not fragment the interplay fragmented, rationalized, and ultimately (by the or unity of the senses, as qualified by the phonetic 19th century) mechanically organized ways of life. environment, then the resultant sensory space is In fact, an essential theme of McLuhan’s work what McLuhan refers to as ‘acoustic space’. This regarding literacy is that this abstract ability, is a synesthetic space of sensory interplay with particularly amplified by means of the development the associated effect whereby a participatory of the phonetic alphabet environment, conditions an and interpretive mode of perception is sustained. inherent dualism between one’s inner lifeworld (the Consequently, in the context in-formed by acoustic psychological and imaginary life) and the natural space art educates human sensibilities by merging and material reality of the outer world. That is, this with the environment by the agency of total sensory implicit dichotomy, sustained by the alphabet as interplay, rather than by means of simply training an extension of the eye, and qualified in terms of a the ability for visual abstraction in the experiences visual spatial prejudice, is embodied socially in terms of the modern world of detached observers. of the associated development of private and public identities. A society that privileged detachment and Acoustic space in-forms both the oral pre-literate objectivity had conceived the world in the mechanistic cultures and the current electronic societies which image of a Newtonian Clockwork Universe. engage individuals in holistic sensory involvement because it is only the abstract ability of the By the fifteenth century the infrastructure of the phonetic script, as compared to all other modes phonetic alphabet was intensified and amplified of communication, which fragments and separates by means of the mechanical printing press which the eye from the human sensorium. In oral sustained the development of Modernity by cultures, of various scales sustained by respective eventually fostering the cultures of the Scientific and communication systems (i.e. the natural voice or Industrial Revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries voice extended by telephone: i.e. far-hearing), respectively, within the context of emergent a sense of immediate participation is sustained nationalistic and econocentric societies that were by the simultaneity provided by instantaneous more aggressively individualistic, entrepreneurial discourse; i.e. exemplified by pre-literate oral- and enterprising (i.e. goal-oriented). This aural cultures or in the contemporary post-literate mechanical social context did not foster a merging acoustic societies of telephone, television, and of perception with society, because emergent social internet communications. In other words, within patterns such as the democratization of literacy visually biased societies objectivity is the ability facilitated by the mass-production of mechanically to ‘act without reacting’ but in the oral resonant produced texts, as well as perspectival prints, field of non-literate societies, action and reaction educated literacy and perceptually prejudiced an are virtually simultaneous. This is evident today 614 DIGITAL APTITUDES + OTHER OPENINGS because instant communications, as an all-at-once “outbreeding” and “inbreeding.” As Mayr puts it, envelop of environmental discourse occurring at “Most animals are essentially outbreeders, most microorganisms are inbreeders.” the speed of light, fosters the development of the global village as an emergent Feudal society. With electricity, all this has changed totally. At present the entire mammalian world has become CULTURAL EVOLUTION AND MEDIA the microorganismic. It is the total individual cultures of the world, linguistically and politically, ECOLOGIES that have become the mammals, according to the old classifications of evolutionary hypothesis. It The emergent infrastructural environment as reso- is the cultural habitat in which we have long been nant electronic fields, facilitated by the internet, mo- accustomed to think that people were
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