What the Internet makes of us What the Internet Makes of Us Doc Searls [email protected] September 30, 2019 Abstract Marshall McLuhan says our tools not only extend and shape us, but "work us over completely." And no tool in human history extends, shapes and works us over more completely than the electronic rectangles we use on our desks and laps, and carry in our pockets and purses. Through these we are now digital as well as physical, inhabiting a second world that is absent of distance and gravity. This new second world is the Internet. Through lenses provided by McLuhan, Emerson, Polanyi, Aristotle and others, this paper examines some ways we are being worked over, looks toward what we are becoming, and argues that while it is too early to know what our mature digital form will be, we can at least know that it will not be entirely human— and that our species’ main challenge in a world mediated by the Internet is to retain and advance the best aspects of our human nature, including ones we may only discover as partly digital beings. Becoming digital As technologies go, railroad cars on passenger trains have changed relatively little since they came into widespread use in the mid 1800s. All are still boxes on wheels, filled with places for passengers to sit or stand. But passengers have changed, especially in the last few years. All are still people with places to go; but fewer now read newspapers or books. They also talk less to each other. Instead they busy themselves with reading, talking, watching videos, listening to podcasts and music, playing games—and doing all those things, plus much more, using mobile phones. This photo, taken in a New York subway by the author in July 2018, provides a telling example: Saturday, September 28, 2019 10:24 PM pg. 1 What the Internet makes of us This change in passengers didn’t happen in New York until the Internet became available through cellular data connections, which were installed in every one of the city’s subway stations by January 2017.1 By then the passengers had already changed, because their phones had become necessary parts of their lives. To be without a phone had become like being without shoes: you can along without one for a while, but not forever. Today the mobile phone had become a necessity for living a civilized life—and that life is rapidly changing in the process as well. This change is non-trivial. People with phones and related digital technologies—computers, apps, smart speakers—are not the same as they were without them. This change goes beyond dependency. There is transformation at work. We are becoming digital as well as physical. Extension Humans enlarge their bodies with clothing, their spaces with buildings, their beliefs and ideas with churches, schools and libraries. This enlargement begins with technologies that extend the body outward. From stone tools to hammers, cars and airplanes, technologies extend and enlarge the self. When a driver speaks of “my wheels,” a pilot of “my wings” and a carpenter of “my hammer,” they each speak from a state of being that is larger than their bodies alone. To be human is thus to be more than a body, more than a mind, or the two combined. “The hand is a tool2 of tools,” Aristotle said.3 Emerson added, “All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of limbs and senses.” 4 Marshall McLuhan (whose magnum opus, Understanding Media, was subtitled The Extensions of Man5), wrote, “All media are extensions of some human faculty — psychic or physical. The wheel is an extension of the foot. The book is an extension of the eye. Clothing, an extension of the skin. Electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system. Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act — the way we perceive the world. When these things change, men change.”6 1 “Cellular Connectivity in Underground Subway Stations One Year Ahead of Schedule; Wi-Fi Also Installed in Underground Stations Two Years Ahead of Schedule.” MTA Info, January 6, 2017. http://www.mta.info/news/2017/01/06/cellular-connectivity-underground-subway-stations-one-year-ahead- schedule-wi-fi-also 2 The Greek ὄργανόν is translated either as “tool” or “instrument.” Most translations use the former; Emerson uses the latter. 3 Aristotle, On the Soul, Book III, Part 8. Translated by J. A. Smith. Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.3.iii.html 4 The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude [Vol. 7] Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882., Emerson, Edward Waldo, 1844-1930. Boston ; New York : : Houghton, Mifflin, [1903-1904]. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/emerson/4957107.0007.001/1:11?rgn=div1;view=fulltext 5 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Gingko Press, Critical Edition, 2003. (Prior editions: 1964, 1994.) 6 McLuhan, Marshall, and Fiore, Quintin. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Gingko Press, 1967. pp 31-40. Saturday, September 28, 2019 10:24 PM pg. 2 What the Internet makes of us Michael Polanyi wrote, “… when we learn to use language, or a probe, or a tool, and thus make ourselves aware of these things as we are of our body, we interiorize these things and make ourselves dwell in them. Such extensions of ourselves develop new faculties in us…”7 Polanyi calls this faculty indwelling. It is by indwelling that the driver becomes a car, the pilot a plane, the carpenter a hammer. To be transformed by technology is not a minor matter. Father John Culkin, S.J., a Professor of Communication at Fordham University and a collaborator of McLuhan’s there, wrote, “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” 8 This shaping extends outward into every human enterprise, in ways that that can be vast and profound. McLuhan again: “All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive… that they leave no part of us untouched unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.”9 McLuhan wasn’t just talking about communications media. He was talking about all the things we make and use—and which then make and use us. In Laws of Media: The New Science, Eric McLuhan (Marshall’s son and collaborator) says that media (in the McLuhan family’s lexicon) refers to “everything man[kind] makes and does, every procedure, every style, every artefact, every poem, song, painting, gimmick, gadget, theory — every product of human effort.”10 To help understand the effects of all these media, the McLuhans provide a tool they call tetrad of media effects.11 It says every medium has four effects, which refract in four directions that also affect each other. They explore these heuristically, through questions: • What does a medium enhance? • What does it obsolesce? • What does it retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier? • What does it reverse or flip into when pushed to its extreme (for example, by becoming ubiquitous)?12 Here’s a graphic representation of them: 7 Polanyi, Michael, and Grene, Marjorie. Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi. University of Chicago Press, 1969. p. 148. 8 Al-Sheeshany, Haitham. “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” McLuhan Galaxy. April 1, 2013. https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/we-shape-our-tools-and-thereafter-our-tools-shape-us/ Note that this quote is often and erroneously attributed to McLuhan, no doubt because it is something he likely would have said, and may in fact have said. 9 Massage, loc. cit. p. 26. “The medium is the massage” is a play on “The medium is the message”—McLuhan’s best known one-liner and the title of The Medium is the Message, written by McLuhan and illustrated (as is The Medium is the Massage) by Quintin Fiore. Published by Random House, 1967. 10 McLuhan, Marshall and Eric. Laws of Media: The New Science. University of Toronto Press, 1988. 11 A tetrad is a group of four. 12 Laws, loc. cit., p.7. Saturday, September 28, 2019 10:24 PM pg. 3 What the Internet makes of us Questions are required because there can be many effects, and many answers. All can change. All can be argued. What matters is that there are effects in all cases, and those effects matter.13 For example, sidewalks— • Enhance walking convenience • Obsolesce dirt paths • Retrieve stone paths • Reverse into lost nature Cars— • Enhance convenience • Obsolesce carriages • Retrieve the shell, or carapace14 • Reverse into traffic jams (and much else15) 13 Andrew McLuhan, “What is a Tetrad?” Medium, June 8, 2016. https://medium.com/@andrewmcluhan/what-is- a-tetrad-ad92cb44d4af Andrew is Eric’s son and Marshall’s grandson. 14 Phil Patton, in “The Car as Medium” (McLuhan Galaxy, June 29, 2011) cites McLuhan in Understanding Media: “The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell of urban and suburban man.” p. 224-5. 15 In Understanding Media, McLuhan presents a long roster of reversals: “It broke up family life, or so it seemed, in the 1920s. It separated work and domicile, as never before. It exploded each city into a dozen suburbs, and then extended many of the forms of urban life along the highways until the open road seemed to become non-stop cities. It created asphalt jungles, and caused 40,000 square land to be cemented over… The motorcar ended the countryside in which the car was a sort of steeplechaser.