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A small horde of technology-related writings and considerations has converged on me recently—in this forum (from Mikhail, David, Tom, and others); on TV; in recent books; in pedagogical planning; and in my own daily struggle to execute a dissertation with any degree of efficiency.  I don’t have the chops to synthesize and speak to all of these things at once, as I would like to do, but, at the very least, I can start moving along a provisional line of inquiry. A brief op-ed-style essay in this past week’s The New York Times Magazine set me going on such a course.  The piece is called “Magic and Loss,” and Virginia Heffernan finds in those two titular concepts the often unacknowledged dialectic underlying our insouciant, pragmatic assimilations of digital (and particularly internet) technologies.   The web, interactive portable computers, and computer code are not just neutral, incidental tools, she argues; instead they necessarily take on mythic qualities, auras of magic.  Heffernan cites Arthur C. Clarke on this conflation of the seemingly progressive and the veritably primitive: “Any sufficiently advanced technology,” writes Clarke, “is indistinguishable from magic” (18).

Whether or not this magical dimension is consciously grasped, its dramatic difference from prior paradigms means that our experience of digital technology might be tinged with what Heffernan calls “dysphoria — a low-level but constant heartbreak” (18) over all that has been lost and displaced in the new order of things.  This dysphoria is the veritable shadow of the euphoria that tends to characterize so much of our digital interaction.  Heffernan frames this “persistent sense of loss” in terms of a strict narrative where the abstract has overwhelmed the concrete.  “The magic of the Internet,” she contends, is in essence a matter of “the recession of the material world in favor of a world of ideas (18).

All of this makes sense to me, sort of—that is, I feel both the magic and also the “lossiness” (Heffernan’s term, adapted from the term “lossy compression,” used in MP3 conversion) she invokes.  But these feelings are of less concern to me than the actual ways we have adapted around digital technology, that is, the nature of our reconfigured habits and the real effects on our brains and bodies.  At the end of her essay, Heffernan makes a critical stab in this very direction:

The Internet has a logic, a tempo, an idiom, a color scheme, a politics and an emotional sensibility all its own. Tentatively, avidly or kicking and screaming, nearly two billion of us have come to take up residence on the Internet, and we’ve adjusted to its idiosyncratic ways. (19, emphasis added)

Though we tend to think of technology as a set of particular tools we choose to wield or not, it is also true—holistically speaking—that “the technological” is a complex of conditions in which we find ourselves inexorably enmeshed.  This, I think, is what’s been addling me most keenly of late—not a fuzzy nostalgia for lost concreteness or a giddiness over a super-charged world of abstract ideas, but a deep, anxious sense that my capacities for both concrete and abstract experience have been reshaped, diminished, even deranged in certain respects.  Educators are prone to voicing concerns about their students’ frayed and underdeveloped attention spans, but I recognize these things most fully in myself.  I am perpetually fidgety and distracted; my brain tends to feel cluttered; efforts to think, speak, or write anything (this blog-post, for example) in a calm, clear form  are almost painfully difficult for me.  Some of this is certainly just inherent to the articulation process and to my own disposition, but I know there are also exacerbating, compounding factors from my environment, my habitus.

Brian Brock addresses these putative neuro-biological effects in his book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. I hope to get around to reading this, as well as Brock’s much-discussed 2008 article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” but in the meantime, I reached for the only comparable thing that was ready-to-hand on my bookshelf: a Marshall McLuhan book.

McLuhan is perhaps best known for his 1964 book Understanding Media, the first chapter of which bears the epochal maxim “The Medium is the Message” as its title (or he may be better remembed today for his illustriously deadpan cameo in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, from 1977).   I have a copy of that book, but the one I reached for is a lesser-known (though still in print) work from 1967 called The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Assembled in collaboration with graphic designer Quentin Fiore, the book is a kaleidoscope of black-and-white texts and images, a 150-page pamphlet, in effect.  Here is one pair of its pages:

The conditional sentence begun on those pages concludes on the following page:  “…the results are startling and effective” (78).  And if the close-up photo of those knit-stockinged legs is brought into the equation—and it surely must be—said info-brushing is also sexy. These three descriptors, the two given plus the implied third, effectively index the tensions McLuhan saw in the emergent “electric age,” a knot that is still at the heart of our digital age, thus a prior formulation of the commingled “magic and loss” Heffernan speaks of.  McLuhan’s cardinal tenet, recapped from his earlier work, is that “The medium, or process, of our time—electric technology—is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life” (8).  Anticipating digital technology generally and the internet and even Facebook in particular, he elaborates, speaking of “Electric circuitry” that “pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men” (16); and “Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance” that are “causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know” (12).

Such conditions, circa 1967 and of course ever-more now, constitute a particular composite medium, an ambient surround, or what McLuhan simply and aptly refers to as an “environment”; and this notion grounds the import of his book’s punning title:

All media work us over completely.  They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.  The medium is the massage.  (26, emphasis added)

This seems to capture what I was fumbling for above, my sense of carrying around a “dis-ease” of mild but constant bewilderment.  I’m not sure I care too much about what I’ve “lost,” but I definitely feel “worked over completely” by the effective, startling, and sexy technologies in which my habits are entangled.

Reading through McLuhan’s book, though, what I found most compelling wasn’t the uncanny prescience of its vision or even its caveat-alarms about certain inimical consequences of electronic environments.  McLuhan, in a careful reading, comes across as neither a luddite naysayer nor a sanguine utopian (each of which, somehow, he is glibly held to be at times); instead, he manifests true ambivalence—not apathy or indecision, but the simultaneous holding of several competing views—a candid, curious, critical, and above all active ambivalence about new technologies and conditions.   On the one hand, McLuhan recognizes that electronic/digital environments have absorbtive, numbing effects.  They are dangerous because they “are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible” and whose “groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns…elude easy perception” (68).  On the other hand he writes of people in these environments living “mythically and in depth” (9), and he declares hopefully that “Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories—for probing around” (10).  If the effect of environmental “working-over” is often unperceived and conduces to alienation and monied interests, McLuhan envisages how “artists” and “amateurs”—through vigilance and involvement, not dissociation—can exert resistance by exposing these latent operations:

Anti-environments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly (68)

Professionalism is environmental.  Amateurism is anti-environmental.  Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment.  Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. (93)

When I reflect on technology and culture and the contingent vitality of individual lives, my thinking tends to veer off into pessimism, an almost abject sense that, as Brian Brock puts it, summarizing Heidegger, we are bound to corrode and consume ourselves “in the acid of our own technological will.”  I expected to find this view basically corroborated in The Medium is the Massage, especially when I noted its epigraph, from philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: “The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur” (6-7).   What I found in the book, though, was McLuhan’s wry, determined cleaving to that “all but” qualification; against all odds, the book actually stirred in me a heartening sense that however fidgety, cluttered, and dazed we are (or become), there are ways to adapt and negotiate, ways forward.  What was called-for in 1967 is surely even more in order today, with regards to ethics—“We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other” (24); the classroom—“Education must shift from instruction, from imposing of stencils, to discovery—to probing and exploration and the recognition of the language of forms” (100); political action—“Participation via television in Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing everything (22); and countless other fronts.

Near the end of his book, McLuhan brings up E.A. Poe’s narrator in “The Descent into the Maelstrom” who “staved off disaster by understanding the action of the whirlpool” (150).  We may indeed find ourselves in a bit of a predicament at the moment (neurologically stultified, for example, as the evidence seems to show—sheesh), but if we are vigilant and critical in trying to “understand its action,” perhaps we can make good use of the new opportunities that are inseparable from that predicament; maybe we can figure out—not just for students but for ourselves, too!—how to keep from being quite so worked over.