by Mark Federman
Chief Strategist, McLuhan Program

This paper was presented as part of a panel on Digitization of Information and the Future of Culture at the EU-Japan Fest 10th Anniversary Symposium on The Role of Culture in an Age of Advancing Globalization, held in Tokyo, Japan, February 10-11, 2003. 

What is the culture of a place that is everywhere and nowhere, that is at once global but renders the globe obsolete, that globalizes the individual yet strips our individuality? This is the intriguing paradox that the Internet presents to us, one that requires us to look beyond what we can easily see or hear or touch.

When we first began to think about the Internet many of us typically thought of a television metaphor. It is not hard to understand why we might immediately make this connection. We view both media through a screen, and screen-oriented technologies often have common effects. Both have a remote control of sorts - in the case of networked computers, the remote control is the mouse - and we are always wondering and searching for what else is on, by "channel surfing" through television broadcasts, and via hyperlinks that serve as our online channel guide.

This is certainly a convenient and obvious metaphor, but is it accurate? By applying Marshall McLuhan's thinking, we understand that the nature of a medium is known by its effects on us and on society. In particular, we know that the most potent effects are those that are unseen, non-obvious or simply ignored. Consider the effect of television: TV brings the outside world in - from a soundstage, a political platform or a theatre of war directly into our homes. But the effect of the Internet is quite different. Via networked computers, we transport ourselves from our homes, and indeed from our bodies, out into cyberspace.

Now the simple observation that digitized material - text, audio, video, graphics - appears on our computer screen might lead one to conclude that the Internet is indeed TV-like. But McLuhan cautions us that it is not how a medium is used that tells us its nature, but rather how it affects us. He observed that, in contrast to mechanization which had an explosive effect on society, the effect of electricity and what he called "all-at-once-ness" was implosive. It effectively made the world smaller and more concentrated.

In much the same manner as a figure skater who draws her arms in towards her body to increase the speed of her spin, we can consider the implosion of electrification using a metaphor of rotation. The force of television, for instance, is centripetal - the force moves society's events towards an axis of rotation that is centred on the television viewer. The entire world coalesces and condense into what we used to call "the tube" or "the box." McLuhan had the image of Edgar Allen Poe's Maelstrom in mind - a metaphoric whirlpool whose energy came from technological acceleration that dragged unwary sailors to their doom. Television's centripetal force made the world more comprehensible and palpable, as outside reality streamed into our homes.

In contrast, the implosive effects of the Internet generate a centrifugal socio-physical force, moving us away from the axis of rotation that centres on our body as we launch into cyberspace. The effect is disorienting and disruptive in a manner that is unique in civilization. Like the supernova of an exploding star, society is imploded and we, as individuals are flung out into a new, discarnate experience. As McLuhan predicted, "having extended … our central nervous system into the electromagnetic technology, … [we] transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well."

So what is this Internet world into which we are transported? What has been created in cyberspace? What awaits us there? And more important, what effects does such a transportation and transformation have on us? Through what framework or metaphor can we begin to understand the not-very-obvious aspects of its nature?

A Sense of Space

McLuhan gave us a guide when he distinguished between "visual space" and "acoustic space." While these metaphors usefully tie to two of our senses, they do not necessarily relate exclusively to that which is seen or heard. Visual space is linear and bounded. It is ordered and continuous, yet continually fragmented by our eye's (and brain's) automatic process of grouping and classification. In contrast, McLuhan described acoustic space as "a resonant sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose boundaries are nowhere," a world of "simultaneous relationships." Therefore, everywhere in acoustic space is here, and every-when in acoustic space is now. This describes the effect of the Internet perfectly, an ever-present presence, the world of simultaneous relationships.

Acoustic space seems to be similar in nature to what I understand as the concept of ma, in Japanese art, music, drama and culture. I have seen it described as the natural interval in time and space between two events that exist in a continuity. It is present, but not in the sense of a moment that separates the eternity of the past from the immortality of the future. Rather, ma is a multi-dimensional experience of time that not only fills a space, but imbues the space with meaning and contextualizes all that surrounds the space. In this sense, it ties directly to the individual's experience of present time and the void of space. It is not emptiness, but possesses its own dynamic and extensibility. While ma is certainly not concrete, it does, nonetheless, have a palpability and tactility to it; ma describes, and culturally grounds, our experience of the Internet.

We can make an additional observation from the interesting metaphor of acoustic space. McLuhan points out that a characteristic of "visual space" is that we can shut it out, in much the same way we can shut off our vision by closing our eyes. We have eyelids, but we have no "earlids." We cannot shut out acoustic space, or the space of relationships and connections that are all around us. This suggests that we cannot shut out the effects of the Internet on our culture and society, even if we choose not to use the Internet directly.

For example, many aspects of popular culture in the physical world gain their currency on the Internet. A particularly telling example was the 1999 movie, The Blair Witch Project. The premise of this rather pedestrian horror film was the disappearance of a young film crew who had been making a documentary about the so-called "Blair Witch." The crew was never found, but their discarded cameras supposedly were. The movie supposedly was the result of the found footage. The film was shot for about $40,000, and was picked up by a distributor for about $1.1 million. The film grossed somewhere in the neighbourhood of $140 million, based primarily on a clever, 11-month marketing campaign that was accomplished entirely on the Internet. Today, a great deal of what fans call the "experience" of a movie encompasses participation on both official and unofficial websites, particularly for greatly anticipated blockbusters like the upcoming Matrix sequels. Afterwards, they purchase the videogame, and can now play it online, interacting with other gamers. It will not be long before we see the next phase of this evolution: theatres equipped so that patrons will actively engage in an online web-gaming experience, while simultaneously watching the theatrical release of the film. The networked film-goer will simultaneously interact with the two entertainment media, and other audience members world-wide.

Perhaps one of the most monumental recent examples of the online world impinging on the physical world occurred in the United States Senate. Its most powerful member, Senator Trent Lott, used to be the Majority Leader until he was forced to step down because of the scandal surrounding certain racist comments. The conventional news media originally chose to suppress the story. However, there is a new form of journalism that is not beholden to political or business interests. I am referring to the phenomenon of the weblog - easily updated personal or group journals that are posted on the web. They began to gain momentum in approximately early 1998, exploding in popularity in late 1999, and have continued to grow exponentially. Individual "bloggers," or weblog journalists, sift and sort the vast repository of information that is the web, and post what catches their attention, along with their comments and observations. The most interesting and salient items attract the most attention and thus rise to the level of world consciousness.

Such was the case with the unfortunate Senator Lott. Through the relentless pursuit of the story among thousands in the weblogging community, the conventional mass media were no longer able to ignore the controversial incident, and this led to Lott's downfall. Society as a whole is affected and we, in our physical reality, are equally affected by the changes that have their impetus in cyberspace.

Enter the digiSelf

We can begin to understand the true nature of these effects by recognizing the extension of our identity in cyberspace. Our identity has, for many years, existed quite independent of our physical incarnation in government, financial and other institutional databases. We are not real to the bank or other authorities unless we can produce something that links our physical self to our "real identity" in their database. We have many versions of this digital identity - or digiSelf, as I like to call it - spread among many databases, each with its unique characteristics, and inferred behaviours. Each one is more real to the institution - and ironically, to the people in that institution - than our physical self, what we consider to be our real self. This is why, for instance, people feel so completely violated by the crime of identity theft, in which some other person "captures" an instance of our digiSelf and uses it to perpetrate fraud. The effect on us is more than the financial loss, although that in itself may be significant. Identity theft victims report feeling as if they had been personally molested, using language similar to victims of rape. The digiSelf is so real, and impinges so greatly on our physical world. The loss of our digiSelf creates the McLuhanesque anti-environment that enables us to take notice of its manifest reality.

Additional manifestations of our identity exist on the web, in chat avatars, among weblogs, web page postings and other digital media, and thereby create numerous digiSelves. What was once integral - our self, our person, our identity - is now split among our self in the physical world and our many digiSelves, each having an autonomous life of its own. Thus, we disconnect from the normal experience of physical and corporeal time and space when we live vicariously through our digiSelf on the Internet. This disconnection is significant and profound, as our consciousness becomes disconnected from our sensorium, extends in a real sense into the world's electronic nervous system and thereby creates the unique experience of separating our identity, or self, from our body.

A few moments ago, I suggested that the next evolution of theatre entertainment would be the simultaneous combination of online game-play and first-run, theatrical release of a major film. We can now see that such a venue would be a natural recreational outlet for our digiSelf. It is the logical extension of conventional cinema - in which the audience is transported to a world that is created by the filmmaker and each person can live vicariously through the characters projected on the screen. With any given digital incarnation separated from our physical self, we live, in a very real sense, vicariously through the experience of our digiSelf.

How real can it become? This separation sometimes has tragic consequences. Last October, a 24-year-old man died at an internet café in Kwangju, South Korea, after playing online non-stop for 86 hours, without eating or drinking. And just days after that incident, a 27-year-old man in Fengyuan, Taiwan died under similar circumstances after a 32-hour marathon. While it would be easy to dismiss these incidents as the consequence of an addiction, the parallel to the Greek Narcissus myth, that McLuhan identified as a consequence of the extension of ourselves into another medium, is simply too striking: In Understanding Media, he noted that "Men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves."

We can easily see the evidence of that fascination. In fact, there is an incredibly strong identification with our digiSelf projected into an avatar or other electronic medium. We are equally fascinated with the avatars of others that we meet in cyberspace, and their artifacts. The easiest observed demonstration of this effect is in the emotional intensity that is generated between two digiSelves that meet intimately online. While some may dismiss accelerated online relationships, and even cybersex, as impulsive, or motivated by the thrill of being able to "get away with" an act that may be mildly illicit, the powerful attraction of these activities, and their ability to disrupt physical lives, are demonstrative of the power and influence our digiSelves have over us.

The digiSelf Crosses Over

As we project various aspects of our lives into our continually expanding collection of digiSelves, we must become aware of the possible interactions and incursions between the digital and physical worlds that are now possible. A simple example: Who "owns" any given instance of my digiSelf? What rights do I have to participate in, or even block, its modification by a government agency or corporation? Is there a duty owed to the individual for appropriate care and sustenance of the digiSelf while an organization has possession of it? Who owns the digital copyright on my digiSelf, and what might be the licensing issues? We know that specific tracking technologies have already been implemented in the software that most of us use everyday - browsers, word processors, email clients and the like. Considerably more is on the way. These are efficient mechanisms to remove a right to privacy, freedom from unlawful search and seizure, anonymous free speech that exist today. Given the behaviour of the current administration in the United States, and certain surveillance initiatives that are underway in Canada, Australia and elsewhere, is it fair to speculate that these mechanism might already be in use? And what government, or government contractor, or even private corporation, anywhere on earth would be able to resist the temptation to indulge in just a little investigation? Physically, we are protected in law by habeas corpus. Is our digiSelf protected by habeas virtualis - from "you have the body" to "you have the effect"?

Thus, the key cultural consideration of the Internet is not so much the digitization of information, but the digitization of us. Modern Western culture has evolved over several centuries, based on the freedom of psychological individuality, and its subsequent expression through a variety of artifacts. Our awareness of the paradoxical reality of the digiSelf presents our global society at large with considerable new challenges as we decide precisely who will define 21st century culture.

Article copyright © 2002, Mark Federman