Cosmopedia
The description of the future of the information society that you will read in this essay is the one that I believe will be the most favorable for our community. However, this future may remain ideal and unrealistic if our society, i.e. human beings, does not decide to be born again. Information society will refer mainly to media in all their forms, from electronic tools such as newspapers, television, the internet, teleconferences, videos, etc., to other modes of communication or expression like face-to-face discussions, communities of practice or simply sculptures and paintings.
McLuhan’s probes brought me inspiration to think of the future of the information society. That is why I will like to start this essay by exposing my main thoughts about the subject while referring to some of his probes.
I will then use McLuhan’s tetrad to sum up my discussion and shows the effect of such a future. And finally, I will conclude the essay by new thought directions.
First of all, if we think of the technological evolution of media, the high demand of knowledge, the emergence of the lifelong education, and the explosion of the information technology, the society seems to have been enduring a crisis of identity for more than a decade. Human beings may be looking for more sense or messages in their lives that the electric time has erased or eroded.
If we analyse this perspective with the use of media, it may simply means that our society wants to live media (instead of using them) and have a true experience with them so that everyone better understand his inner and external environment.
McLuhan said: “Physiologically, man in the normal use of the technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology”. I believe in this statement and link it to my idea that our society will change, in the sense of better understand herself, while experiencing media and exploit its understanding of change. The benefit for our society in this change will be its growth and its ability to modify media (instead of undergoing them).
Moreover, if it is true that our society looks for more sense and messages then natural forms of expression or communication may re-emerged. Sculptures or communities of practice are good examples. McLuhan states that: “sculpture is auditory, not visual because it makes its own configuration in space and resonates”.
Sculptures will make individuals listen to their subconscious to bring them back to the natural world where their own identity expresses.
Communities of practice, on the other hand, will gather individuals to reflect together on their lives, accomplishments, frustrations, attitudes while telling their personal stories in their own words. Sharing their stories will bring them more compassion, allow all kinds of minds and people to be equal in their lives, and encourage them to express their emotions. Such medium will be particularly appropriate in places like companies because it will create a leadership culture and retrieve an oral environment.
However, in this future our society will not completely abolish hot media like books or web documents. On the contrary, she will take advantage of high technology to find an equilibrium that McLuhan refers as one between the strength of techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual’s own reaction. Web sites where people can improve interpretations of everything they do, see, feel, and hear may appear so that they can improvise responses and continue their relations with their fellows (quoted in Stearn 1968, p. 327). Concretely, such website may look like the one I have described while thinking of the future of websites (Jean and motiongraphx.com). In this website individuals will be able to use all their senses and respond to situations with their complete identity. Thus, the ability of touching, smelling and hearing with this kind of medium will adopt McLuhan’s idea, i.e.: “Touch and smell and hearing don’t claim objectivity”.
To strengthen the previous argument I believe that hot media in their pure form will still persist and improve the knowledge of our society. For instance, information-age-technology will gradually link online all reference books, specialised encyclopedias, atlases, lexicons, dictionaries, and other scholarly material. The ultimate result will be what Pierre Levy called Cosmopedia, the ideal universal information resource including graphics, motion pictures, music, sound recordings, and probably other new media options we cannot yet imagine.
But again, if our society takes the challenge that Cosmopedia presents, communication will be transcended. Enhanced capabilities for virtual reality will make accessing the Cosmopedia a total-immersion experience, allowing users to absorb knowledge through all their senses. Beyond mere definitions, users will find interactive demonstrations that enhance their understanding of any word, idea, musical sound, image segment of film or video, scientific formula, gene sequence, nuclear structure, historical event, or phenomenon of nature.
Finally, McLuhan argues: “The American image of itself, American goals, American directions, have been scrapped…I’m not making value judgment. I’m simply observing that if you accelerate any structure beyond a certain speed it collapses”.
While our society strongly believes in the benefits of speed, the future that I am describing will redefine this word. Speed will refer to dead entities, like computers, telephone, bandwidth, but will not affect human beings anymore. We will fully use this speed to live at our right pace and appreciate essential things like time, nature, reflection, family, and professional fulfillment.
By using McLuhan’s tetrad the effect of the future of the information society can be identified:
(Sorry I had a nice sketch to show but it did not show up when I pasted it from my word document)
Enhancement
-Our inner
- Our external environment
- Knowledge
- Total-immersion experience into the virtual reality
Reversal
- Better understanding of ourselves
- Growth of our community
- Compassion, equality, leadership
Retrieval
- Forms of oral expression
- Appreciation of essential things
- Use of our senses
Obsolescence
- Hot media of our electric time
- Interpretation of fragmented data
- Speed affecting our lives
In conclusion, while being aware of her censors and discovering herself again our Western society will be able to react with media. The challenge is to understand McLuhan’s laws of media so that the change of information society happens naturally. If our society does not make the effort then the future I have just described may never happen.
You may think that such a future can be dangerous if a group of people, who has perfectly understood how such a vision about media affects our psyche, intends to manipulate us. This possible threat of manipulation came to my mind when I analysed McLuhan’s comments about Margaret Mead’s statements in the Time magazine (September 4, 1954): “Whole cultures could now be programmed to keep their emotional climate stable in the same way that we have begun to know something about maintaining equilibrium in the commercial economics of the world”. In this perspective, the manipulators could grab the power of media and use them at a specific scale and intensity in order to take advantage of our interactions with these latters. Examples of such circumstances would be a civil war or the transformation of democracy into anarchy. These states would be new reversals and ‘the future of the future’ of the information society.
However, one should remember that world is not perfect, such threats may occur. It is the laws of nature.
References:
Rossman P. (2004), Cosmopedia. The Futurist- May/June 2004.
Stearn G. E. (1968), McLuhan Hot & Cool: A primer for the understanding of McLuhan and a critical symposium with rebuttal by McLuhan. London: Penguin Books.
Graphical versions of McLuhan’s probes