You can
argue that all of humankind’s major achievements down through history was due
to some sort of new technology. Each of these new technologies presented new
and improved ways for human beings to feed, clothe, warm and protect themselves.
Each and every one of these “achievements” represented a new media, some new
extension of the individual.
It’s safe to say that the naked, upright
ape—the pitiful critter which stepped out of the jungles millions of years ago was,
for all intents and purposes, was essentially media-less. His entire repertoire
of extensions consisted of the six natural, God-given ones. These were the five
senses, taste, smell, hearing, speaking, feeling and the movement (kinesthetic)
sense. You could say he was media-challenged.
Early tools consisted on sticks and
stones he fashioned in various ways to more effectively gather food and defend
himself. The discovery of fire enabled him to have
a source of light, warmth and a method to cook his food. You can also rest
assured that he used fire as a weapon in many cases against wild animals and
his enemies.
It was only natural that, once he
discovered fire, it wouldn’t be long before he started melting down metals to
fashion new tools out of bronze, iron and other metals. Of course, this new technology of
melting/fashioning metals led to an enormous revolution which ultimately resulted
in the sophisticated mechanical contraptions of the 18th and the 19th century. These were the legacies of mechanical media. These included all
sorts of mechanical gadgets—both large and small—such as farming implements,
industrial machinery, household appliances, automobiles, jet engines and such.
In the late 19th century, a
new category of media—electronic media—appeared. This included the telegraph,
telephone, radio, television, phonograph and film. The ultimate electronic
device was the computer. In the computer, human beings had the supreme
contraption for storing, organizing and manipulating data. All kinds of data…
words, numbers, formulas, music, books, letter… you name it and the computer
could handle it in a more efficient way that any device human kind had come up
with. The computer was the incarnation of all other electronic media. It was a telegraph,
telephone, radio, television, phonograph and film. In many ways, it could also
duplicate many mechanical media including the printing press and the
typewriter. It could not take you from point A to point B like the vast
spectrum of mechanical transport such as cars, bicycles, airplanes and boats.
But, in its own way, it can transport you into another dimension, like a book.
In a figurative sense, computers can “take you places” just like a car. But now
that humankind has this new computer contraption, wouldn’t it be nice if all of
that stored, filed, manipulated information could be shared with everyone else
on earth? That’s where TCP/IP comes in.
TCP/IP
is the networking protocol complex which allows one computer to talk to
another computer (or computers) over the internet. It is the software suite
which adds functionality to hardware such as servers, routers, switches and
cables. It is the essential infrastructure of cyberspace which allows a packet
to be sent from the application layer of one computer to the application layer
of another computer anywhere in the world. Now that’s quite an achievement, if
you ask me. That has to be one of the greatest inventions of all time, if not
the greatest. Of course, TCP/IP would never have been created if it hadn’t been
for fire, metal manipulation, electronics and the computer chip. As the great
mathematician Sir Isaac Newton once said, “I’ve stood on the shoulders of
giants.” I guess media has to done the same thing over the centuries.
Aristotle
once said “We are what we do repeatedly…..”
If browsing the web, sending email,
FTPing, searching databases, doing word processing, creating spreadsheets and
maintaining webpages/blogs is what we do all day then, Oh, Great God, what are
we becoming?
I fear that the computer is turning all
of us into one.
As we
meld ourselves deeper and deeper into the computer world, we begin to see
ourselves and our psychological/biological processes as little more than a
mechanistic replica of the computer. Our brains are CPUs, our long-term memory
is a hard drive where data is stored. Our central nervous system is nothing
more than random access memory where processing occurs. Our involuntary
muscular system (breathing, heartbeat etc.) is the biological counterpart of
ROM (read-only memory) of a computer. Our hands and feet are nothing more than
peripheral devices connected with cables we call arms and legs. It's scary, but it is happening each and
every day.
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