These three parameters of the info- and media-sphere transfer responsibility from God to men. Instead to the postmodern 'anything goes', I shall emphasize the shift from a irresponsible postmodern society to a responsible electronic society -- the greatest shift ever in human history -- from the transcendence beyond to a transcendence within.
2. Fragmentation - digitization
3. Spiritualization - the Digital Cathedral
1. Unification - homogenizing
In terms of our western tradition, the humanistic approach has been a unifying process; whereas the technical/scientific approach has been one of partition. The atomic approach versus the holistic one. The information environment seems to change this notion radically. The natural sciences, with its spin-off technologies seem to create a unifying processes with an unprecedented spiritual power. So to say, we are in the midst of building the one building, that I call the Digital Cathedral. In this Digital Cathedral the arts and social sciences, according to their lack of advancement, function as applied arts only.
The literary metaphor for the universal building is the Bible. Its form is the book, either hand-written or printed. Since the Bible is the book of creation and final end of the universe, all books have one thing in common: a beginning and an end. Even the dictionary.
The educational metaphor for the educational building is the university. Its form again is driven by the building of a universal personality. (versus a specialist only) this personality is the universal book brought to life.
But both of these -- books and universities -- have come to their end as form. Again, the reason being that partitioned information has fragmented both the book and university universe. (What can be said about the university must be said also about the art school.) With the partitioning of information by the power of machines, fragmentation reversed to unification. This machine-based unifying process transcends each single human being. The consequence of this trans-human (some say post-human) information-processing is the fact that no one comprehends the process itself. In terms of quality, the process is sensed as metaphysical. As this process is centered in our consciousness its context is the environment itself being comprehended as a metaphysical unity.
(Leonardo, vol. 27 number 2, Technology Papers From Technology, Scholarship, And The Humanities, 1992. The Implication Of Electronic Information, Irvine California, 1994)
The University
1. According to a recent research, Clark Kerr has pointed out that 66 Western institutions have survived since the year 1530 without significant alteration in form, and that 62 of these are universities. But the university of 2010 may be as different from the institution of 1992 as today's university is from those in 1530.
Will the university continue merely as owner of the electronic hardware or as a mere way-station for adolescents? Or can it find new relations as educator, alchemist of information, into knowledge, guardian of intellectual freedom?
2. The University, which was to embody human unity, has become an intellectual "multiversity" because of specialization since the 17th century and fragmentation and digitalization with the more recent advent of the computer.
3. At their creative best, computers can provide unexpected alternatives which enpand understanding -- compelling new questions on sources or elaborate operations for imaginative understanding. A cardinal rule of humanistic scholarship has been broken; as fact and fancy are no longer separate, even if the latter is plausible.
4. The focus of the universal art school is not technology, but information and its associated methodologies of analysis, synthesis, and communication. The real revolution in information technology is about communication, not computation.
5. That is why this intersection, in relation to the arts, science, technology, is so important -- to bring the practitioners, the theorists, the academics, and administrators together in search of a new pathway for integrating knowledge and affecting the course of electronic/digital education delivery.
The Student
The fragmentation of the University also affects the fragmentation of the universal personality as a result of being educated in the university or art school.
1. The students must be skilled at analysis as well as synthesis. Within the university communities in particular, we must create an intellectual climate for an integral process of societal change.
2. Content, Access, and Guidance are the three main categories to be established in an art school for giving the students the chance they need: they must learn to analyze facts, to develop a critical mind, and, finally, to ask and create the right questions.
The Book
As the book has been in the center of our culture, all that can be said about books can be said about painting, sculpture, film, music, dance, and theater. If the digital revolution has not really happened to the humanities and the arts -- if the changes have not occurred -- then the history of twentieth century art is a meaningless aberration.
1. Literature will not die, but clearly it will change as it moves from page to screen.
2. The end of the book has not come, but more, the end of the culture of the book. The book as the cultural, political, social and religious unifier. Books are still produced and read in enormous numbers, and they will continue to be as far into the future as one can imagine. However they do not command the center of the cultural stage. Modern culture is taking on forms that are more varied and complicated than the book-centered culture it follows. (Hardsinson, O. B., Disappearing Through The Skylight: Culture And Technology In The Twentieth Century, Penguin Books, 1989.)
3. The unifying processes take a place in the center of the fundamental grounding of the information/digital era. It is "an isomorphic representative code for words, images, and sounds. In a digital universe, word, sound, and image share a common notation." They are, at a fundamental level, "convertible into one another." Unified into one single code. The arts draw together and, with the arts, comes mathematics. This convergence will certainly lead to overlapping of the traditional areas of creativity and will have consequences both for the democratization of the arts and sciences as well as for the academic organization within which they are taught.
4. We have an expressive surface that can mix word, both written and spoken, with image and music. A Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk for the common reader.
5. In the electronic world "the social basis of production and dissemination has indeed changed. "musical talent" in such a world means something quite different from that in the world created by renaissance.
And the performance, the act of dissemination, now occurs in private as well as in public; since the signal is digitized from the beginning, to reply it at home is as "authentic" as to replay it in a concert hall. All of this sampling, collaging, and replaying creates horrendous copyright confusion of course.
6. Unification is process oriented. Instead of a "set" type of cultural production we have a "flow" type. The fundamental metaphor shifts from static to dynamic. This "liquidity" of our basic alphabet will affect in profound ways how we think about reading, about literacy itself. (will we return to chaotic days of medieval orthography?)
7. Once we get the world on screen we can manipulate it as easily as we manipulate every other digital signal.
8. Aesthetic is has a nonlinear matrix. So are the arts of nonlinear system. It may be so as the self-expression of the mind processes and thinking. Chaos-theory is a mathematical system which comes nearest to explain these processes. In terms of esthetic as well as nature as well as mathematics.
9. In the era of linear text, all the great subjects were drawn inward into the verbal center. Centripetal power. Needless to say, we proceed nowadays on the opposite system, a centrifugal one in which new subjects are continually thrown out into discrete orbits.
Information technologies
As I have mentioned above, the ambigious status information technology is the driving force behind both the explosion of information and the fragmentation of knowledge.
Paradoxically, information technology also presents us with the opportunity and the tools for meeting the challenge of explosion of information and the fragmentation of knowledge. If, on the one hand, the new information technologies seem fragmenting, they are on the other also profoundly integrative. Remember, these technologies are fundamentally communication technologies. Their deployment in society is, as often as not, an exploration of new connections among the social fields, new way of finding significance and meaning.
As the book has changed from paper to the screen so has the linear text to hypertext. The consequence is an open-ended culture instead of a final one. But most important hypertext leaves the organization to the user. (this is where the social process is being affected, by copyright, authorship, communication impact, etc.!)
1. The primary problem is not engineering the future. We must rise above the obsession with quantity of information and speed of transmission, and recognize that the key issue for us is our ability to organize this information, to find meaning in it, and assure its survival for use by generation to come.
2. The matrix of cultural grasp represented by the arts and letters, is now dominated by three convergent forces: technology, theory, democracy.
Theory: the aesthetics of electronic expression were laid out by twentieth-century visual art before the computer was invented. Democracy: digital technology is opening the discourse out from a strictly verbal base, it enfranchises not only the left handed and the right-brained of all sorts.
3. Technology - any technology, including mechanical printing- does what technology does best and tends to discount what it does not do well.
There is something to the notion that information technology can change our perception of information and our analysis of problems, and therefore the way we make decisions.
But in acknowledging this, we also ought to be aware of the possibility that we may lose something distinctive, a way of viewing the world, a perspective that is quite possibly embedded in the humanities. The very power of technology can influence and redefine what we mean by "original" research. In other words, the methods supported by technology deal best with phenomena that lend themselves to quantification and computer manipulation. Important variables may be ignored, and there is a danger that technology may dictate the kinds of questions to be asked. This is not a new danger, nor one that is inherent only in information technology, but as information-technology is the technology of our mind, it affects our total mental processes. That danger is new.
1. In this regard, Paul Klee's statement about modernism has become obsolete -- his "making the invisible visible." Information technologies have taken over this role in the reverse direction as well -- making the visible invisible with stealth technology. By doing this, both worlds, both the visible and the invisible have unified in the numerical cosmos. This is the final victory of the arts, a transfer of its inherently ambivalent principles onto the concrete world -- no difference between fact and fiction; fragmentation meets unification.
2. Fragmentation affects knowledge as well. According to Carlos Fuentes: "One of the greatest challenges facing modern society is the transformation of information into knowledge." But even more important is the absence of spirit within information and knowledge.
3. The fragmentation of knowledge into information is the real crisis of electronic information age. This fragmentation into intangible numbers affects the organization of humanistic knowledge and the social basis of its production in some fundamental ways -- let me summarize:
+ it changes the central humanistic artifact from printed book to digital display. (letter to number)
+ it changes the definition of author, it fragments the author into participants.
+ it undermines the basic idea of originality we inherited from the romantic movement.
+ it changes the definition of text.
+ it radically compromises the cultural authority of the text.
+ it metamorphoses the marketplace of humanistic inquiry in ways so radical we can scarcely yet find our way.
+ it de-substantializes the arts and letters in much the same way that the information society has de-substantialized the industrial revolution.
3. Communication-culture
Ernest Mandel, the great communist theoretician questions: "When will a system break down?." His answer? -- "When a political and mass-psychological situation appears in which those in power cannot reign, and the powerless are not willing to remain under power." Mandel died before the fall of the communist empire which was caused mainly at the hand of the information media. Mandel is not only wrong, but the opposite of his theory has be realized. "Those without power have voluntary gone under the power of the reigning information media to become mediated themselves. This status is more entertaining, diverse, universal and makes one believe one is always on the side of the winning team... (Turkle, Sherry, Ghosts In The Machine, The Sciences, vol. 6 Nov 1995, New York p.39)
Sherry Turkle has disturbed this position: "in these days, when people step through the looking glass of the computer screen, they find other people - or are they a program? (in MUDs) on the other side. As the boundaries erode between the real and the virtual, the animate and the inanimate, the unitary and the multiple self, the question becomes: are we living life on the screen or in the screen." it is to say, that this is the ambiguous vision of art, which has finally become real by the computer screen.
This machine-based ambiguous communication process, between man and his self, between man and man, between man and machine, between machine and machine has become one of a totalitarian seduction and obsessive addiction. As these processes do not have any difference in their form but only in its intangible numbers, it penetrates all social, political, educational, cultural, techno-centered, workforce related, managerial spheres, highlighted by the capital based flow of information, as the visualization of bits by capital numbers.
But the net also means connectedness to the world of numbers by numbers. The creative possibility, the creation out of nothing is the reason for the net for being so addictive that is offers everybody the chance to participate in an evolving world. (one of the many reasons why the youth are represented and representing themselves on the net.) Right now the net offers the statu-nascendi for creativity by communication.
We can see different aspects of this creative empowerment:
1.
The collective outcome of net-debates in the net might eventually serve to set a social standard for net-using community.
2.
The Internet is a society in the making, one where conventions have not yet been fossilized and fixed.
3.
Its very nature might even mean that fixed social orders, of the kind that shape relationships in real life, never evolve in cyberspace.
4.
The potential of the addictive potential of the might arise from its character as an unfinished culture, a society in the making.
5.
The absence of traditions, the freedom from conventions and sanctions in cyberspace, makes possible different kinds of relationships from those that everyday life permits one to have.
6.
Being in different relationships means that you can also be a different person.
7.
Net addiction is an addiction to remolding yourself, an addiction to being a person free from the mundane concerns and limitations of everyday life, and instead grappling with issues within a dynamic, evolving community.
8.
Relating in cyberspace
The net is a uniquely democratizing medium of communication. Just as you follow the rules of eye contact in conversation without being aware of what they are, so you can experience the freedom from social conventions when you relate with people in cyberspace without realizing that this is what makes it different.
#social setting
During the course of this year, 1995 (Newsweek) the discussion ranged from sex to stock prices to software standards. But the most significant aspect to the Internet has nothing to do with money or technology really, it is us: "the Internet mediates human interaction better than any other medium.(...) Getting in touch with each other is more fun than the coolest computer game, or the hottest information.(...) The technology is successful because it is based on peoples natural emotions, including fear, greed and vanity. (...) They want to show off. If you do not have a web server, you are nothing in cyberspace.
The real fuel for the excitement is the connectedness, the thrill of putting ones own brick into the ultimate edifice of human creation.
The components of the "net ethic" are easy to identify: free expression, a drive for individual empowerment, a loathing of authority and strong liberitarian strain.
#poltical setting
Users hook up to the net through Internet service providers (ISP) -- Netcom in US, Ping in Germany -- But those are only middlemen who hook into big regional data lines called backbones. At the top of the pyramid there is no CEO of the Internet - the real power lies in those open protocols that ensure that the smooth movement of information.
#futuristic aspects
No one really knows what it means to connect hundreds of millions of people together into a "massive monument of human expression." It will not just be people talking to each other. It will be people talking to machines, and machines talking to each other.
But this is the crucial trans- or post-human status to come. Let me quote Simon Wiesenthal: "There are 6 components that have led to the shoa -- hate, dictatorship, bueaucracy, technology, crisis or war, and a minority as victim. I have read different historical books. I have read about dictators, imperators, kings, presidents, archbishops. But those who have thrown Cyclon-B into the gas chamber have been bureaucrats. And if 500 years ago the inquisition of the catholic church had been in the posession of the technology hitler has had, there had only been one alternative for the jews: either to become babtized or to get killed. The hate was there, no Jew in spain, no Protestant in france und perhaps no catholic in england would have survived. The combination of hate and technology - this has been the desaster."
According to Marshall McLuhan: "first, man has formed the tools, then the tools formed men."
End
Information-based technology has already gone far beyond our consciousness. We are at a revolutionary stage in humankind. We do not know what it means and we are far away from predicting anything at all. We are too close to the beginning of the immaterial construction of our Digital Cathedral to visualize its gestalt.
A Quadpuck is a device, named by its inventor Jerry Cromer, that allows a totally paralyzed person to communicate by his/her breath. The breath creates the environment, the breath is the first and last medium and, indeed, the only one medium of communication and creation. Breath is bio-sphere and info-spere in one. (Donna Coco, Input Device Turns Air Into Electric Signals, Computer Graphics World, Nov. 1993)
Newsweek Magazine, April 22, 1996, stated the question: "Who's Internet is it?" The answer? -- A metaphor for the ominpresence of the medium on our planet. "Internet is like air" says Esther Dyson, chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, "a user in germany who wants to read the Neo-Nazi Zuendel will dial up a computer in Amsterdam or Paris."
We are beginning to enter the spiritual/metaphysical world where we have come back to our book of books, where God's breath created Adam. However, this time, the Adam will create the Digital Cathedral with a digital breath -- a breath that is communication at its best. The question of this new form of communication as a creative process is not a question of our technological ability, but of our spirituality, our ability to ground a moral balance in our own human thinking.