“The aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology. The age of mechanical industry that preceded us found vehement assertion of private outlook the natural mode of expression. Every culture and every age has its favorite model of perception and knowledge that it is inclined to prescribe for everybody and everything. The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. We are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally.“

pp5-6

Here again MM appeals to the nowness of his own time. In many ways he is a kind of self styled tour guide of the 60s generation gap. This is part of the last couple paragraphs of his short introduction, and he appears to be marketing his work as a way to understand changing times. As the focus from understanding ourselves as mechanical processes shifts toward electronic processes, young people(or those most vulnerable to the media environment) prefer speed, spontaneity, and involvement to discrete or private association.

This makes me wonder if MM, writing nearer the onset of the electronic age views this as a novel reaction to the stimulus at the time. MM will argue later that the instantaneous nature of the electronic age is a reversal to tribal thought patterns. From the vantage-point of contemporary technology, does it not begin to look as if specialization is a short inter-period between actual pre-agrarian tribalism and electronic tribalism? That is, is tribal thought simply the more natural mode?

MM is closing out the introduction here and I’d like to make reference to a few recent things from my own media diet:

Richard Powers’ environmental fiction work The Overstory which i’ve recently read, is structured in such a way that it appears at first as anthology, then many of the characters are part of one story, then they diverge into separate stories. This coalescing and fragmenting is formatted to be much like the growth of a tree. The book is divided respectively into sections: Roots, Trunk, Crown, and Seeds. This of course made me think of MM’s anthropological perspective of tribalism>collectivism>tribalism as a roots>trunk>crown scenario. Adding the tree metaphor to UM’s many symbols. Hopefully this metaphor will be of continued use as I continue to post.

Rodney Asher’s new docudrama film A Glitch in the Matrix, contains a sequence where one of its subjects describes learning in school how different societies have different models for perception based on current technology (ie Roman Aquaducts=Bodily Humors theory). The subject speaks of the importance of realizing how tempting it is to take our favorite models of perception for granted. Of course the current model is the computer. Is MM’s electronic model closer to the computer, or perhaps internet, or is it something else?

And as regards internet prophecy, the NYT recent ran an article on Michael Goldhaber who is responsible for popularizing the term attention economy. While the politics of attention economy are certainly on topic for UUM, I want to use it to instead point out how theorizing often leads to authority. The article refers to Goldhaber as the “Cassandra of the Internet Age.” Like MM, there is an authority conferred on him not only because he was saying it first, but that he was saying it before the possibility of being tainted by the very thing he is describing. As contemporaries of our own problems with technology, there is a sense in which we are ruined by them and can not be trusted to see the forest for the the very enticing trees. It’s a common myth but is it really the case?

MM closes out his introduction with a quote from Robert Theobald on economics which is “There is one additional factor that has helped control depressions and that is the better understanding of their development”. He’s intimating that we mis-understand the power of media environments at our own peril, and that the consequences may be as lasting and as far reaching as economic depression. MM tends to be hyperbolic, so I doubt even he knew this would end up being an understatement.