Post-literate media
The more data we collect via Google, YouTube and Facebook, the less likely
we are to understand what it means
BY LEWIS LAPHAM
This originally appeared on TomDispatch.
I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my
horse.
– Emperor Charles V
But in which language does one speak to a machine, and what can be expected
by way of response? The questions arise from the accelerating data-streams
out of which we’ve learned to draw the breath of life, posed in consultation
with the equipment that scans the flesh and tracks the spirit, cues the ATM,
the GPS and the EKG, arranges the assignations on Match.com and the
high-frequency trades at Goldman Sachs, catalogs the pornography and drives
the car, tells us how and when and where to connect the dots and thus
recognize ourselves as human beings.
Why then does it come to pass that the more data we collect – from Google,
YouTube and Facebook – the less likely we are to know what it means?
The conundrum is in line with the late Marshall McLuhan’s noticing 50 years
ago the presence of «an acoustic world,» one with «no continuity, no
homogeneity, no connections, no stasis,» a new «information environment of
which humanity has no experience whatever.» He published «Understanding
Media» in 1964, proceeding from the premise that «we become what we behold,»
that «we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.»
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