Andrey Mir writing at Human as Media (Homo homini media est), June 25:
Ubiquitous digital media offer potent rewards—but at the price of eroding our sensory and social capacities.
The media theorist Marshall McLuhan held that every medium constitutes an extension of our physical or mental faculties. The hammer extends our fist, the spear our teeth, the hut our skin, the wheel our feet—and electronic media our central nervous system. By broadening human intellectual and social faculties far beyond our natural abilities, the Internet has given us incredible benefits. Never before could humans augment their knowledge of any subject matter so quickly and easily; never before have people had so many contacts.
But everything comes at a price. Amplified abilities may provide new powers, but they also lead, in McLuhan’s terms, to the “numbing” and “amputation” of organs and skills formerly responsible for certain tasks. A phone’s digital memory remembers phone numbers for us, but it cuts off the part of our organic memory responsible for basic recall. Machines do many things much more efficiently than people once did, but they atrophy bodily functions, disrupting not only the preexisting sensorium but also old physical skills and social habits. Ubiquitous digital media, with their new reward system, threaten even more troubling changes.
Evaluating the gains and losses that new media produce is an old tradition. In Plato’s Phaedrus, god-inventor Theuth brought a gift of letters, which he created for people, to King Thamus for approval. Theuth claimed that writing would make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memory. Thamus replied that writing would actually cause forgetfulness because people would “not remember of themselves”—they would rely on “the external written characters” instead of their memories. Writing would become “an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence.” People would learn a lot but know nothing. They would appear wise know-it-alls but lack real wisdom.
Both mythological figures proved right. If devices cause the “organic” memory to deteriorate, as Thamus warned, our “practical” memory has also improved beyond measure, supporting Theuth’s stance. You no longer plausibly can fail to get in touch with somebody just because you forgot his phone number or can fail to wish a friend a happy birthday because you couldn’t remember the date. Some personal faculties have deteriorated, yes; but media are much better at performing functions that we previously did physically. <…>
The logic of our faculties’ migration into media, extended far enough, leads to a complete human resettling into media. The more our capabilities migrate to media, the more our power grows over our physical and social environments—and the more essential it is to improve the potency of our media. The migration of physical abilities to, say, a stone ax dealt with only a tiny fraction of our needs. The Internet, by contrast, caters to all human collective and personal activities.
Indeed, we are nearly all the way there, save for some physical daily routines....
....MUCH MORE
