Beginning to Understand the Computing Environment. . . .

Understanding the environment created by computing is vital to our physical, psychological and spiritual survival. The electrical environment of Thomas Edison consumed and contained the mechanical environment of Henry Ford. Understanding how the computing environment will consume and contain the electrical environment is our main concern.

In a lecture titled 'Cybernetics and Human Culture', Marshall McLuhan helps us to begin understanding computing:

Pictorial three-dimensional art has little in common with the acoustic space because it selects a single moment in the life of a form, whereas the flat iconic image gives an integral bounding line or contour that represents not one moment or one aspect of a form, but offers instead an inclusive integral pattern. This is a mysterious matter to highly visual and literate people who associate visual organization of experience with the real world and who say 'Seeing is Believing'. Yet this strange gap between the specialist, visual world and the integral, auditory world needs to be understood today above all, for it contains the key to an understanding of what automation and cybernetics imply. To anticipate a bit, and to capsulate a good deal, let me suggest that cybernation has much in common with the acoustic world and very little in common with the visual world.

Ever since we learned to speak, mediating and meditating on our existence has defined the arc of human progress. The alphabet lit a fire that burned as long as the Roman Empire. Gutenberg's mechanical improvement of Chinese block-printing caused an explosion of culture. When we harnessed electricity for communication an implosion occurred of atomic proportions.

Internally, our nervous system communicates through electrical signals. Since the birth of the telegraph, the external signals we send to each other are increasingly communicated through electricity. There is a unique symmetry of communication and parallel of media here. It could be that this is a natural consequence of evolution as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has stated. As Marshall McLuhan has pointed out, amongst other results of this unique parallel of media is the depth of communication which is possible: the inputs and outputs of electronic media vibrate to our very core. If we fail to understand the medium of computing, we will miss an opportunity to improve the lives of people throughout the world. We might even find expressing our thoughts and feelings to each other or forming a connection with another person or another culture more difficult than any time in human history.

For McLuhan, computing was another part of the electronic environment, or the latest evolutionary species to emerge from that environment. Time has shown that computing is an environment of its own as its consumed and contained all the media of the previous electronic environment: photography, telegraphy, telephony, phonography, moving pictures, radio, and television. The situation is more dire, for McLuhan and others who tried to deepen our understanding of the electrical environment had scant time for their ideas to percolate through society before the computing environment closed in.

The main concern of these writings is an adventure, as McLuhan would have put it. The plan is to stride out into the landscape and shed light on some landmarks so that others may follow and record in detail. We'll find that the mapping of the electronic environment has left us with a rough sketch of the coastline so that we can make a landing point. We'll also run into a few of the other adventurers who so far have been bold enough to tread inland and explore. While 'adventuring' may carry a light-hearted connotation, make no mistake, the stakes are high . . .

Humankind and humanity rest on our ability as a people to understand computing.