Advertising and Automation

Many people have expressed uneasiness about the advertising enterprise in our time. To put the matter abruptly, the advertising industry is a crude attempt to extend the principles of automation to every aspect of society. Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness. When all production and all consumption are brought into a pre-established harmony with all desire and all effort, then advertising will have liquidated itself by its own success.

-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964

The Heresy Hunter Hunts McLuhan

The Heresy Hunter

The Heresy Hunter has a long (and when I say long, I mean L-O-N-G) post on why McLuhan the Mass Media Mystifier was Gnostic and a heretic (available here). The author has put some serious research. I don't agree with many of his conclusions, but I will quote what stood out to me on my first read, and in a couple of days try to draft a response.

"McLuhan was unmindful to this because he, like Hume, wrote that "the effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinion or concepts" [the mind], but at the level of "sense ratios or patterns of perception" [the body].

If "electric light" has no "content", if it is not substantial, then what is it? If it is not something that can be perceived (whether biologically or with some technical instrumentation), what is it? It cannot be something and nothing at the same time, as this is in defiance of the principle of contradiction.

Moreover, McLuhan wrote that light and power "eliminate" time and space.[29] But do they really? No. They only lessen the scales of "time and space factors" involved. They do not completely remove, effectuating an entire change in the character of technology. Rather, they noticeably reduce quantifiable magnitudes in a biological-sensorial sense.

As is now being evidenced, all kinds of fallacies are coming to the fore. This is simply because McLuhan presumed the medium to be equal to the message. When one really ponders the phrase "the medium is the message", it is classic Humeanism. The messages that man relays around the world are in themselves irretrievably tied in with the physical/technological contraption utilized to emit these messages or information, be it via satellite, television, radio, fax machine, internet, and so forth. The message, represented by universal signs, are fashioned to be equivalent to the medium, which is a singular thing or device. Information (in the forms of language, alphanumeric codes, graphical images, and so on) then become, not representations of commodities (things); instead, they are converted into commodities as such. To McLuhan there was, à la Hume, no distinction between the sensible and intelligible. The signs that communicate ideas to the mind, and the thing in the world as a really distinct existential unit from the mind, were not deemed as such by Marshall McLuhan. Again: he made understanding equivalent to technologically heightened sensation.

Thus TH2 [author of the post] concludes that Marshall McLuhan was a gnostic who mystified mass media. This is straightforwardly confirmed with the following:

The main obstacle to a clear understanding of the effects of the new media is our deeply embedded habit of regarding all phenomena from a fixed point of view.[82]

As with any gnostic, ancient or modern, philosopher or scientist, the remission of specificity or "a fixed point of view" is an error betraying a propensity towards relativism, leading inescapingly to obscurantism. "

My response will follow, soon.

Discarnate Man is Not Compatible with an Incarnate Church

When people are on the telephone or on the air, they have no physical bodies but are translated into abstract images. Their old physical beings are entirely irrelevant to the new situations. The discarnate user of electric media bypasses all former spatial restrictions and is present in many places simultaneously as a disembodied intelligence. This puts him one step above angels, who can only be in one place at a time. Since, however, discarnate man has no relation to natural law (or to Western lineality), his impulse is towards anarchy and lawlessness. Minus his body, the user of telephone or radio or TV is also minus his private identity, an effect that is becoming increasingly relevant.

-- Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media, 1988 

Guy Debord and the Return to Normalcy

A not-so-recent article in the New York Times by Clive Thompson (Web Ushers in an Age of Ambient Intimacy) discusses how new media like Facebook and Twitter have given us an “ambient awareness.” The multiple and often mundane updates we publish online provide us with “a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of our friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.” It is remarkable that we can be so intimately aware of the daily lives of any of hundreds of friends, family, and acquaintances that may be scattered over the globe, and it is very reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan's observation that electric technology involves "the family of man in the cohesive state of village living."

In fact, one of Thompson’s sources for his article described Facebook in this same way:

It's just like living in a village, where it's actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already," Tufekci said. "The current generation is never unconnected. They're never losing touch with their friends. So we're going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that's very new. It's just the 20th century."

So, in the broad sweep of history, we are finally returning to normalcy. Yet clearly, we are living in an entirely different environment. There is a qualitative difference between meeting your fellow village-folk at the well and discussing the events of the day and sitting in front of your computer or on your handheld of choice and being confronted with a list of updates. Twitter and the Facebook news feed both embody an evolution of our news media more than any other medium (it’s called a news feed). From the village herald to the newspaper to television news networks to electronic newspapers to Twitter, news has reversed from its pattern of broader and broader coverage to about as personal as it can get.

Yet is this really a return to normalcy? Guy Debord, a noted French social critic, wrote his esoteric critique of the technological society in The Society of the Spectacle. He claimed that the Spectacle—described variously as “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images,” “a worldview transformed into an objective force,” and the “chief product of modern day society”—is the preeminent factor organizing society today. It manifests itself in the content of news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment, and in the forms of the mass media and technology. Debord noted that though our technology may unite us, it “unites only in its separateness,” as he saw it reinforcing the isolation of the lonely crowd.

The question is then, does his critique stand? Tufekci says that we are returning to normalcy in our social interactions while Debord says that everywhere he looks he sees the same intent: “to restructure society without community.” There seems to be truth in the fact that our online personas require a little more personal consistency in as much as they disallow us from really leaving behind any social group. On the other hand, though our news media have reversed into the personal village gossip, we are involved in the village only as long as we sit in front of our computers.


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Eternal Vigilance

The price of liberty and even of common humanity, is eternal vigilance.

--Aldous Huxley

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

--Marshall McLuhan

Required Reading

Excellent essay in the NY Times this weekend. I'd quote it, but it should be read in its entirety.

Only Disconnect

By GARY SHTEYNGART

The Well-Adjusted Man is a Robot

The world becomes a sum of lifeless artifacts; from synthetic food to synthetic organs, the whole man becomes part of the total machinery that he controls and is simultaneously controlled by. He has no plan, no goal for life, except doing what the logic of technique determines him to do. He aspires to make robots as one of the greatest achievements of his technical mind, and some specialists assure us that the robot will hardly be distinguishable from living men. This achievement will not seem so astonishing when man himself is hardly distinguishable from a robot.


-- Eric Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 1973

AVATAR: The Future of the World

Is not the mechanical at its best a remarkable approximation to the organic? 

-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964


Most reviews of Avatar described it as a sort of sci-fi retelling of Pocahontas or Dances with Wolves. Jake Sully enters the world of the Na’vi to get the inside scoop on this group threatening the economic interests of the humans, much like John Smith or Lt. Dunbar. But a much more interesting message reveals itself to us if we consider McLuhan’s thoughts about art in Understanding Media:

No society has ever known enough about its actions to have developed immunity to its new extensions or technologies. Today we have begun to sense that art may be able to provide such immunity.

The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs. He, then, builds models or Noah’s arks for facing the change that is at hand. 

The folks over at Metaphilm have a sense that movies may be able to provide us with immunity to technological change, if we try to “see through” them to the real message. As Fr. Barron says about the Dances with Wolves plot in Avatar, it really seems like something that would only appeal to a 14-year-old boy. Yet, as the viewer identifies more and more with the Na’vi people and less with the human antagonists, we sense that Cameron is playing with us.

The technology used by the humans in the movie is cool, but not unimaginable (that cool computer screen hand manipulation is demonstrated at a TEDtalk), except for the technology that allows Sully to enter the Na’vi body. But the technology that really steals the show is the interconnectedness of the Na’vi people to each other and their environment.  There is a scene where Sigourney Weaver’s character, Dr. Augustine, is studying a tree root and is amazed at the networking capabilities she finds. We see these capabilities utilized by the Ethernet-like braid extending from the back of all Na’vi heads that they use to communicate with Eywa--the Mother Nature-esque deity—and all the animals on their planet. Reminiscent of how Neo and company enter the Matrix, these braids connect the Na’vi completely and seamlessly with their entire planet, rather than pulling the wool over the eyes of the human race.

Avatar may really be best understood as the flipside of The Matrix. In his avatar, the world that Sully enters becomes more real to him than his human-embodied life, so much so that the movie shows him becoming more of a visitor in his human body and more connected to his Na'vi avatar. By the end, taking the blue pill, Sully abandons his human body for his avatar. This action is perfectly understandable, as the audience has seen the destruction and brutality of the human race in contrast with the peacefulness and community of the Na’vi. Why would Sully choose to live in a disjointed, violent society in his imperfect body when he could live in perfect harmony with a “body like Shaq that moves like Kobe”?

The Na’vi people represent our cultural ideal for technology, especially since the internet. We want our technology to bring us closer together, to connect us in a beautiful web that nature could never accomplish. Cameron shows his vision of the future, wherein the mechanical doesn’t just approximate the organic, it is organic. With Avatar and The Matrix, we are given two visions of our technology.

We are also given two very different versions of people interacting with technology, which is most likely influenced by changes in how we used to interact with the internet and the changes that are still occuring with the advent of the social media--Twitter, Facebook and the like. The realm of computers and the internet used to be mostly for solitary types who were into technology, but these days, who isn't into technology? In America, technology is quickly becoming as universal a conversation topic as the weather--everyone understands the annoyance of a mysterious bad connection or the tragedy/joy when your computer breaks days after/before the warranty expires. Computer technology and the internet especially have become the new centers of our mediated lives, and if that was the fear of The Matrix, Avatar shows that we have nothing to fear and should embrace our new environment.

The mentality the Singularity movement--which you can read about here--takes to technological evolution is similar to the Noah's ark that Cameron built for us to face the technological changes that are coming. Avatar is a movie about "the arrival of the Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state. At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past." Cameron's movie beautifully expresses this dream, but we must wonder if the dream will change as dramatically as it has since The Matrix.


See also the review of The Matrix at Metaphilm.

Internet Factoids

Via: Medical Coding Certification

Consider the Following: Twitter and Collective Consciousness

"Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums  among the other organs and extensions of the body."

"With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism."
    
                    -- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964

Twitter and the Global Brain

© 2009 Dean Pomerleau

View the original document

The prevailing model for many years of how synapses between neurons in the brain are altered during learning has been Hebbian learning, which can be summarized as "neurons that fire together, wire together".  In other words, in two neurons fire at the same time, the connection(s) between them will strengthened.

But recent evidence in neuroscience shows the truth is actually an interested twist on this idea - a twist that could have important implications as a model of how global consciousness could emerge from real-time social media like Twitter.

In reality, synapses are modified according to a rule called Spike Time Dependent Plasticity(STDP).   In a nutshell, STDP says that if two neurons fire (= spike) in rapid succession, the  connection from the one that fires first to the one that fires second will be strengthened.

In other words, if neuron A reliably fires shortly before neuron B, the connection from A to B will get stronger, so that next time when neuron A fires, neuron B will be more likely to fire too.  And the opposite holds as well.  In this example, since the firing of neuron B lags behind neuron A, the strength of the connection in that direction (from B to A), will be weakened.  You could think of it as the neural equivalent of the old saying 'the early bird catches the worm' - a neuron that fires first gains increasing influence on its downstream neighbors.

STDP is a simple idea, but it has been shown to be a surprisingly powerful way that the brain uses for rapid pattern recognition and classification [1][2].  It turns out that using STDP, neurons naturally learn to specialize in detecting certain patterns in their inputs, even in the presence of lots of noise.

So what in the world does this have to do with social networks?  There is an intriguing analogy between networks of neurons operating by the STDP rule and the emerging structure and functioning of real-time social networks like Twitter.

Imagine a twitter user as a neuron.  He/she makes the equivalent of a synapse with each of his/her followers.  When a twitter user sends out a tweet, it is the equivalent of a neuron firing.  Followers who receive the tweet decide whether to propagate the activity by retweeting the message, in a sense by deciding whether they too should fire in response to the tweet.

It isn't happening exactly this way yet, but STDP would enter the picture in the following way.  Suppose Bill is a follower of an influential person on Twitter like Guy Kawasaki and Bill decides one of Guy's tweets is interesting enough to retweet.  This is a clear indication that Bill finds Guy's tweets interesting and valuable.  Based on this 'vote of confidence' for Guy's tweets, a yet-to-be-implemented mechanism could automatically increase the weight that Guy's tweets are given for Bill, making Guy's tweets more likely to show up high on Bill's Twitter 'dashboard'.

But what if Guy wasn't the first to tweet the news that Bill found so interesting?  The same automated mechanism could suggest to Bill that instead of (or in addition to) following Guy, Bill might like to follow another sharp Twitter personality (perhaps Nova Spivack) who beat Guy to the punch by being the first to post the content Bill found interesting.

In this way, users could be automatically steered towards following folks who are the first to post content that will interest them - towards those who are considered the 'thought leaders' you might say.  And content creators who work hard to be the first to find and tweet interesting content will be rewarded automatically with a growing list of followers, and eventually with monetary reward if/when Scobleizer 'attention economy', or some other way to monetize eyeballs, emerges on Twitter.

As an added benefit, the tweets Bill receives could be automatically sorted based on how interesting they are likely to be for him.  As a simple example, imagine that several of the people Bill follows and has demonstrated an affinity for in the past (by retweeting their posts) tweet about the same story. This convergence of matching input from sources that Bill weights highly suggests that Bill will find this to be very interesting content, so it should be automatically bubbled to the top of Bill's prioritized list of tweets to read.

In this model, content generators on Twitter will compete to be the first to create good content or break important news, just as neurons in the brain compete via the STDP update rule to be the first to detect patterns in their input and shout out about it by spiking.  In both systems, 'the early bird catches the worm'.

Eventually, tools may even emerge that automatically retweet messages based on a user's previously expressed preferences, to alert his followers of content he, and therefore they, will likely consider interesting.  At that point, the virtual neurons formed by the combination of people and their automated agents on Twitter will be influencing each other and firing automatically based on the inputs they receive.  On a macro scale, this will represent the equivalent of thoughts emerging in the Global Brain, in the form of rapid, coordinated firing of millions of these virtual neurons.  These thoughts will propagate and potentially trigger other thoughts in the network.  This massive semi-autonomous reverberation in the twittersphere could signal the emergence of a true global consciousness.

[1] Masquelier T, Guyonneau R, Thorpe SJ. Spike timing dependent plasticity finds the start of repeating patterns in continuous spike trains. PloS one. 2008;3(1):e1377. Available at:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18167538.

[2] 1. Masquelier T, Hugues E, Deco G, Thorpe SJ. Oscillations, Phase-of-Firing Coding, and Spike Timing-Dependent Plasticity: An Efficient Learning Scheme. Journal of Neuroscience. 2009;29(43):13484-13493. Available at:http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/doi/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2207-09.2009

A Place to Stand

Archimedes once said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world.” Today he would have pointed to our electric media and said, “I will stand on your eyes, your ears, your nerves, and your brain, and the world will move in any tempo or pattern I choose.” We have leased these "places to stand" to private corporations.

                                                                                                            -- Marshall McLuhan, 1964