The Perpetual Nomad

All this information and more has overtly, osmotically, or perhaps inadvertently damaged a collective sense of time that has been working well enough since the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the middle classes. This "timesickness" is probably what killed the economy, and God only knows what it's up to next. Everywhere we look, people are making online links--to conspiracy, porn, and gossip sites; to medical data sites and genetics sites; to baseball sites and sites for Fiestaware collectors; to sites where they can access free movies and free TV, arrange hookups with old flames or taunt old enemies--and time has begun to erase the twentieth century way of structuring one's day and locating one's sense of community. People are now doing their deepest thinking and making their most emotionally charged connections with people around the planet at all times of the day. Geography has become irrelevant. Our online phantom world has become the new us. We create complex webs of information and people who support us, and yet they are fleeting, so tenuous. Time speeds up and then it begins to shrink. Years pass by in minutes. Life becomes that strange experience in which you're zooming along a freeway and suddenly realize that you haven't paid any attention to driving for the last fifteen minutes, yet you're still alive and didn't crash. The voice inside your head has become a different voice. It used to be "you." Now your voice is that of a perpetual nomad drifting along a melting landscape, living day to day, expecting everything and nothing.


Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan: 
You Know Nothing of My Work!
2009

The Digital Story of the Nativity

via: The Thin Veil

Glass House Living

Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical womb-to-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma between our claim to privacy and the community's need to know.


--Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 1967


For an interesting perspective on social and electronic media, check out The Public Isolation Project. Cristin Norine has devoted the entire month of November (even Thanksgiving!) to living in a glass storefront, only able to communicate with others through electronic media. CNN featured her last week:





Her time is coming to a close, but check out her blog for some thought-provoking meditations on what it is like to interact only through social media. One commenter compared her undertaking to Joshua Slocum, Sir Francis Chichester, and Amelia Earhart, showing us that now that we have conquered the natural environment, our media environment is the true frontier.


Via: Read Schuchardt

Internet Factoids

Via: Medical Coding Certification

Last Week’s News: Internet Kill Switch

“This is especially true of our media. They are put out long before they are thought out. In fact, their being put outside us tends to cancel the possibility of their being thought of at all."

-- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964

Last week saw the announcement of a new US Senate bill that would give President Obama control over the Internet in emergency situations (See the Huffington Post article). US Senator Jay Rockefeller is a proponent of the bill, and wonders if the national security threat that the internet opens us up to is grave that “we would have been better off if we never invented the internet (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8PCmLPPVnA). The bill and Sen. Rockefeller’s support has a lot of people on the internet up in arms, but Sen. Rockefeller seems to be ignorant of the history of the internet. The web was not invented as a new medium to do business or to meet new friends on Facebook. Of, course, it does both of those things great.

The web started as ARPAnet, funded by the Department of Defense under the Advanced Research Project Agency. It began as a program to connect research at various universities and government research labs across the country, so that scientists and scholars could have easier access to information. The key difference between ARPAnet and any previous communications system is in the kind of network it creates. Radio, print, television and the like all depended on centralized networks to operate, meaning that all users connected to one central source of information. ARPAnet, and now the internet, function on a distributed network, meaning that there is no central host of information; if a connection is severed, information can easily be rerouted and still reach its final destination.

From a military perspective, this kind of communications network is much more robust. Though the Director of ARPA at the time of ARPAnet’s conception, Charles Herzefeld, assures us that the network “was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack,” it is very clear that this would be major motivation for funding from the Department of Defense. Even if this was not the intent from the beginning of the project, Herzfeld notes that the military applications were in their minds, and were later developed in conjunction with the Air Force.

The most significant benefit of a distributed network for military purposes is there is no central communications infrastructure that can be destroyed to wipe out information or communications between cities. It is easily seen that an attack on a radio tower would terminate any communications being transmitted from that tower and leave those it served in the dark. The existence of something like ARPAnet makes a centralized attack like that obsolete, but it also makes necessary a new kind of attack.

Now, back to Sen. Rockefeller’s remark: “Would we be better off if we never invented the internet?” Well, it is a actually a good question to think about. In terms of military power and vulnerability, how well does the internet serve us? Clearly, the terrorist attacks that Rockefeller and Lieberman fear are a product of the internet, but its invention obsolesced the kind of centralized attack that was so feared during the Cold War. Could we have foreseen this development?