Synthesizing Mcluhan

MCLUHAN's PUZZEL

My PhD research project aims to reassess the work of communication scholar Herbert Marshall Mcluhan (1911-1980) in the light of todays media revolution. During my last three years at the European Journalism Centre (EJC) I was astonished to see many of his predictions becoming central realities in todays new media ecosystem. It buffeled me how Mcluhan's thoughts expressed more then 30 years ago still captures the central characteristics of an ongoing shift in todays values. Not just in economy and business but in politics, technology and society. Reflected in metaphors such as "Social Media", "Web2.0", "Cloud Computing", "Mobile Web", "Realtime Web", "Long Tail", "Creative Commons", "Mashup", "Facebook", "Realy Simple Syndication RSS" a much wider vortex of energy shaping the mindset of 21st century western culture seems to be at work than current theories can explain. Supported by sound scientific metaphers like "Knowledge Society", "Information Highway", "Network Society", "The Cult of the Amature", "ReMix Culture", "Creative Commons", "Knowledge Worker", "Innovation", "Change Management", "Infonomics", "Data is the new oil", "The Wealth of Networks", "Attention Economy" the forces shaping western culture seem to impress themselves upon 21st century digital boys and girls on facebook and elsewhere. To give but one example of the shifts in values underlaying the statistics of popular social network sites I focus on identity.

Uwe Hasebrink, Chairman of the German part of the EU Kids Online Network and director of the Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research in Hamburg said that young people have really embraced social networking sites, which has become an important part in social development and establishing their identities.

Since the internet became 'social' there is much talk about privacy and identity. What invaded over night millions of not only young people people who's sense of identity became watery. Research into media consumtion and habits reveal a dissolution between private and public identity, work and home, not just since facebook is around. Institutions too are faced with new media and are under constraints regarding their choices. Working at Maastricht University School of Business and Economics as webmaster I am shocked how a simple website alters how people see themselves. This ongoing shift definately reached its climax with the introduction of the mobile internet and devices like the iphone in combination with 'social' customer relationship management platforms. Web2.0 gurus like to talk about "The wisdom of the crowd", "The Networked society", "Here comes everybody" and "The cult of the amature", "The swallow" all relating technological imperatives to social phenomena. The shift that turned former passive consumers into active producers is responsible for this shift in selfperception. In a world where the majority saw on TV the spectacle orchestrated by a minority private identity was tacitly placed into the realm of the individual. And from their amplified in the multitudes of channels into the public realm. And this is our twitter, facebook, blogs.... . All that is now imploding on us and causes us to respond by flooding this new space - the internet. Or however you want to call it. A "New Cultural Economy" is unfolding upon the babies of the babyboom generation with increasing speedup of innovation accross all sectors of society. Driven by young entreprneurs accros the globe filling up to discover new markets and tapping into novel enterprises a global media galaxy is shrinking devices to the a level when kids get the feeling of beeing bigger than them: the 'Big Media'. Or the old one if they would only know that there was a time when we had no TV, even no radio or newspaper.

 

Brain and the Computer by John von Neumann

The Brain - Computer Debate

The brain - computer comparison was investigated in a book by John von Neumann back in the 1950s. In it, the father of all computers looked at the neuro anatomy of brains. He concluded that "whatever computational regime governs the brain it must be fundamentally different from the one governing von Neumann machines". After a detailed and skillful exploration of the brain at the end of the book he concludes "that the brain has a different physical organization and uses a computational strategy that is different from the von Neumann architecture".

The brain is different in that "a solution to the problem of the brains slowness of its neuronal activities and given the low accuracy of its typical representation" is compensated by the "logical depth" only imaginable as "massively parallel analog machine". Because it is "the acquired global configuration of those many millions, nay trillions of synaptic connections that embodies whatever knowledge and skills the brain may have aquried" that makes it what it is and subsequently what it does. Along the sidelines of computer science evolved empirical neuroscience.

Advancement in electron & confocal microscopy, patch clamping, electro - and magnet encephalography, CAF scans, PET scans, MRI and fMRI scans are the technical instruments responsible for its rise as cognitive neuroscience and the insights they give into the workings of the brain. The American Association for Advancement of Science Journal issued an article, which was coauthored by Eric Richard Kandel Nobel Laureate, and subtitled “Breaking down scientific barriers to the study of brain and mind”. The article covers very interesting ground but ends up with the conclusion that the neuroscience of higher cognitive processes is only begining. One of the leading Neuroscientists Randy Gallistel pointed out that “we clearly do not understand how the nervoussystem computes or even the foundation of its ability to compute even for the small set of arithmetic and logical operations that are fundamental to any computation”. Thus we seem to be today as far away from a more meaningful understanding than Hans Lukas Teuber, one of the founders of contemporary cognitive Neuroscience was 50 years ago, when he wrote that "it may seem strange to begin with the claim that there is no adquate definition of perception and to end with the admission that we lack a neurophysiological theory. Althou this was the most that could be said".

What governs von Neumann machines are computer languages. At the heart of these languages lies formal logic. Ever since formal logic and logical syllogism encapsulate connectedness in reasoning, philosophers and mathematicians have entertained the idea to reduce matter to pure form. About a millenia later just as Aristotle created the abstraction of logic by focusing attention on the form of Syllogisms rather than their meaning of their propositions, Boole a young english mathematician, abstracted algebra by looking closely at its rules of operation wherby he showed that they formed a consistend system themselves that didn't have to apply to numbers at all. He showed how numbers could be used to reduce logical propositions to the form of equations that could be solved according to ordinary algebraic rules. Boolen then demonstrated the generality of his system by showing how it could be used to derive ANY true conclusion logically contained in any given set of propositions. Thus, the goal of building a formal system that could generate and prove all laws of science or mathematics was shown to be unatainable. Aristotle's investigation into the old problem posed by the destinction between form and matter ended with the attempts of formal mathematics that proved that its unsolvable. Form would never totaly replace meaning. With the Syllogism at the center, formal languages and computer technologies formed a symbiant relation. What makes such a computer usable is the language governing its operation. But unlike a natural language will govern the operations of von Neuman Machines, so are all formal languages deviced inappropriate in governing the human mind/brain.