more to come, out of time for now ...

As an inroads to discussing JCR Licklider’s Man-Computer-Symbiosis of 1960, it would be interesting to analyze the simultaneous “tetrad” of effects as outlined in MacLuhan’s Laws of Media of 1992 to that theoretically supreme example of new media prefigured so presciently in Licklider’s writing, the internet.

Enhance – The internet clearly enhances the velocity and volume of the exchange of information in a multitude of digital forms, those being primarily audio, video, text and image.

Obsolesce – The internet tends to obsolesce those forms of communication or information transfer which now have a digital equivalent. The easiest example is e-mail which changes dramatically the role of the traditional paper mail service (now referred to as “snail mail”). An interesting post-e-mail phenomenon has been that companies such as Netflix have been able to find adaptive reuses for the USPS that expand and exploit its potential beyond that of a basic message delivery service.

Recurrence – I would argue that the recurrence of a suppressed fantasy of democratic culture is engendered by the internet. The internet is simply too broad and too open of a forum for a multitude of agendas, desires and opinions not to be expressed. Of course internet access has initially been available to only the most privileged. But, as time goes by, as bandwidth becomes cheaper, as the means and modes of expressing oneself become disseminated and more importantly modified by new user groups, the internet could become a more highly charged political space, not merely mimicking the partisan divisions and representations of the traditional media (which tend towards bullet-pointed filtrations) but rather micro-broadcasting a disparate array of differentiated agendas, within which the ultra fine silt of individualized desire might start to emulate the utopian dream of true representative democracy.

Reversal – The immersive interactivity of the internet that allows for the emergent political potential here previously argued has embedded within it a simultaneously regressive character, that postmodern condition best described by Baudrillaird, that culture could become a completely simulated experience.