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Electric
technologies create an overall sensibility or "feel" of the input
sense data that the brain uses to dynamically generate the imagery
of thought. Marshall and Eric McLuhan described the effect of
electric media as creating a ground that engenders a sense of
tactility that mediates all the senses. The electric creates a
tactile feel. According to the McLuhans, this sense of tactility
defines "the relation of figure to ground and provides the structure,
the con-figuration of ground."
Any
technology gradually creates its own environment--what the McLuhans
called service environments. These service environments are active
processes that affect the whole psychic and social complex. Electric
technologies create supersensory, immersive service environments:
electric spaces. Electric space is primarily tactile in nature.
Electric sensibility has a certain "feel."
Marshall
McLuhan and his son Eric spoke of electric sensibility in terms
of "acoustic space." They described acoustic space as being constituted
of "resonant intervals, dynamic relationships, and kinetic pressure."
They recognized the audile and the tactile as being inseparable.
The McLuhans wrote:
We
hear from all directions simultaneously; acoustic space has the
structure of a sphere in which things create their own space and
modify and coerce each other. Without visual stress necessary
to drive the other senses 'underground' into the subconscious,
their interrelatedness is constant … There is no infinity; to
the ear faculty, the question is unintelligible. The essential
structure … is kinetic and tactile, a matter of pressure and interval.
Marshall
McLuhan explicitly contrasted the sensibility of acoustic space
with what he called 'visual space.' He said visual space had its
formal cause in the phonetic alphabet. Visual space is the abstract,
non-experiential realm of concept, constructed since the time of
the Greek geometers. Visual space has engulfed our sensibility since
then and has existed as the ground from which we orient and take
direction.
The
electric sensibility of acoustic space feels different from visual
space. Acoustic space envelops the body like the biosphere envelops
the earth. It demands a physical interaction with the body. Visual
space lends a different feel to reality, grounded on the abstract
rather than on the concrete. It feels mediated by the space surrounding
the body. Visual space is outer awareness, awareness of 'other'
rather than perception that drives consciousness inward.
This
is an age in which, as McLuhan noted, all forms are pushed to the
limits of their potential. The harmonics of the electronic support
our extended, synthetic superstructure: cyberspace. Cyberspace is
an electronically supported virtual reality. Cyberspace is electric
space.
There
are many names for cyberspace phenomena and cyberspace media: virtual
worlds, virtual environments, artificial reality, synthetic environments,
artificial environments, virtual reality. Characterizing any virtual
reality, however, is the electronically supported subjective experience
of virtuality.
Experimental
psychologist John Waterworth, researching and working in human/computer
interaction and interface design, recognizes the implications of
virtuality for shifting the focus of consciousness. He refers to
a virtual environment as a "virtually-physical landscape" in which
everything is a thing. Virtual objects stand for abstract entities
and processes. They are computer-based realizations that provide
direct engagement with information.
In virtual
reality, abstract concepts are concretized as knowledge through
interactive, direct engagement with virtual objects. Through a tactile
interaction with objects that present as being "apparently physical,"
we come to knowledge. Direct engagement provides a sense of presence,
defined as a sense of being in an environment.
By transferring
the task of realization to the computer, we integrate physical existence
with abstract thought and thereby concretize knowing as the experience
of being. The computer becomes part of a whole communication system
that supports the grounding of abstract thought in concrete action.
Abstract
reasoning can be embedded in concrete reasoning skills. Concrete
reasoning skills are highly automated in the sensori-motor systems.
In virtual environments the abstract becomes embodied as knowledge
via direct, interactive, tactile engagement with the concrete. Waterworth
says this is the normal way people anchor and control abstract thought.
They attach it to sensori-motor plan execution. In virtual reality,
the environment itself can do the anchoring work. Abstract concepts
become embodied as concrete action via sensori-motor activities.
Virtual
objects serve to place awareness and attention physically in the
virtual landscape. Physical placement works as a mnemonic device
to transfer the burden of association from the abstraction to the
concretization of knowledge. Waterworth says this represents a profound
perceptual shift and a shift in the focus of consciousness. The
challenge is in design.
Sensemaking
relies on concretisation (in the imagination or on the computer
screen). By this view, to make sense literally means to make into
a form that can be experienced by the senses, and in this task
the computer is more powerful than human imagination. Sense is
not made until a concrete representation is experienced in human
consciousness but, as human consciousness is very limited, effort
spent on the process of imagining and holding the information
necessary for concrete mental representations is effort that is
not available to reflect on those representations. Transferring
the task of realisation to the computer frees conscious resources
for other things …
It
transfers the burden of association from ongoing abstract processing
(in consciousness) to ongoing concrete processing (largely automatised
and unconscious) … this brings a profound change to our perception,
and emphasises that, however useful it may have been for solving
practical problems, mental life also has the primary effect of
giving experiences, of imparting a sense of being.
Electric
sensibility in virtual environments is tactile in nature. Virtual
environments have a certain "feel." Conjoined with this feel, the
focus of consciousness in virtual environments shifts from abstract
reasoning to concrete action through direct engagement with virtual
objects in the electric space. This creates the feel of real and
establishes a sense of presence, a sense of being rather than merely
thinking. "I am, therefore I think." The mind is in the body, and
the body is in the mind. The mind and the body are one.
This
is the essence of hi-touch sensibility. Thought, feelings, mind
are ordered through a process of whole interaction between environment
and organism. Mental phenomena, and any psychic transformation,
can be fully understood only within this context. Theories of mind,
self, and soul reconfigure as the lens of our perception shifts
in interplay with the biases of our artifactual use. As we immerse
ourselves in the electric sensibility of virtual cyberspaces, the
consequent effect is that of a sense of being part of technology
rather than separate from it.
Copyright
© 2000 Rita Lauria. All Rights Reserved.
Rita
Lauria is a Research Associate of Media Interface and Network
Design (M.I.N.D.) Lab at Michigan State University. Her research
involves the philosophy and design of virtuality. Link to her
Web page at http://books.mindlab.org/rlauria
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