Understanding the Tactile Nature of Electric Sensibility in Virtual Environments

by rita lauria

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