Plus ca change, plus c'est pareil -- French Canadian Expression

Have you seen the IBM commercial where the guy with the wearable computer shouts stock quotes (seemingly to pigeons) in St. Mark's Square in Venice? Or the Cisco commercial that muses about a utopian future where kids in Africa have Internet connectivity? What about the Cosby Show? Or Friends? Do you listen to the radio online? Do you hear URLs advertised when you listen to the radio? Do you own a copy of Radiohead's OK Computer? Did you download it from Napster?

What do these things have in common?

At *spark-online we're still trying to figure out that question. We do it under the banner "exploring electronic consciousness" yet what exactly do we mean by the phrase?

Electronic consciousness is a self-conscious attempt to emulate the masterful aphorisms of Marshall McLuhan without much success. When we all sat down together for the first time at Vancouver's Steamworks pub on a glorious July evening in the summer of 1999, we were attempting with the creation of the magazine to represent a shared concern. The common cause that brought all of us together was the world we shared as it was reflected on a television set, in the flicker of film, in the static of radio, in the synthesis of all three on the Internet.

We are children of the media generation. My mother, a baby-boomer, can remember the day her father brought home the first television set on the block. I can't remember life without the box. Yet, ironically, my friends and I, the founders of *spark-online are members of the first generation to see the blossoming of media delivered through a new medium: the Internet. The question as it was presented that first night to the assembled group was: How do we reflect a shared history as children of this new medium?

The result was a lot of coffee over the course of a lazy afternoon on Vancouver's Robson Street a few days later and "exploring electronic consciousness". Yet, the notion remains somewhat vague.

Huh?

"Exploring electronic consciousness" is dubious in the sense that it attempts to define with a single catchy slogan, the vast reality of the new world of media and electronic communication. To argue that these mediums have contributed to some new form of human consciousness is specious at best. Yet, we maintain that it has. Others (on the *spark-online discussion board and elsewhere) have challenged the notion successfully.

Here are the nuts and bolts of the argument. McLuhan wrote that the medium is the message. Basic behavioural psychology holds that messages, repeated again and again, become the assumptions that flower into cultural axioms. No matter the truthfulness of the statements. When Cisco (advertising its corporate agenda in various media) asks: "Are you ready?" it is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is telling us that the Internet is not just a phenomena found in rich western countries that enables photographs and movies of nude children in third-world countries to be downloaded quickly into the privacy of dark offices across the world. It is telling us that the Internet is the future utopia of communication (and that the future of communication is enabled by its technology).

Do you believe the message? If you use the medium you already do.

The Mission

The future collective consciousness (to bastardize Jung) is electronic in my opinion, when you aggregate psychology and McLuhan into a single worldview. What we see (and reflect in the magazine every month) is a world that is dominated by its creation, specifically communications technology. By changing the means of communication (from old-fashioned talking to ICQ) we change what is communicated. This is a dangerous impasse given the needs of modern society.

A medium only allows for finite amounts of information to be communicated in a single exchange. The irony of our present complex society is that we've adopted mediums of communication (television, the commercial Internet) that limit communication to simplistic images and messages when society demands more sophisticated means of communication. We are dumbing down our communication at the same time that politics, religion and society demands a more complex form of discourse. The Internet (if you believe the commercials) is the medium that satisfies this demand. Yet, it is under pressure to become more like its traditional cousins (television, film and radio) rather than its present state as a vast repository of text.

At *spark-online we're attempting to be a bridge.

If McLuhan is right and the medium is the message then we have the opportunity as a publication to reflect all that is good (and evil) about human society on our pages.

The Internet allows us to explore all media in one box. Our goal as a publication is to reflect this flexibility and diversity.

  The Message

Back to exploring electronic consciousness. Some have wondered how the various aspects of the publication fit together. The sections of the publication form a complete system, which in turn is an extended argument for the existence of electronic consciousness as we see it. Media is at the top. It is the disseminator of ideas. It forms the context of electronic consciousness; it is how this consciousness is communicated. Trends are the products of media, the result of the culture that media helps to create. Discourse on electronic consciousness is the glue that holds the publication together. It is a discussion of the ideas that are generated by media, but not exclusively by it. Ideas generated and discussed in Discourse become the basis for the discussion of politics and religion that are the foundation of E-Society. E-Society acts as an intersection between the various sections as well, Media and Trends, in addition to Discourse, become important sources of the mostly political and sociological discussions found there. Misc.(ing) is the odd ball. No civilization is complete without the arts, yet we find the arts increasingly marginalized in all media, especially the Internet. We seek to redress this.

The entire magazine, then, is an expression of electronic consciousness. The medium by which it is presented (the Internet, embodying all the media found on the Internet including text, images and video) the message (concerned first and foremost with the medium it is presented by) and the format (which every month, presents twenty voices of the media generation grappling with the society that they find themselves in) are a paean to the complex relationships that influence the viewpoints and subject matter that are presented in the magazine each month. It is in this sense then that *spark-online is a reflection of electronic consciousness.

We are all mirrors of our creator. *spark-online is just a self-conscious reflection of the society it seeks to understand.

Is it electronic…

When one speaks…

Of consciousness…

Whilst asleep…

Copyright © 2000 Robert Delamar All Rights Reserved

Robert Delamar loves Canada. He lives in the United States. He doesn't understand the Internet. He works for an ISP. He dropped out of law school. He is married. He is wondering how many times he can say use the masculine third person to describe himself in one paragraph. He's a co-founder and Managing Editor of *spark-online.

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