[Nettime-bold] The War Between the Two Technologies

[Newmedia@aol.com]

[Frederick Wilhelmsen and Jane Best, "The War in Man: Media and Machines," 
1970, University of Georgia Press]

"Now electronic technology is antithetically opposed to mechanics in almost 
every aspect.  McLuhan has demonstrated this brilliantly in his 
'Understanding Media.'  Here we select one of these aspects crucial for out 
purposes.  Mechanical technology tends towards anonymity as it approaches 
perfection; machines progressively throw off human intervention in their 
functioning the better they become, needing less and less immediate human 
guidance by their operators; they reach for an independence they never quite 
achieve; and they, in the measure of their excellence, depend less and less 
upon the human person.  Electronic media do something entirely different.  
They involve the person by invading his entire nervous system and by 
eliciting his attention, willy-nilly.  You cannot *not* be involved in the 
light that is on.  Personal involvement is of the very meaning itself of 
electronic media, whereas personal involvement is a sign of primitiveness in 
mechanical technology.  The issue can be expressed as follows: electronic 
media are independent in their own mode of existence, and they render man 
dependent by involving him; but mechanical technology, while dependent upon 
man, progressively attempts to escape the dependence.  The results, of 
course, are antithetical.  The electronic involves man more and more as it 
approaches its perfection.  The war between these two technologies -- the 
older approaching fullness at the very moment of its immanent obsolescence 
even while it mingles with the newer -- has produced an intolerable tension 
in the psyche of western industrialized man.

"The mechanical order has had four centuries now to depersonalize the human 
being and to render the world surrounding him remote and distant until he has 
almost come to sense himself a stranger in his own house.  The new media, 
simultaneously, throw him back into what McLuhan calls 'tribalization,' into 
a new order of corporate existence that obliterates space and time even as it 
combines into unity by analogy a world in which men can no longer hide from 
one another.  It is as though the machine were suddenly found out because 
somebody turned the lights on.  Atomized by mechanical culture into solitary 
units that had been centralized in the gigantic factory which West had 
become, cut away from one another by an ever-increasing division of labor, 
constrained to live in a world that was perforce as functional as was its 
technical basis -- men suddenly found their private and depersonalized lives 
invaded by a gigantic Peeping Tom that synthesized once again the hitherto 
fragmented, the united the previously isolated, that abolished pure function 
in the name of communitarian being.  We oversimplify for the purpose of 
illustration.  Actually, the new technology has not abolished the old -- not 
yet.  It co-exists with the old, buttressing it peripherally even while 
gradually replacing it centrally.  But in the meantime, WESTERN MAN IS FORCED 
TO LIVE TWO RYTHMNS WHICH OPPOSE EACH OTHER.

"As a mechanical man, he is alone, anonymous, violent in the mechanization of 
his sexuality and resentful in the loss of his personality.  As *beamed on* 
by electronic media which englobe him along with all other men, he is 
forcibly united to the whole, tribalized, reintegrated bruquely into a 
humanity he would otherwise avoid if he could.  Machine tenders in Detroit, 
beer-swiggers at the 'Oktoberfest' in Munich, scuba divers of Ecaudor, space 
men on the moon and miners in the bowels of the earth, the Pope in Bogata and 
Russian tanks in Prague on the same day -- all are rendered simultaneous to a 
generation fed on television.  Privacy as a stance and as a way of life is 
threatened.  There will be no more invasions under the cloak of darkness, and 
even the slaughter of the Biafrans in Nigeria now works its tragedy into the 
front rooms of millions in America.  No longer can anybody get away with 
something without being found out.  Privacy -- itself a necessary by-product 
of mechanical fragmentation -- is today discovered, revealed, commented on.  
Princess Irene of Holland taking a sunbath on the roof of an Italian hotel in 
a bikini, discovered and photographed by prying news photographers, did not 
lose her privacy.  It was not taken away from her.  It was simply found out 
and violated."  (pages 14-16)

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