In Our Own Image: A New Tribal Self

Part I: An Introduction

I believe that the new electronic media and multimedia present us with unsettling new ways to define ‘self’. How do our media of communication work to create and recreate our individual and collective self?

The following explores the concept of self from the perspective of the effects of different media of communication on human perception— from the here-and-now world of the oral tradition, through the sequential, hierarchical, linear world of print, and to the webbed matrix of electronic multimedia.

Can the split in our consciousness, the self/other construct that is the basis of all oppression, finally be mended? Marshall McLuhan seemed to think so, and the text that follows has been influenced by his prophetic, sometimes utopian, vision.

Over time, computer mediated communication may transform our polarized dominant/subordinate modes of thought into a postmodern collective consciousness— a new tribal self. Certainly, the electronic web of the new media has the potential to erase boundaries, to undermine power hierarchies.

But what if one of the boundaries we erase is the one that separates our ‘self’ from the ‘other’ of our own technology? What then?

Part II: Becoming Conscious of Self

Isolated individual experience cannot determine our concept of self. Simple consciousness alone doesn't define us. The information we gather must be processed— perceived, ordered, and transformed by the miracle of the human brain— and then translated.

From birth, our concept of self is formed through reflexive interaction. Communication is key to our understanding of what constitutes us as individuals, separate from m/other.

I think it was Einstein who said, "It is the theory which decides what we can observe." We limit thought through language, selecting what we can talk about by the words we use to talk about it.

As a skier, for example, I have an extensive vocabulary to describe the quality of snow (spring corn,champagne powder, icing sugar, granular, corduroy, crud, blue ice). Non-skiers, with fewer words to describe the minute differences in the snow's texture, consistency, and temperature, will be less likely to discuss— or even to think about— those variations. Non-skiers' thoughts about snow are limited by the narrower range of their experiences with snow, and that limitation is reflected in their vocabulary.

What we can ‘know’ is determined not only by the range of our words, but also by our systems of ‘knowing’. As the German philosopher Schopenhauer pointed out, we marvel at the miracles that we ourselves have created through application of our ordering intellect to nature:

It is as if the intellect were astonished at finding that all multiples of nine again yield nine when their single figures are added together, or else to a number whose single figures again add up to nine; and yet it has itself prepared this miracle in the decimal system (in Watzalawick 63).

We created the decimal system, the language of mathematics, and any ‘miracles’ it works are a result of our own design.

Collectively, we are God.

Language doesn't merely label an objective world, it also defines that world. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that differences between various languages can account for some cognitive and philosophical differences between cultures.

If this hypothesis is true, then no one language is more or less valid than any other. There can be no ‘objective’ criteria by which to judge. Any so-called strengths or weaknesses of a particular language, or of a particular medium of communication, are created by the subjective reality of the originating culture, and also create the reality of that culture.

Each language, each medium of communication, reflects the biases of the culture in which it developed, interpreting the world in a unique way. And any new language, any new medium of communication, will work to change modes of perception of the society within which it evolves.

Western society, with the development of the multimedia of communication, is currently struggling with just such a change. We're plugged in and humming.

Part III: Print Culture, Individual Self

Until literacy, we lived in a world of what Marshall McLuhan called "multi-dimensional resonance, every word.... a poetic world unto itself, a ‘momentary deity’, a revelation" (25). Each word existed only in the perpetual NOW of our unified senses, and ceased to exist outside of the human brain at the very moment it was spoken. The concept of past lived only as part of eternal present. Future was perceived as the natural unfolding, the perfect ‘becoming’ of now. Time was a fluid, living thing. The eyes beheld what the ears heard.

The gradual development of the phonetic alphabet, and the spread of its representational abstract symbols in place of direct expression, split vision from hearing, tasting, smelling, touching. As McLuhan says, it "reduced the use of all the senses at once, which is oral speech, to a merely visual code" (45).

In the holistic world of oral tradition, the alphabet made "a break between eye and ear"(McLuhan 27). Our sense of sight was externalized in the form of written words stored outside our bodies.

This extension of our sight was at the expense of our fully integrated senses. McLuhan points out that when technology extends one of our senses, the ratio among all is altered (24). The amplified sense "acts as an anaesthetic" to our other senses. We suffer a loss of our integral whole, of the interaction between our parts.

As the written word spread, the distance between man's externalized vision and his other senses increased. This dichotomy, this widening rift, was necessary to our quest for knowledge. For the first time, information could be separated, ordered, and stored outside ourselves.

There was a shift from imagination to reason, from mythical to logical thinking. We began, in the words of William Blake, "to take portions of existence and fancy that the whole." Knowledge became a tree, a tree that could be divided, dissected, analyzed, and classified into dominant and subordinate branches. The apple had been picked. The garden of passionate, mythical, mystical Eden was lost.

With the development of typographic print, our division from our sensual selves accelerated. With each new extension, each new technology, a sense drifted further from centre, or a new sense was peeled away.

The unified all-at-once world was slowly segregated, fragmented, compartmentalized. The storage of information changed our concept of the time, producing a static written history that appeared to be objectively recorded, and could be used to predict future events. Past and future became separated from present. Time began to appear as a rigid linear line, a railway of boxcars.

And as we severed from the present moment of our senses, we lost cohesion becoming disconnected from our bodies, from each other, from the world around us. Tribal wo/man was dismantled.

As quoted by McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy (22), Bertrand Russell describes the first truly literate culture, the Greeks, as a people "at war with themselves, driven along one road by the intellect, and along another by the passions, with the imagination to conceive of heaven, and the willful self-assertion that creates hell." Plato warned (cited in McLuhan 25), ironically in writing, that literacy would create:

—forgetfulness in the learners' souls.... they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves—

and would give:

—not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be the hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Communication in a print society becomes a solitary, individual process. Individual interpretation is encouraged. The adjective ‘self’ meaning ‘being of the same material as the rest’, becomes the prefix ‘self-’ meaning ‘to, with, or for oneself’.

Print culture brought to its zenith culminates in an individual self, rather than a tribal self. The idea of self as a collection of individual personality traits is peculiar to print cultures. In collectivist or group-centered cultures, the self is embedded in community. Tribal man is defined in context. Individual man has no context.

In this century, our Western world is passing the apex of print culture. We have been divided; intellect from sense, mind from mind, nation from nation, human from nature. In the living breathing body that is us, we have lost all connection.

For man has closed himself up, until he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

(William Blake: Plate 14, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

Part IV: Electronic Culture, Collective Self

All systems of communication have evolved, as Joshua Meyerowitz points out (121), "toward fuller representations of face-to-face sensory experience". Each technological extension of a human sense first acts to overcome space/time barriers, and then to regain the quality of the physical experience.

Telecommunications provide us with the opportunity to live once more "in a single space resonant with tribal drums" (McLuhan 31). Our sense of hearing has been reunited with our vision, ear and eye rejoined.

At least some of the rich magic of oral acoustic man is being recaptured. There is evidence of this drive in the renewed popularity of spoken word poetry and oral storytelling, and the incorporation of multimedia into the World Wide Web.

Meyerowitz also explains (Preface viii) that "physically bounded spaces are less significant as information is able to flow through walls and rush across great distances" .

This is true. Walls between situations are vanishing, hierarchies are being destroyed. Walls between nations have been dismantled brick by bleeding brick and sold as souvenirs of our cold war past. Specializations interconnect, become multi-disciplinary. And the walls that separate "us" from "them" are beginning to fade and fall away.

We are finding context and community. Slowly, we are beginning to see ourselves less ego-centrically, as part of the infinite pattern of life, a dynamic, layered, unbounded kaleidoscope.

As the new electronic media continue to extend our senses ever outward, we are being recreated in the neural network of cyberspace. Our extended senses form a cosmic membrane round the earth. Communication is approaching the speed of light. We see, we hear, we speak, all over the world. We are everywhere, everywhen. Space and time have become truly relative.

Tribal self is being recreated in the metaphor-model of our own human brain; "an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, although never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns" (Sir Charles Sherrington, in Restak 40).

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

(William Blake: Plate 14, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

Part V: The Future—Reintegration or Disintegration?

With the connectionist movement in artificial intelligence and neural psychology, the time is fast approaching when even our simple home computers will advance beyond the strictly serial-digital processing of sequential data (Allman 193). Researchers are developing neural networks that model the functioning of the human brain, and micro-chips small enough to be implanted into a human brain. Scientists funded by business and government are busily decoding, mapping, and patenting human DNA. And there has been talk of scanning the human brain into a computer.

Bio-robotics. Virtual reality. Mind uploading.

Meanwhile, we are being distracted. Multimedia. Cybersex. Our mediated communication is coming closer to face-to-face experience than ever before.

Soon, our fully extended senses, including touch, may be reunited in the ether of cyberspace. Marshall McLuhan, whether he was aware of it or not, recognized the illusory nature of this new version of this tribal self we are creating. He says that "the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village" (31) (italics mine).

Okay. Someday we may, literally and figuratively, step out into a world of our own creation. We may even be able to ‘live’ in the computerized world of our extended senses, creating ourselves in our own image, becoming the final abstraction, the final metaphor, a sort of cosmic self.

But when we lose direct experience, will we lose our physical earthly form? Like the characters in E.M. Forster's disturbing story, The Machine Stops, will we become trapped inside our own technology?

I have no answer. But I do know that computers crash. Whatever I write here can disappear, without a trace, in a nanosecond.

I'd say that's something to consider.

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

(William Blake: Plate 14, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

WORKS CITED

ALLMAN, William F. Apprentices of Wonder: Inside the Neural Network Revolution. New York: Bantam Books, 1989.

BLAKE, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. M.H. Abrams, Ed. New York, W.W.Norton and Company, 1987.

MCLUHAN, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962.

MEYEROWITZ, Joshua. No Sense of Place. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

RESTAK, Richard. The Brain Has a Mind of Its Own. New York: Harmony Books, 1991.

WADE, Carole & TAVRIS, Carol. Psychology. 3rd ed. New York: Harper-Collins, 1993.

WATZALAWICK, Paul. How Real is Real? Communication, Disinformation, Confusion. New York: Random House, 1976.

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