Marshall McLuhan & Internet2

Marshall McLuhan is sometimes described as the father and prophet of the electronic age. Certainly no one understood media as intuitively as McLuhan whose ideas literally exploded upon academia as a new field of media ecology was created in response to his work.

The Internet had not yet erupted, but McLuhan seemed to understand the implications of the electronic age that was now emerging as an age of new media. In Understanding Media (originally published by McGraw-Hill in 1964 and now by MIT Press, 1994) McLuhan observed:

If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?

Some three decades ahead of their time, McLuhan's words describe the emerging electronic consciousness, the neural network that makes up the Internet, and Internet2 takes us closer to this "spiritual form of information" which has served to fire the imagination of scientists, academicians, and artists. Indeed each advance of media and digital technology is articulated through smaller and smaller devices in which all functions continue to merge and overlap in astonishing leaps and bounds. Print media, mixed media, images, photos, radio, TV, video, and film all merge into a single device, an additional brain outside our bodies, connected through dynamic interactive networks where knowledge and process are housed in distributed servers around the world that know no boundaries. While Internet2 is guarded by the high priests of the Consortium, enterprises like Skype are transforming distances into the immediacy of communication.

Now the artist is perpetually at the point of knowledge and understanding, and creation is an interactive perpetual exchange which is never finished. The creative process starts to become synonymous with the collaborative process. Ideas and expression take precedence over authorship. Ownership surrenders to spontaneity and change. Yes, Miranda, it is indeed "a Brave New World" ...but more than brave... a bountiful world compressed into binary code, a splitting the atom of imagination and creating a new equation of the infinite expanse of conscious awareness and objects dissolving in the energy of process.