What do you think?
Rate this book
240 pages, Paperback
First published September 28, 1976
“Electronic man loses touch with the concept of a ruling center as well as the restrains of social rules based on interconnection. Hierarchies constantly dissolve and reform. The computer, the satellite, the data base, and the nascent multi-carrier telecommunications corporation will break apart what remains of the old print-oriented ethos” (92).
“Communication media of the future will accentuate the extensions of our nervous systems, which can be disembodied and made totally collective. New population patterns will fuel the shift from smokestack industries to a marketing-information economy, primarily in the US and Europe. Video-related technologies are the critical instruments of such change. The ultimate interactive nature of some video-related technologies will produce the dominant right-hemisphere social patterns of the next century. For example, the new telecommunication multi-carrier corporation, dedicated solely to moving all kinds of data at the speed of light, will continually generate tailor-made products and services for individual consumers who have pre-signalled their preferences through an ongoing data base. Users will simultaneously become producers and consumers” (83).
“We extend parts of ourselves into the environment to do some intensely elevated function […] and then find ways to fight about it […] The first humanoid uttering his first intelligible grunt, or “word,” outered himself and set up a dynamic relationship with himself, other creatures, and the world outside his skin […] Conflict occurs, not because of human inefficiency, but technology moving at incompatible speeds” (93).
"In the order of things, ground comes first. The figures arrive later. Coming events cast their shadows before them. The ground of any technology is both the situation that gives rise to it as well as the whole environment of services and disservices that the technology brings with it. These are the side effects, and they impose themselves haphazardly as a new form of culture [...] As an old ground is displaced by the content of the new situation, it becomes available to ordinary attention as figure. At the same time a new nostalgia is born" (6).