Inventing the Medium

Originally from The New Media Reader , this article was written by Janet H. Murray .

This is a landmark work, the first to establish a lineage using the computer as a medium of expression.

Although the title of the book is The New Media Reader , its theme is the emergence of a single medium, which we can define more concretely than just point to its novelty sex. The digital medium (medium) that we see in these curated and contextualized articles may now be as diverse to us as it takes many forms - virtual reality CAVEs ), the Internet, "enhanced" television, video games. In fact, like the medium of film 100 years ago, the computer medium draws on the experience of many predecessors and spawns a variety of forms. But the term "new media" suggests that we are currently confused about the direction of these efforts and breathless about the pace of change , especially in the last two decades of the 20th century. How long will it take us to see this gift for what it is—a single new medium of expression, the digital medium, formed by the intertwining of technological invention and cultural expression at the end of the 20th century? This book reflects the flourishing of "New Media Studies" in academic life and in the world's new media practice, and should help accelerate changes in our thinking.

Here, for the first time, in one book, we can trace the spirals of culture, the lines of echoes and opposites that make up the DNA of cyberspace itself. The first two articles established this pattern, the call and response of visionaries and engineers, philosophers and inventors. Borges , a storyteller, and Vannevar Bush , a military scientist, speak to us with the same mid-century mentality, exhausted by war Excited by a budding sense of globalism . Almost all of them are viscerally aware of the increasing complexity of human consciousness and the inability of linear media to capture the structure of our thoughts. Borges was one of the first fiction writers to place himself in the extended context of global culture, fascinated by the randomness of language itself and its meaning across cultural boundaries. His novels evoke a sense of flickering focus, an individual consciousness that is constantly transforming itself, a discourse that is constantly expressed in translation. Borges confronts us with moments of "pullulating", when we become aware of all the choices we might make, all the ways we might intersect with each other, for better or for worse. His imaginary Garden of Forking Paths is both a book and a landscape, a book in the shape of a labyrinth that folds in an infinite return. It was a dizzying sight that humanist writers would describe again for the rest of the century.

For scientist Vannevar Bush , the world is not a labyrinth of confinement, but a labyrinth of challenges waiting to be solved by a well-organized and intelligent team. Like Borges, Bush imagined different libraries. But while Borges's imagination is interesting, a subversion of rationalist exploration, Bush's dream is hyperrational. He was horrified to discover that the library shelves were no longer an adequate map of knowledge. The book-based organizational structure can no longer keep up with the rhythm of investigation and research, and can no longer reflect the constantly reconstructed disciplinary boundaries of contemporary academia. Knowledge is expanding, but human lifespan is still too short. While Borges is stuck at a crossroads, bewildered by the endless paths that emerge, Bush can't wait to find shortcuts, paths blazed by experts who have blazed the trail before us. He wanted to follow in their footsteps and forge new paths, paths that would not fade. His engineer's commitment to the redemptive machine also permeates the book.

Of course, Bush didn't think of a "computer"—nor did Borges. Instead, they are inventing fanciful information structures—a book-garden-maze , a desk-library-machine —that reflect not a new technology, but our Changes in way of thinking. The changes they imagined were made more urgent by the experience of two world wars, which highlighted the vast gap between our technological prowess and our social development, between our complex thinking and our atavistic behavior . In Borges' allegory, the protagonist kills a person as a way of information processing, and the person being killed has meaning only because his name in the newspaper would serve as a properly coded message.

A representative research topic for Bush is the history of bow and arrow technology. He has learned the power of information organization in the context of wartime weapons development, where more knowledge means more power against the enemy.

At the heart of Borges’ story is our unease about the narrator’s amoral choices, a man who becomes his friend at alternating “forks” only to be murdered by inhumane politics. There is no right side in his war scenes; the killer doesn't trust his reasons and doesn't care which side wins. In the world of the Garden of Forking Paths, time does not move forward at all, but spreads outward with the possibilities of creation and destruction that make up the totality of human potential. Living in the world of Borges feels both complicity and exhaustion and wonder. Bush's view, on the other hand, is moralistic, energetic, engaged. Implicit in Bush's narrative is the Enlightenment's belief in human progress fueled by the expansion of knowledge, the American metaphor of a rich frontier awaiting conquest by able pioneers, the absolute necessity of self-defense. Bush's labyrinth challenged us, but we were smart enough to find our way out. The solution lies in creating something new that better meets human needs. This dichotomy persisted throughout the rest of the century and is echoed in this anthology.

All creativity can be understood as seeing the world as a problem. The concern of all authors in this volume is the development of pulling consciousness, a direct result of 500 years of print culture. We can think of humanism as dramatizing the problem, amplifying our discomfort by changing our ritual of denying it. The disciplinary humanists in this volume, artists, theorists and scholars alike, are committed to foregrounding our cultural confusion and adjusting our existential confusion ahead of the world revealed by 20th century science. (existential befuddlement). Engineers, on the other hand, put their faith in inventing the right instrument, like microscopes and telescopes before, let's focus on the things that baffle and unhinge us, so that we can Think about them systematically. The right tools organize not only the outside world but consciousness itself, a phenomenon feared by humanists and championed by engineers. Engineers see the central task of our age—finding the key to survival in the atomic age—as a challenge to our intellect. The world is getting harder and harder to understand, so we need better ways of thinking and stronger ways to master complexity. Library shelves and chapter books create overviews and close-ups that allow us to move between them without losing our place. Computers provide us with a wider space and a finer division. Engineers outline a vision for a new meta-book, a navigable collection of books that will gracefully take us to the next level of information control and systems thinking, much like the invention of printing 500 years ago. In this survey, humanists whose voices were initially far removed from the material basis of the new medium tended to be less hopeful. They found that the punch cards of the early information age were of little use. They are examining the wreck of ideologies, accepting the failed promises of print, the horrific trajectory of the rationalist arrow. They insist that we experience the flickering focus, the slipping away of meaning, between the signer and the signee, which is the intellectual dilemma of the second half of the twentieth century.

The authors of this volume stand on either side of this dividing line, but they also face each other along the woven path. The difference is not in what they describe, but in how they position it. Humanists saw the contradictions and limitations of great systems of thought, which led them to question the engineering of systems thinking. This questioning belongs to their time, but it is also part of a long tradition of literary and philosophical discourse on the unknowable, tragic, and absurd and crazy persistence of longing, pain, and need.

Engineers have a tradition of emphasizing solutions and defining their unmet needs—and the pain their solutions can cause—as domains outside the problem. Worst of all, engineering thinking creates efficient killing machines, faster and deadlier arrows. It revels in the "Put-That-There" ability to move weapons around the map with magic gloved fingers. At its best, it cultivates our humorous view of the world in which we are resilient enough to solve problems and get out of the way until death itself. At its best, it also celebrates the human ability to learn and conceive of things never thought of before that might make us not only smarter, but more creative.

Throughout the period described in this anthology, these lines cross each other, and a single individual often seems to straddle the chasm between them. Engineers use cultural metaphors and analogies to express the magnitude of change, and the shape of this as-yet-unseen medium. Storytellers and theorists construct imaginary information landscapes, writing stories and articles that later become blueprints for actual systems. Engineers are constantly adjusting their rhythms to meet the accelerating threat of destruction posed by new warfare technologies; humanists envision machines as a redemptive environment, welcoming the prospect of cyborg architectures, renewing them in hopeful ways. structure our bodies, cultures and selves. These two traditions are actively brought together to work together on new learning structures in which the exploration of computers is driven by the desire to facilitate the process of exploration in the mind itself. Gradually, weaving collaborations gave rise to a new form, a new medium of human expression.

By arranging these two threads together in chronological order, the editors allow us to take a closer look at the rich interplay of cultural practice and technological innovation. We see scientific culture articulating a medium that "enhances" our humanity, by bringing together our thinking and organizing it at a higher level, and even by promoting new thinking that is more integrated and capable of grasping complex operations and ideas way to make us smarter. At the same time, art is also cutting and randomly reorganizing language, drawing attention to the arbitrary nature of written and spoken symbols, and dramatizing the feeling of cultural unraveling after the two world wars. Seeing all these participants gathered within the confines of this volume, we can almost imagine them in a room, participating in a sort of quilting bee. In one corner, Borges, Burroughs (William S. Burroughs and Oulipo) were busy smashing the outdated prints, while on the other side of the room Bush, Engelbart and Xerox's PARC collaborators The pieces are being eagerly stitched together to create an intricately patterned, huge and popular quilt. The process began in the mid-century, when Turing, Wiener, and others first recognized the potential of computers to symbolically represent and capture complex interacting systems.

The development of computer languages has enabled more powerful manipulation of quantitative and text-based data, supporting large databases, scientific and economic simulations, and artificial intelligence research. For computer scientists, the 1960s were a dizzying period of development, in which the field of computing itself was defined, separated from electrical engineering and mathematics, with its own advanced degree programs. It was around then that the Internet was proposed by the likes of JCR Licklider and Weizenbaum inadvertently invented the first believable computer-based character (the first chatbot in history) ), Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext" and embarked on his lifelong quest to embody it.

At this time Douglas Engelbart looked around, found that human beings were "in trouble", and devoted himself to "augmenting of human intellect". Had Engelbart been given the resources to implement more of his "Framework", he might have become the prolific Michelangelo of the computer renaissance, showing how to accomplish many difficult things with maximum expressiveness. In fact, he was a bit like Leonardo da Vinci, accomplished a lot, indirectly influenced a lot, but left more unfulfilled plans. Engelbart does not believe that computers have merely improved the human mind, but have changed the processes of our institutions in a more profound way. In his view, an "augmented institution" will not become a "bigger and faster snail," but a new species, like a cat, with new sensory abilities and new powers . The metaphor of evolution is awe of this gigantic transformation, a way of sharing the fear that arises from the onslaught of unfamiliar mind forces that make us question our ability to transcend our humanity.