Ok, I've spoken a little about McLuhan earlier in this blog. It was merely an accident that I was exposed to him and read his white paper: The Medium is the Massage. I was so inspired by that white paper that I went to the library and checked out the only book of his that was on the shelf: The Guttenberg Galaxy. In it he expounds on the central thesis of his life's work: that the tool of communication communicates as powerfully as the communication suspended within it. Sometimes he's a little obnoxious, going on and on with all these double negatives that obscure his meaning beyond any rational use of the English language. Then there are other times that he writes eloquently and wields the medium very effectively.
Bruce Wands' concludes his book with a short little ditty about how the digital medium has changed the world of art irreversibly, yet in the future it will be normal maybe even standard for all art to weave in and out of digital space. He also briefly discusses the ephemeral nature of art that is instantly in an aging medium. Basically, when you create a new piece of art that is intended to be experienced through digital technology you are surrendering the immortality of the artifact to the whims of the economy. If you tape your magnum opus on Beta Max, then you might as well burn it, and if you only supported internet explorer in your net art during the '90s, then you probably had two to three months of good solid viewing before it was unviable. But I think that the digital medium is starting to flatten out to some extent. Many really good formats have won the battle, and they're not going away anytime soon.
This stability of digital technology will soon yield an overarching epoch of a few centuries or more, where the formats change and improve yet the devices will still have reverse compatibility. At least, I think so, and I think that McLuhan develops that idea as he describes that transition between spoken and printed word in his book Guttenberg Galaxy. What seems to really bother McLuhan is that once the printed word became the lingua franca of trans-generational communication, we lost some of the skills associated with oral tradition and developed a handicap when coming to comprehend the thoughts of our forefathers.
I think that you can really see that in the nostalgia of the 2016 election cycle, with many politicians claiming to be just like one or the other previously successful candidate in their party. Except that none of the candidates are really like their predecessors. Hillary Clinton for example, is quite a bit like Barry Goldwater. Pro-choice, pro-business, anti-all-other-countries in foreign policy. Meanwhile Cruz and Trump couldn't be further away from Reagan and Nixon's policies on immigration or the environment. I mean, Richard Nixon actually started the EPA. Yet, all of the candidates freely quote their heroes as if they were friends, or their villains as if they were enemies. Nothing could be further from the truth, these characters from our past would never be our friends in the world that we live now. They were people of their time, and their words were words of their time. Instead it is probably better to view all of those old political characters more like family, like ancestors whose mistakes and successes we have now inherited but whose motivations are alien to us now.
Personally, I don't mind that my words won't mean the same thing a hundred years from now. By then my audience will probably, literally taste my words in their own mouths if they experience them at all. While for now, we'll just have to settle for reading them through a dull pane of glass and a searing beam of light. That future audience will likely be totally mystified by the attitudes and vocabulary of today, puzzling over the archaic tags that abut our every italicized, emboldened, and linked idea. But I still think that they will experience our thoughts in some way, and I tend to agree with Bruce Wands when he describes a future where art is created yet the interface with the digital is not even acknowledged.
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