Page 7 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report

The change
From the time that telephone companies began to connect homes, businesses and people to telegraphic communication networks using copper cables, the entire planet began to enjoy a connective system somewhat similar to the nervous system that makes the human body function, feel and act. These mechanical im- pulses evolved first to AC power and until finally we have arrived at bits.
From the start humans anticipated that the electronic impulse would relegate mechanical systems to history, above all in the field of infor- mation. In an article entitled ‘The End of Jour- nalism in Less Than Ten years’ written in 1887 for the newspaper Época, the journalist asks: “So the press won’t die? It’s true. It won’t die, because they’ll kill it. And it won’t be killed by its enemies, but by its allies. It won’t be harmed by obfuscation or fanaticism or reformism; it will be poisoned bit by bit by improvement and progress; civilization will stab it in the back; the press will die at the hands of the telegraph. It will die from electricity. The work of Morse will conquer the work of Gutenberg. It will kill it. [...] The press is in an initial period, in the age
of squalor and now begins the galvanic age: electro-journalism.”
Clearly, his prediction, though 100 years out, was not so wide of the mark.
The improvement and changes to communica- tions through cables and waves with the arrival of telephone, radio, TV and, recently, Internet, only amplified the phenomenon, allowing them to gradually reach increasingly remote areas and a wider social strata within urban areas.
Despite there being a significant digital gulf between the rich and poor in Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, we should add one more layer peculiar to the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st, which is the capacity we have to connect with others and access knowl-
edge. The hierarchical pyramid is a psychological theory proposed by Maslow in his work ‘A The- ory of Human Motivation’ from 1943 and consists of five layers. The first four concern “basic needs” while the top layer concerns “self-actual- ization”. The communications system created by humanity and the chance we all have of access- ing it, has generated a new need for 20th century men and women as well as for companies
and public bodies: being almost permanently connected. This connection is now seen on a par with the basic needs described by Maslow because they not only help to satisfy them, they have a self-actualization effect. A child without a cell phone not only gets frustrated because
he can’t use it, he feels marginalized in relation to his phone-owning peers and handicapped
in relation to his environment as he lacks what
is perceived as an extension of his senses and brain. This is creating amplified human beings or, cyborgs which, unlike those that appear in sci- ence fiction, don’t yet boast a communications system implant, carrying it instead in his hand
or in a bag, but which nevertheless forms such
a substantial part of his corporal awareness that it might as well be a hand or a tongue. It seems that the droll message that appears on doormats saying ‘Home is where you can connect your cell phone’ is more of a reality than a joke. We can’t live without a connection, our digital prosthesis need to be connected to others via mobile data.
This new awareness of an extension of our body, beyond clothes or glasses, adds an extension
to our idea of it. Cell phones and to a lesser extent tablets and computers themselves have become an almost integral component of our nervous system because, as Professor McLuhan anticipated, they extend our senses, improve our memory and increase our intellectual capacity. Why would anyone want to turn their back on machines that turn us into superman and super- woman?
According to Marshall McLuhan’s accurate hypothesis, a medium is not only a medium for communication, it is any kind of technology or
AC/E DIGITAL CULTURE ANNUAL REPORT 2018
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Digital Trends in Culture