In Marshall McLuhan’s time the globe had been criss-crossed by copper wires, etherized by aerial antennae, and circled by satellites. Unlike today, this communications infrastructure was not intermediated by computers. The signal was direct, excepting the time-delay of recording and playback. The content of McLuhan’s media was, in a word, analogue: it was transduced from the energy of its input by electronic sensor into transmittable signals of analogous proportion. This means that the sound waves were directly represented by fluctuations in the electricity of the wires carrying them or the electromagnetic radio waves being broadcast. The light being picked up by the television cameras scanning finger was faithfully reproduced on the cathode ray tube. While the form of each media certainly had a role in shaping and biasing the content by its forms, the “nerves” of the electronically-extended nervous system were direct and free of any complex processing at a content-level in midstream.

The 1980s was a time of deregulation under the Reagan administration and the commercial communications infrastructure was opened up for massive innovation and upgrading. The ends of these new means were being demoed for corporations in various experimental laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Stuart Brand’s 1987 book The Media Lab is an exposé of the work done at MIT to stay ahead of developments in media technology by “inventing the future.” Lead by Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT Media Lab’s slogan — adapted from the academics slogan “publish or perish” — was “demo or die.” And the future of of media was computers:

The technical convergence that is dissolving boundaries comes in two overlapping stages: electronic, then digital. Less than one out of five words were delivered by print in America in 1977, according to Ithiel de Sola Pool’s influential 1983 book, Technologies of Freedom. “The force behind the convergence of modes is an electronic revolution as profound as that of printing.” The first era of communications, said Pool, was speech; the second, writing; the third, printing and other forms of making multiple copies such as phonographs and photography; and now the fourth era: “All media are becoming electronic”

And most electronic media are becoming digital. Telephones, radio, TV, and recorded music began their lives as analogue media — every note the listener heard was a smooth direct transform of the music in the studio — but each of them is now gradually, sometimes wrenchingly, in the process of becoming digitized, which means becoming computerized. You can see the difference in the different surfaces of long-playing records and compact discs: the record’s grooves are wavy lines; the far tinier tracks of CDs are nothing but a sequence of distinct pits. Analogue is continuous; digital is discrete. (pg. 18, The Media Lab)

In a digital medium, the signals to be mediated which are picked up by electronic sensors are precisely quantified by mathematical models into bits. Just as how letters and numbers were represented by binary telegraph codes, now all sorts of media could be rendered into numerical digits. And computers can process that digital information nearly-instantaneously in any way that might be contrived by computer programmers before re-rendering it back into the analogue form to be sensed by the receiver. That passage through cyberspace represents a fundamental change in the nature of McLuhan’s electronically -extended nervous system.

With digitalization all of the media become translatable into each other — computer bits migrate merrily — and they escape from their traditional means of transmission. A movie, phone call, letter, or magazine article may be sent digitally via phone line, coaxial cable, fiberoptic cable, microwave, satellite, the broadcast air, or a physical storage medium such as tape or disk. If that’s not revolution enough, with digitalization the content becomes totally plastic — any message, sound, or image may be edited from anything into anything else. (pg. 18)

Today the hybridization and translatability of multimedia is so self-evident that it is taken for granted. I think it’s essential for any contemporary application of the theories of McLuhan to first painstakingly retrace the evolution and changes in the media environment since the time of his writing. The Media Lab is an excellent resource for doing so. By attempting to stay ahead of the curve by inventing the future, the visionaries at MIT were breaking new ground in producing working, live demonstrations of all the interfaces/end-user effects which we all experience today through our computer screens. All amalgamations and concatenations of the end-user experience of analogue media were being manifested, mixed, and merged in cyberspace and shown off to corporate big-wigs financing the work.

What will remain analogue? Only live face-to-face conversation and performance – which may become newly valued. Even copy machines and photography are going digital. “Digital is a noise-free medium, and it can error-correct,” comments Negroponte, referring to the capabilities that make digital reproductions as perfect as the original. “I can see no reason for anyone to work in the analogue domain anymore — sound, film, video. All transmission will be digital.” (pg. 18-19)

Digital is free from unintended, unwanted noise insofar as it doesn’t irreversibly degrade with time or transmission or copying. But, of course, in cyberspace the ability to seamlessly transform it and process it opens an entire world of potential distortions into our extended nervous-system itself. That could be the cute, innocent manipulations of photo/video filters which change eye colour, do ad-hoc background replacement, or give you dress-up glasses, fake moustaches, make-up etc. in video calls. But the potential for undetectable abuse is nearly infinite,  and having witnessed the panic today regarding fake news the human imagination cowers at the possible trajectories for future innovations in malice by actors large and small.

In McLuhan’s day, to interface with a telephone was to extend one’s voice and one’s hearing through a wire via direct (well, switch-boarded, frequency-filtered, and signal boosted) analogy — perchance to be eavesdropped at worst. But what is being interfaced with today in using our”phones”? How many layers of indirection and processing are going on, and how many more layers might be introduced in the future? If the content of the supercomputer in your pocket is the old telephone, what is the medium of cyberspace capable of doing, invisibly, while you focus on the old thing?

Even if it is doing nothing at all, the knowledge that invisible processing, simulation, word-replacement, recording could be happening is enough to have severe psychic ramifications on the media literate. If dead musicians can go on holographic tours, and dead actors can appear in modern Hollywood films, than how is the critical user of contemporary media technology suppose to feel about their everyday sensory extensions? When even the raw, basic, rudimentary 20th-century channels for communication are today vitiated with all the smoke and mirrors of Hollywood, for how long will narcissistic numbness remain subconscious? What follows the urgent desire to amputate one’s media extension?

What will remain analogue? Only live face-to-face conversation and performance – which may become newly valued.

The value of analogue and face-to-face interface between people may end up deriving from the difficulties of processing and altering them in realtime in contrast to digital media. Ensuring and maintaining fidelity of a long-distance digital signal or archived digital record requires systems of encryption and verification. In turn, this necessitates the effort of creating — and vigilance in maintaining — trust in such systems and people providing and auditing them through total transparency. In contrast to this effort, these protections come part-and-parcel with the simpler, analogue forms of electronic communication which McLuhan took for granted in his time. If the goal of the artist is to reveal the hidden ground of whatever figures in the conscious attention, then that ground needs to be made sensible either through simplicity of its form or the full availability of its complexity for audit.

In practical terms, that means either immediate, face-to-face dialogue, analogue or very-simple digital electronic machines — or Free Software and Free Hardware whose innerworkings are legally mandated to be available for inspection as a fundamental human right. Not just for the sake of privacy, or freedom, as important as those may be. First and foremost, personal assurance regarding the veracity of our basic ability to communicate and keep records for the future must be maintained for the sake of continued sanity and consciousness itself.