Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction Book

Orientalism and Pop Psychology
This is an extremely dated hippie book, jam-packed with cheesy Orientalism and the worst of pop psychology. According to McLuhan and Powers, the mysterious East is so perfect - so Tao. Us brutish Westerners would never understand, but our continued survival depends on it. They take the left-brain right-brain thing to a ridiculous extreme. There is literally a chart in here connecting the word 'spiritual' to one part of the brain. I mean - what? They're so specific about which parts of the brain do which things that it reminds me of phrenology. Certainly they are out of their element when it comes to psychology.

The authors criticise the 'left-brain' mode of experience which seeks hierarchy and linearity at all costs, and then go ahead and commit the worst crimes of that approach. They insist on putting everything into an extremely unconvincing binary world view. They reduce everything to a dichotomy between east and west, left and right brain, and implicitly place them into a hierarchy with a clear preference for 'oriental' modes of experience. Their attempts to connect this binary thesis to everything they touch are forced and overzealous, like when they randomly drop the idea that dyslexia is probably caused by Western culture's failed attempt to adapt to an Eastern way of experiencing things. Also, the final chapter was of little interest to me as an Australian. It's an essay on Canada as a place of cultural borderlines that really only seems vaguely related to the main themes of the book.

Visual and Acoustic Space
Having said all that, some of the ideas in this book are astonishingly relevant. The book's central metaphor about visual and acoustic space is more powerful than the authors probably could have imagined in 1980. They write about a hybrid between the computer and phone being the next big thing, and predict the fundamental nature of the Internet with incredible accuracy. They describe it as a shift from a visual mode of experience to an acoustic one. Visual space has defined Western culture since the time of Aristotle. In visual space, everything is clearly delineated. Our visual percepts are defined by solid boundaries, and we focus on one thing at a time, apart from its environment. Acoustic space is less centralised. Sounds come from multiple sources simultaneously and ricochet throughout the environment; it's much harder to focus on one centre apart from its environment. Traditional media are distinctly visual - in print, for example, we focus on words one at a time in sequence; there is a clear, linear structure as in visual space. In the new media, there are a myriad of centres; each user is both producer and consumer, everywhere and nowhere, dislocated and simultaneous. New media are decentralising - there is no authoritative voice anymore:
"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).
When everything is instantaneous, time and space are contracted and we all move within an eternal instant: The body of electronic man "will remain in one place but his mind will float out into the electronic void, being everywhere at once in the data bank" (97). All of a sudden, we're existing in a synchronous or ahistorical mode. It really reminds me of the Neoplatonic One, an absolute that simultaneously contains us and is contained within us; a circle without borders, each of its individual manifestations being the centre. You can also see hints of this sense in the disjointed nature of postmodernism, with its total disregard for historicity.

I also like that the authors challenge the Shannon-Weaver model of communications, revealing it to be hopelessly linear and outdated. They suggest that the multiplicity and instantaneity of new technologies may even begin to challenge the dominant notion of efficient cause. Complex networks of instantaneous, simultaneous interaction like the stock market or Twitter actually make the notion of efficient cause less useful, or less relevant - it seems more pertinent to speak in terms of general correlations and tendencies; qualitative explanations may actually be more helpful than quantitative. The authors also suggest that new technologies may challenge the subject-object distinction characteristic of visual space, where we endeavour to behold everything in isolation and from a detached perspective, as the reader of a phonetic alphabet processes the orderly contours of a newspaper article, or a scientist records data only after defining dependent and independent variables. The authors suggest that it'll become increasingly difficult to look at phenomena in isolation because context shapes content; in other words, the medium is the message.

Facebook
Here's a visionary prediction of the information marketplace spearheaded by Facebook and Google:
"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).
Tribalism
McLuhan and Powers also seem to predict the renewed tribalism and populist xenophobia we're seeing across the western world in response to globalisation - endless hysteria about immigration and cultural incompatibility:
"Video-related technologies compress the sequent into the simultaneous and emphasize the pre-literate group will, re-establishing the tribal chieftain" (99).

They describe technology as an extension of the body, so it becomes the platform for an almost physical invasion of another person's space:
"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).
Vaporwave
The authors even manage to shed light on this new technologically-focused nostalgia for the 80s using the concept of ground and figure in art. Figure is the focal point of the piece and ground is the background or environment:

"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).
McLuhan and Powers extend the concept of figure and ground to technology, with figure being the central, highly visible part of a new technology, and ground being the hidden context that it brings with it and from which it's born. When a new technology or figure brings a new ground, the old ground becomes figure - for the first time, it's conceptualised consciously and not taken for granted, giving rise to some sort of generational nostalgia like the current fascination with videotape and corporate muzak.