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| FOUR GENERATIONS OF MEDIA The decision to focus on positive prosthetics which extend us as information systems leads to a consideration of media - the 'machines' which store and transmit information. Carl Sagan makes the distinction between extragenetic tools (that is, outside the genetic code) and extrasomatic tools (that is, outside the body) [Sagan, 1977]. Those two dichotomies yield a two-by-two matrix which provides a useful classification of media [see Figure 1]. The history of those four generations of media is perhaps the best way to tell the story of our species in historical time. That is, history is the story of the cyborgisation of the person. At the moment the sperm of our father enters the ova of our mother to create the zygote, that single cell which unfolds into you or me, each of us is given a conception-day present. This wonderful present is the wisdom of our species, culminating in the magnificent invention of speech, accumulated over billions of years of survival in a harsh arena. In our individual lifetimes, we are simply adding a footnote to this information, by means of those four generations of media. Communication for most of our human history was by speech and gesture, in which both storage and transmission are extragenetic; about 3500 B.C., we learned the trick of storing information outside our bodies (writing, later enhanced by print and film); early this century we learned the trick of transmitting information outside our bodies (television and telephone); and late this century, we learned the trick of both storing and transmitting information outside our bodies (internet, multimedia). |
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