| The theory of evolution tells the story of the development from the amoeba to Socrates; the theory of the co-evolution of the person and media continues the story from Socrates to you. In genetic terms, you are essentially no different from Socrates. Evolution works on such a large time canvas that a few thousand years makes little difference. You differ from Socrates because you have access to the innovations in extrasomatic storage - the printing press which democratised writing and reading, photography and film which made images more universally available; innovations in the transmission of information - television and telephony; innovations in both the storage and transmission of information - multimedia and the internet. It is those extragenetic and extrasomatic tools which empower you to learn, know, and remember more than Socrates. How do you plan to use those 'extras'? What kind of cyborg do you plan to be?
FOCUS ON FOURTH GENERATION
Each of those generations of media extends us as information systems, since they enable us to share information with other people. The fourth generation - in which information is stored electronically in disks and transmitted electronically through the informatics infrastructure of computers interlinked by telecommunications - is, however, particularly powerful, because it is more integrative and interactive. Since numbers, text, images, sounds can all be reduced to a lowest common denominator of 0s and 1s, the products of the generations can be integrated in electronic storage. Since the person can interact intimately with this electronic information, the person and the machine can be tightly coupled. This rich feedback between person and machine creates a cybernetic organism (cyborg) as the term was originally intended.
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