Moulded into the plastic soles of my father’s bedroom slippers were the words: “Man-made Materials.” As a child, I pondered that phrase for years. What, exactly, is a man-made material? Where did “man” get the stuff he “made” it from? And if he got it from somewhere and merely melted it down with something else, then this wasn’t a man-made material at all. It was merely man-combined natural materials.
I came to the conclusion that nothing is man-made. Everything is natural, in one way or another. Bees make honey, beavers build dams, spiders weave webs, and man makes plastic-soled bedroom slippers, televisions and computers.
Human technology should be considered no less natural than animal technology. It simply extends our ability to achieve our goals. A web makes it a lot easier for a spider to catch a fly, and a computer makes it easier for me to submit this column. When technology is understood as an extension of our own will, it doesn’t seem so foreign or dangerous. So why can’t we always see it that way?
Because we didn’t invent technology to promote nature – at least not consciously. We invented it to conquer nature’s inconvenient and sometimes frightening rhythms. We use electric lights to break the tyranny of day and night. We use heating and air- conditioning to thwart the cycle of the seasons. Our technology has separated us from the natural rhythms of our world.
Just as technology was developed to control nature, media was developed to control populations. “Mass media” is not the study of how to help people communicate with one another. It is the science of coercion through TV, radio, print, and advertising. Public relations means control of a public. A programmer uses media to influence buying habits in the same way a farmer might use fertiliser to influence the growth of his crop.
But, like over-aggressive farmers who erode their own topsoil, these public relations people did their job a bit too well. We fell in love with media itself, and began to value the processes of broadcasting more than any particular message. Eventually, we had so much media that no one could control it any longer. It was everywhere, and sending information back and forth in every direction. Best of all, we began to use it to communicate to one another rather than just listen to the few people rich enough to own TV stations. The unfettered media allowed for the freeflow of thoughts, ideas and even feelings across what had seemed like boundaries.
The more new media technology with which we come into contact, the less mysterious and more natural it all seems. A camcorder lets us make our own television. The computer and modem let us upload the images we record for anyone else to see. When technology is more something we do than something done to us, it is no longer threatening. It is an extension of who we are and what we want to be.
For new media to promote humanity and the nature that drives us, it must never be seen as acting on us, but rather as acting for us. We must refuse to be intimidated into believing that someone else knows better than we how it should be used. There are no digerati. There are no cybergurus.
Media is no longer a magic act. To those of us lucky enough to have experienced media as a form of expression rather than a way of being manipulated, communications technologies such as the Internet have been demystified. They are rendered as unthreateningly natural as my father’s slippers and their man-made soles. c Douglas Rushkoff
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