Electronic technology and the metaphor of the city
Why Telepolis? Why should the metaphor of the city be appropriate to describe interactive electronic technology? Consider how the metaphor resonates with certain key features of postmodern culture. As a social construction of electronic technology, Telepolis best captures the postmodern moment.
The metaphor of the city suggests to us that the cyberspace should be thought of as:
collective,
heterogeneous,
spatially organized,
and visually realized.
Collective
A contemporary city is an enterprise, whose inhabitants lead a curious double life. Each inhabitant is pursuing his or her own agenda, and yet the activities of all combine to give direction and life for the whole city. Cyberspace, or at least the Collective action [1] The Internet has this quality, and perhaps no available metaphor other than the city captures the tension by which individual action leads to collective sense of coherence. Could we imagine electronic technology compared to a farm, a house, a forest, or a mountain? None of these seems appropriate. The Global village [2] metaphor is a special case.) Nor in fact is the Infobahn.html [3] particularly appropriate, although this is perhaps the dominant metaphor in the United States. Above all, the metaphor of the city privileges the social over the individual.
Twenty or thirty years ago, the dominant comparison was between the (standalone) computer and the inidividual human mind or brain. Postmodern culture has little interest in pursuing this analogy, because it has so thoroughly deconstructed the Cartesian subject [4].
Heterogeneous
The information superhighway suggests homogeneity. The superhighway is the same mile after mile. The contemporary city is radically heterogeneous, and heterogeneity is a great virtue in the postmodern world. The homogeneous, the univocal, the universal have all become suspect. As a result, pre-urban environments are suspect because they enforce a spirit of conformity that is now associated with prejudice and cultural hegemony. Telepolis is not therefore quite the same as the global village [5] , a term coined by Marshall McLuhan thirty years ago that has once again become popular and even (from a postmodern point of view) dangerously respectable. The Internet and cyberspace do seem radically heterogeneous - a mixture of voices, images, and agendas that are unified only at the operation level by the fact that all are expressed as binary units. This operational unity, which once seemed so important to historicans of technology, now seems to be hardly a limitation at all, for the bits can be hidden so effectively that the user need know nothing of them.
Spatial
When we think of the city, we think of a complex and extended architecture, an architecture that reflects city's social complexity and multiple functions. The spatial dimension of the electronic technology is obviously present in the term "cyberspace." Likewise the Greek root "tele" is a spatial term: it generally means "from afar" or "far off" in space.
Electronic communication is supposed to annihilate distance. Yet terms like "cyberspace" and "Telepolis" indicate that electronic technologies simply refashion space and reintroduce it into our discourse. These technologies actually encourage us to imagine spatial relationships among information elements and between receivers and senders of information, they indicate that electronic technologies simply refashion space and reintroduce it into our discourse. Indeed, spatial metaphors for hypermedia design [6] has become a research topic in computer science.
Visual
Extended in space, the city is visual spectacle. There is much to see that is pleasing, and there are also obstacles and dangers that must be seen to be avoided. The city privileges vision and the visual, and this privileging seems to me to contrast with the village or the home, where sound may well be more important than sight.
A village does not have an architecture in the same way that a city does. A traditional village is largely just a collection of homes, a symbolic extension of the home. We find less visual novelty when we move about a village than when we move in the city. We find still less visually novelty in the home itself. And we do not need the elaborate signs and labels at home or in a village, as we do when finding our way through a city. Village life can thrive in a preliterate culture, but the city seems to need writing. The city suggests a reorganization of our senses - both a new reliance on the visual and a new and complex relationship between spectacle or perception on the one hand and symbolic communication on the other.
Ultimately the revolutionary aspect of Telepolis will be the way that it forces us to renegotiate the ratios of seeing and hearing in communication [7] .
For example, throughout its history the ancient world remained alive to the resonance of the spoken word. The space of ancient culture was the acoustic space of the theatre, the marketplace, and the assembly. Although its name is constructured from Greek roots, Telepolis will not be a Greek city. It will not be the Athens of Pericles or the Thebes of Sophocles's Oedipus the King [8] .
Indeed, the two roots "tele" and "polis" were incompatible at least in the age of Sophocles or Plato and Aristotle. The city for the Greek had to be small and self-contained: Aristotle favored about 10,000 citizens. The available communication technologies (such as public oratory) would only allow that number of citizens to remain in contact. But the nature of the contact was different, because, as McLuhan and Walter Ong have put it, the sensorium was differently organized.
In cyberspace the ratio between the visual and the aural has certainly shifted in favor of the visual. Cyberspace is a visual plenum, as well as, and in preference to, an oral one. (For a review of the literature on the orality/literacy question, see Daniel Chandler on Biases of the Ear and Eye [9]). And the ratios of the perceptual and the symbolic [10]in representation will experience a deep change.
Conclusion
Finally, it is well to remember that although Telepolis suggests the collective, the heterogeneous, the spatial, and the visual, none of these qualities is inevitable or inherent in electronic technology. Human technologies may not be infinitely malleable, as social constructionists such Steve Woolgar believe, but it is surely true that electronic technology can be constructed in several different ways. Telepolis is one such construction. The information superhighway, which privileges the individual user exploring a relatively homogeneous information space, is another construction. And we could also imagine (and indeed some [11] are trying to create) computer constructions in which sound dominates and almost excludes the visual.
URL dieses Artikels:
https://www.heise.de/-3445801
Links in diesem Artikel:
[1] https://www.heise.de/tp/subtext/telepolis_subtext_3478458.html?artikel_cid=3445801&row_id=1
[2] https://www.heise.de/tp/subtext/telepolis_subtext_3478460.html?artikel_cid=3445801&row_id=2
[3] https://www.heise.de/tp/subtext/telepolis_subtext_3478462.html?artikel_cid=3445801&row_id=3
[4] http://www.gatech.edu/lcc/idt/Faculty/bolter/degrees.html
[5] https://www.heise.de/tp/subtext/telepolis_subtext_3478464.html?artikel_cid=3445801&row_id=4
[6] http://www.gatech.edu/lcc/idt/Faculty/andreas_dieberger/ECHT94.WS.toc.html
[7] https://www.heise.de/tp/subtext/telepolis_subtext_3478466.html?artikel_cid=3445801&row_id=5
[8] https://www.heise.de/tp/subtext/telepolis_subtext_3478468.html?artikel_cid=3445801&row_id=6
[9] http://www.aber.ac.uk/~dgc/litoral.html
[10] http://www.gatech.edu/lcc/idt/Faculty/bolter/degrees.html%22
[11] http://www.gatech.edu/lcc/idt/Projects/Espace2.html
Copyright © 1996 Heise Medien