ast time

• Spend 5 min per idea

EXTENSIONS OF MAN

Marshall McLuhan

• Official site, Wikipedia
• Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
• 1911-1980
Marshall McLuhan

Writings

Best known:
• (1967) The Medium is the Massage (with Quentin Fiore)
(1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
(1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
Understanding Media (1964)
Famous ideas:
Medium is the message: The form of the medium is more significant than its contents.
Gutenberg Man: The man whose consciousness is has been changed by the printed book.
=>The Internet Man?
Technologies: Not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which -people are re-invented.
• Clothing as technology
• Housing as collective skin
• Extensions of... bodies in space
Heat-control mechanism: means of defining the self
• Central nervous system, technological simulation of consciousness
• Social (knowledge) building as creative process of knowing will be collectively extended to the whole of human society (foreseeing the Internet?)
Electric network & nervous system: "It is a principal aspect of the electric age that it establishes a global network that has much of the character of our central nervous system.
Brain: The interacting place where all kinds of impressions and experiences can be exchanged and translated, enabling us to react to the world as a whole.
Hot medium: A lot of information provided, little to be constructed, e.g. movies, photo
Cool medium: Little information provided, a lot to be constructed, e.g. television, telephone
=> Is the Internet cool or hot?
=> Is an online community cool or hot?
Global village: Electronic mass media collapse space and time barriers in human communication, enabling people to interact and live on a global scale (Gutenberg galaxy, 1962)
• "The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village." (from The Medium is the Message)
Article: McLuhan meets the net
• McLuhan, Complete list of works

Andy Clark

• Writings on the Extended mind

Other sources

• Autopoiesis. Social phenomenology as a biological phenomenology (Mariotti)
Cyborgs: (Marsh 2003)

DIGITAL WORLD MODEL

Underlying ANALOG level on which low current vs. high current is interpreted as 0 and 1, respectively.
Digital technology is an abstraction of the analog.
Article: Analog and Digital
How stuff works ?

Digital representation as a model of world!

There is a digital representation (=model) of some resolution for every imaginable phenomenon:
• * alphabets
• * numbers (of different formats)
• * images
• * moving images
• * sounds
Digital representation allows handling the digital representation instead of the actual matter.
ideas.
=> Practically everything in the world is being converted to digital representation!
Is there something that cannot be modeled as a digital representation?
Why is this happening?

Advantages of digital representation over analog

• -Inherent noise is not carried - more reliable
• -More efficient use of bandwidth
-Digital content is often more cheaper to handle, e.g. digital photographycompared to film camera costs (film, papers, etc).
-Digital representation is universal. There was a lot of carriers in analog world: for voice magnetic tape and vinyl LP; for pictures magnetic tape, slides, films etc.

Back to analog?

*Analog computers may hit back, e.g. Chua's parallel analog visual computer. Supporting visual operations instead of text-based commands, such as "rotate" , "crop" .
See also: Analog hi-fi enthusiasm

Virtual & reality

• Virtual <- Virtus = "excellence, potency, efficacy,
As if...
• Pretending
Model of...
• Manipulable on the representational level, regardless of other 'reality'. =>
• Reality, realism
Scratching the deepest issues of life!
What's real?
Reality?
Whose reality?
When reality?
Your idea? Seek for definitions.

SIMULATION

In addition to digital representations as models of the world, digital representation allows simulation models of complex dynamical processes and systems.
Why do actual phenomena need to be simulated?
Because they allow studying and training processes that are too:
• *Complicated (E.g. Neural system, ecology)
• *Inaccessible (E.g. Quantum physics...)
• *Costly (E.g. Impacts on economy, flying an airplane)
• *Ethically questionable (E.g. new drugs or treatments)
• *Dangerous (E.g. emergency procedures in aviation)
• *Nonexistent (E.G. VR and CAD in architecture or design)
• ...to be studied directly
• Articles on simulation
• Simulation games
• Willy Nilly stimulation simulation
Cyberspace: computer-simulated reality, a model of a constrained part of the world (Gibson 1984)
• Inspiration from cybernetics, the science of complex systems control

Illusions

Origin of the word (etymology): il-lusion = "in-game"
• Perceptual illusions are based on built-in tendecies of the perceptual system
Gestalt laws, Gestalt psychology: emergence of something more the sum of parts
Old media:
• Cinema based on the illusion of continuity
• Illusion of spatial continuity in stereo audio

Avatars

Origin in Sanskrit: Incarnation of deity
• Graphic identity or representation in a virtual environment
• Articles

Ubiquity

Ubiquity: Illusion or idea of "being simultaneously everywhere" , omnipresence