Pause: Inside Out

Video technology turns us inside out. McLuhan led us to this conclusion when he said that tools extend human functions. The wheel, he said, is an extension of the foot; the hammer, an extension of the arm. This makes such tools, in a sense, externalizations of body parts. Following his line of reasoning, we run into a scary insight when studying information and communications technology. The telephone may be only an extension of the ear and the television camera by itself one of the eye, but what part of us does the database externalize, what part the complete video production system?

The answer is unavoidable: they extend the mind. The database externalizes and amplifies the mind's ability to save and sort information. The video production system is even more frightening. It mimics the mind's ability to generate and assemble moving images and sounds. This is the mental function responsible for dreams and hallucinations. Look at your editing system: machines outside your body trying to emulate functions from deep inside your mind.

A sidelight to all of this technical extending of ourselves is the fact that we have not extended all our parts proportionately. Homo technicalis seems a funhouse distortion of homo sapiens, not simply a larger, stronger representative of the same species. If technological humanity had a single body it would have very large feet, hands and arms, a relatively minuscule--but growing--head and no heart or gut to speak of. We see a frightening creature: long thick limbs attached to puny torso governed by an expanding …