This is the first installment in a new category of post called Q&A. When I receive interesting questions, I’ll post the answers here on my blog. Got a question? Fire away!
No. McLuhan’s electronic media were all variously complex devices of electronic components: oscillators and electron valves (vacuum tubes and transistors) modulating and adjusting waves of current which were analogous to sound patterns, light patterns, etc. They instantaneously transmitted the energies raw reality transduced into the charge in a conductor. That’s what Morse discovered crossing the ocean back from Europe at the end of a trip he had embarked upon to distract himself from his sorrows. While traveling in America, he received a letter too-late, warning of his wife’s sudden sickness and returned home to find he had missed her funeral and burial. During dinner, onboard a ship called the Sully, a guest was explaining how a wire would change its state instantaneously, regardless of distance, when electrically charged. And all at once he could see the potential for transmitting messages, was inspired to spend decades toiling to bring the telegraph into creation, so as to spare anyone else his grief.
The instantaneity of McLuhan’s electronic media is precisely this escape from the limits of velocity on physical objects/physical wave-propagation being the maximum speed for human communication, resulting in simultaneity across space. And yet, the fidelity of the signal between encoding and decoding (besides degradation in quality) is guaranteed through preservation of general shape of the analogue waves from pick-up to re-creation. Old-timey telephones couldn’t change the words in your mouth, such as a modern phone-app might do in offering language translation, etc. It is taken for granted, in McLuhan’s formulation of electric technology, that the signal being transmitted is an authentic capture, in low-resolution, of the source; some human sense being extended across space and time without entering some plastic “domain” beyond representative analogous, continuous electromagnetic wave-forms which might, at best, be filtered or modulated.
The computer, first and foremost, is not a communications device. It is, as Steve Job’s often put it, a “logic amplifier”. It extends the faculty of the programmer for logical thinking: it is a bicycle for the mind. As the new medium, it is invisible. It has swallowed McLuhan’s old electronic media environment, and thus indirectly contains their use-cases for communication as content. But they themselves are not instantaneous — only very, very low-latency as processors. Their fundamental working is governed by clocks. In fact, rather than be considered a vast network of individual machines, all internetworked computers might as well be seen as one giant single machine. Only computers which aren’t plugged/transcieved into the internet are discrete, single, self-contained devices. The internet is one giant, single machine which we’ve built all around us. So it isn’t simultaneous beyond existing, it just is itself one big stupid thing large enough for us all to live inside. Electricity is incidental; it might as well be a giant mechanical Babbage engine, or series of Turing’s tape-head contraptions.
As logic amplifiers, we use computers directly. We can perform all sorts of math using logical algorithms. We’ve been modeling the world using math in more-and-more complex ways for centuries. So we use computers for capturing models of the world, which we can then animate. This is called simulation. Now, for most intents and purposes, we use computers indirectly for and through simulation, instead of directly amplifying our own embodied logical sense directly, the way we still do with a pocket calculator. This is the move of computers from logic amplifier into fantasy amplifier, as Alan Kay says (“Fantasy” being “the California-word for simulation”). It is in this simulation sense that computers contain what is called the “digital domain” or the “digital world”. For instance, the digital twin concept (for more, see this presentation by Derrick de Kerckhove).
The analogue, electronic environment of McLuhan has become the content of the “digital domain” through the use of technology known as Analogue-to-Digital, and Digital-to-Analogue conversion, which allow for translating wave-forms into processable computer-data and vice-versa. Literally, there are computer chips/circuits called “DACs” and “ADCs” which are part of your personal electronics. An ADC in your computer’s sound card takes in continuous audio waves and put out equivalent flickering, on-off, binary 1s and 0s, using an algorithm called a Fast Fourier transformation. Same with light-sensors in a digital camera, or dial-up MODulator/dEModulators for telephone computer networking. Computers (or rather, as I said above, the one, single computer of internetworked nodes which houses the simulation of our instantaneous, global communications environment inside of it) thus model all of the waves, frequencies, and vibes which our senses take in as meaningful information. Once this is achieved, they introduce abilities to process them far beyond mere filtering, modulation, reverberation, etc. as can be done with the real, straight-forward analogous waves in electronics (think audio-engineering). The wave-forms, once digitized, can be subjected to any logical processing we can imagine, translating them into any formal domains which our capability for modeling reality humanity can conceive and implement. Just as how the real world can be conceived in Euclidean geometry, or Cartesian space by mathematicians who can then move methodically from one abstract system to the other, so can the words you say into a phone be considered as sound waves, or words to be translated, or data to be analyzed for emotional content, or samples to be remixed in an EDM song time-shifted and quantized to a beat.
This ability to model and then transform/process reality via modelling has nothing to do with the simultaneity of communications technology ushered in by Morse’s telegraph. It’s a different beast entirely.
Related post: What’s Changed Since McLuhan?
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