Love and War in the Global Village:

A Techno-Pragmatic Perspective

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, attitudes toward the information super-highway and computer mediated communication have tended to be either techno-utopian or techno-skeptical. Techno-utopians like Bill Gates in his book, The Road Ahead, idealize technology, virtual reality, and computer mediated communication, arguing that they serve only to enhance human experience, bringing people closer together while promoting freedom and democracy, blithely ignoring any unwelcome consequences caused by the new techno-environment. Techno-skeptics like Mark Kingwell, Arthur Kroker, and David Shenk focus only on unforeseen techno-pollution, arguing that any benefits that result from technological innovations are far outweighed by the presence of data smog and data trash. The techno-skeptics focus uniquely on the road kill lain waste by virtual road rage along the information superhighway, while the techno-utopians describe the highway as a crowded sidewalk of the global village where people gather to beat drums, chant, and groove to a McLuhanesque tribal beat. The under-represented alternative to techno-utopia and techno-skepticism is what I shall term "techno-pragmatism," a middle of the road view that describes life on the Internet as somewhere between a pleasant sidewalk and a twenty five lane mega-freeway. The purpose of this essay is to explore the effects of the computer mediated communication on human relationships from a techno-pragmatic perspective. I shall argue that computer mediated communication is quite different from any medium we have ever used before and that it is unclassifiable in traditional McLuhanesque terms, which is to say that it is neither hot nor cool, but both. I shall go on to sketch some of the unanticipated psychological effects of this new medium and conclude that we must deconstruct the categories of virtual and real relationships.

Techno-pragmatists like Patricia Wallace in her book The Psychology of the Internet view computer mediated communication as both potentially useful and harmful. We techno-pragmatists adhere to Marshall McLuhan's tried and true adage that the medium is the message and like McLuhan, we believe that new mediums are

both extensions and amputations of man. To say that the medium is the message is not to discount the relevance of the content of the media, but rather to recognize that the medium by which we absorb and exchange information, is as or more significant to our psychic and physical landscape. The same information broadcast by different media (the same activities performed by different methods) have profoundly different effects. A medium is any technology that makes communication possible and may escape notice as a medium because it appears to have no "content". An example of such a medium is the automobile. Before the car, people relied on horses or their feet to move from point a to point b. As the car became the most common mode of transport (in privileged areas in the world), people were able to travel and relocate more easily while remaining in physical contact with distant friends and family. By all accounts, the car is an extremely useful medium and can be viewed as an extension of human legs and feet. But while it extends our lower extremities, within it our legs and feet are quite useless. Hence we experience what can be described as a virtual amputation of our bodies. The car at once extends and amputates our lower extremities.

The automobile has had a profound impact, not only on human culture, but on the planet Earth. One may have predicted that the new facility of locomotion would have resulted in people devoting much less time to travel, freeing them to pursue other more creative activities. The reality, however, is just the opposite. As locomotion became more convenient, people began moving around much more, profoundly impacting the structure of cities and creating a commuter culture. Henry Ford could not have foreseen urban sprawl, the depletion of the ozone layer, global warming, and road rage. This is not to suggest that life on earth would be better without cars, rather, the car, like any new medium, has had many unanticipated consequences and these, like the obvious calculated benefits, should be taken into account.

As Isaac Newton once noted, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Techno-utopians believe that the reaction is less than equal to the action, while techno-skeptics believe that it is far greater. Techno-pragmatists are still studying the equation, unconvinced that the reactions are inherently good or evil.

McLuhan divided media into two categories, "hot" and "cool." In his view media that require little interaction from the consumer or that engage only one sense are "hot," whereas media that demand more active participation are "cool." Participation does not refer so much to intellectual involvement as engagement of the physical senses. Media like radio, print, and photographs are "hot" because they demand little engagement of more than one of the consumer's physical senses. Text for example, is hot because it engages only the reader's eyes. Cool media like the phone, speech, and seminars, engage more than one sense and require the consumer to participate more fully in the experience. According to McLuhan, hot and cool media have very different effects on the consumer, altering the human sense ratio differently, and influencing the way we react to our environment and to the content of the media. In general, hot media contribute to modern linear, alienated, and independent culture, while cool media encourage group participation and "tribalism." Oddly enough, McLuhan did not speculate that there could be a medium that was at once hot and cool. Nevertheless, this is precisely the case for the Internet at the dawn of the new millennium. Not only does the Internet contain a mixture of hot and cool media, electronic text (traditionally a hot medium) closely simulates speech (a cool medium) because of its immediacy and its injunction for participation. E-mail and chatrooms are at once hot and cool or "tepid" and the effects of this new medium are profoundly different from anything we have ever experienced before.

McLuhan believed that electronic media have radical "tribalizing" effects and that they would create a world in which political boundaries drawn on the world map would cease to matter as much as local alliances and conflicts in "the global village." According to McLuhan, the global village was conceived by the intense interaction between different people all over the world, made possible by film, radio, video and television. The global village was in its embryonic stage of development during McLuhan's life and is still only in its infancy, yet now people all over the world are interacting with each other in ways that would have been quite unlikely ten years ago. Today the global village is mediated not only by traditional media like television and radio, but also by chatrooms, newsgroups, multi user dungeons, and e-mail correspondence. Within the village, ideas are being shared, people are comparing cultures, forming friendships, and falling in love. The global village is at once harmonious and fraught with conflict, characterized by fighting called "flaming" by the cyber-community. As often as we make friends, we make enemies with other villagers. McLuhan's utopian vision of the global village was tempered by the realization that increased communication would lead to more conflict. In his famous Playboy interview in 1969 he writes:

Techno-skeptic David Shenk has argued in his book Data Smog⁽²⁾ that we ARE becoming tribalized- but not into ONE big global village as McLuhan suggested. Rather, he posits the existence of multiple fragmented and specialized villages, unaware of or hostile to, the others' existence. The world is becoming more diverse, and clans are becoming more alienated from each other. We are not all coming together in one virtual town square, rather those of us with similar interests and ideologies are able to communicate more easily, resulting in less diversity within specific subgroups. Shenk also argues that as we become more connected with minds all over the world, we are more alienated from our local, face- to-face relationships. As virtual tribes are formed, "real" relationships dissolve.

From the techno-pragmatic perspective, it doesn't matter whether we describe the virtual community as one big global village or many smaller virtual villages because McLuhan's global village has never been characterized by homogeneity, but by conflict and diversity. As in any village, we know our friends and family best, but we visit our neighbors any time we care to. Moreover, it is not clear whether the "problems" Shenk describes are entirely negative. If people invest less time in face-to-face relationships as a result of computer mediated communication, it can only be because these new relationships better fulfill intellectual and social needs. If people are more fulfilled by "virtual" relationships, than they SHOULD invest less in face-to-face relationships. (We will discuss the distinction between virtual and real relationships in the last section.) Obviously birds of a feather flock virtually together, causing ideologies to reinforce themselves as people offer each other support for particular lifestyles and convictions. Nevertheless, it is also true that people have easy access to more alternative points of view than ever before. A curious born-again Christian connecting with other Christians on the net can easily click on a Hindu site. Moreover, she can do so in relative privacy, without fear of reprisal from her Christian community. She can at once strengthen her own beliefs and sense of community as she educates herself about others. Clearly life in the global village is not without its unintended consequences, but these corollaries are not always negative.

Unlike printed text media of the past, electronic text allows and even demands commitment and interaction. Effectively, tepid electronic text is a totally new kind of medium, and its full effects have yet to be understood. Electronic text, like the phone (a cool medium) is an extension, amplification and amputation of speech. It allows one to gather information quickly, and to instantly interact with the authors of that information. Like traditional text (a hot medium), it is usually linear and logic-bound, engaging only the eyes. Electronic text often demands participation while it discourages physical trips to the library and investment in face-to-face relationships with people who do not closely share one's interests. It is at once, tribalizing and alienating. Tepid.

There are many important features of computer mediated communication. It is convenient, requires no postage, very little physical exertion and like the phone, it is immediate and there is often little or no lag-time between a message and a response. This medium is therefore something between a phone call (a cool medium) and a letter (a hot medium.) Computer mediated communication, however, is much less intimate and invasive than a phone call or face-to-face communication. It is now possible to e-mail people one would never dare to call or bother to write and as a result, people all over the world are exploring relationships that would have been impossible during the phone-age. Since computer mediated exchanges are still usually text-based, they have the potential for being higher quality than ordinary conversations because people have time to think before they write. This is less the case with synchronous media, like MUDS and chatrooms. It should be noted that electronic text may not be the medium of choice for people who do not write or spell well and may cause a degree of anxiety for such people.

Computer mediated communication is often anonymous and has the potential to be a breeding ground for deception. People can easily swap genders or take on fantasy personas, even when they are not within a MUD (multi-user dungeon). In most cases, however, this does not occur, and it seems that the feeling of safety, distance, and anonymity encourages more honest self-disclosure than wanton deception. The opportunity to get one's point across without interruptions and without the need to worry about one's physical appearance is a tremendous advantage to a-synchronous computer mediated communication, like e-mail. As a result, people often disclose more about themselves over the Internet than they would over the phone or in face-to-face conversations. Patricia Wallace notes in her book The Psychology of the Internet:

computer mediated communication is not consistently impersonal, as many suppose, rather it can be hyperpersonal. It should be noted, however, that the tendency to self-disclose to the computer can foster both intimacy and alienation with the people on the other side of the computer screen. The ease with which some people self-disclose on-line may falsely communicate emotional instability, scaring away potential friends or lovers. Moreover, virtual friends often disappear over night, because there is little if any consequence to ending a relationship. Nevertheless, as a result of the heightened tendency to self-disclose, Wallace has shown that people often form committed relationships with others on-line and that these relationships are far deeper and more common than many believed possible at the dawn of computer mediated communication.⁽⁴⁾ Many people have suggested that cyberspace is cold, sexless, and genderless, resulting in users who are unable to conceptualize themselves as a living, breathing human beings.⁽⁵⁾ Nothing could be further from the experience of many Internet users, who frequently find both support and love on-line. Sexual attraction is alive and well on the Internet and 7.9% of the relationships formed on-line are romantic liaisons⁽⁶⁾. Computer mediated communication has redefined sexual attraction in the postmodern world. Unlike any other era, we are living in an age where beauty can be less important than other qualities that account for sexual attraction. This is probably a temporary condition, which will change when video cameras become common place accessories.

An advantage of computer mediated communication, is that boring or disturbing messages can usually be ignored. E-mail harassment, for example, is much less serious than phone or face-to-face persecution. On the other hand, studies have shown that because of the perceived anonymity of the Internet, people tend to react much more aggressively to each other than they would over the phone or face-to-face⁽⁷⁾. Flaming is a common occurrence in computer mediated relationships (somewhat more common in public forums than in private e-mail) causing real conflicts that are deeply felt by all involved.

A potent disadvantage to computer mediated relationships, is that they may change expectations one has for face-to-face relationships. On the Internet one can talk to any number of interesting people, but off-line one's choices for socialization are considerably more limited. Parents, children, husbands, and wives do not typically share the same specialized interests that often absorb an Internet user. As a result, the Internet junkie may feel unstimulated and bored with life off-line. She may also become too dependent upon on-line relationships and begin to socialize primarily on the Internet. Internet dependence is a problem that psychologists are only now beginning to address. In the next section we will consider why this problem is taken so seriously by so many, and how we might change our attitudes towards it.

Many people believe that computer mediated interpersonal interaction is not real. There is an assumed distinction between authentic and virtual relationships, which privileges face-to-face or "real" interaction. This distinction is similar to the one Derrida noticed between the written and the spoken words. Many people warn of the dangers and futility of spending too much time on-line interacting with "virtual" people. Moreover, people who spend significant amounts of time on-line are branded "geeks," "nerds," or "weenies" and assumed to be emotionally incapable of forming authentic relationships in the real world. It is no exaggeration to say that such people suffer stigmatization at the keyboards of techno-skeptics, who believe that life on-line constitutes a puerile fantasy. Arthur Kroker writes:

Here Kroker assumes that e-mail is neither "present" like speech or "disciplined" like writing. It is a trashy hybrid- devoid of any REAL value. People who use it are termed "geeks," and their value as human beings is clearly called into question. In the same vein, Kingwell describes the Internet as "coma inducing mind-floss." He writes:

Kingwell and Kroker, not only attack electronic media, but describe its users as "geeks," "nerds," and "weenies." They are clearly fearful of and hostile to computer mediated communication and have not hesitated to resort to the basest of rhetorical techniques; name-calling! What is most to be despised about Kroker and Kingwell's criticism of electronic media (and those who use it) however, is their striking lack of insight and originality. Throughout history, conservative knee-jerk reactions against new media have been common place. We rarely trust new media and never fail to work up nostalgia for the old methods they replace. As it is, so it has always been, and so it shall always be. Reading and writing are two media that took their share of abuse in their early days and the printing press remained the object of hostility centuries after it become part of the fabric of everyday life. Alexander Pope writes in the Denunciad in 1728:

On page 1441 of War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy writes: "The most powerful of ignorance's weapons is the dissemination of printed matter."⁽¹¹⁾ Like Kroker and Kingwell, luddites of old, did not lack for names to call the "victims" of a new medium. Emmerson is reported to have said: "Instead of Man thinking, we have�the bookworm, meek young men who grow up in libraries."⁽¹²⁾

New media has never ceased to be the brunt of unbridled hostility, the scape-goats for all kinds of social ills. Techno-skeptics have always fought change and innovation tooth and nail, as blind to their benefits as techno-utopians are to their shortcomings. Yet just as Socrates resisted the written word and Cervantes defied the novel, it is precisely through these condemned media that we come to know them today. In the same way, Kingwell and Kroker use electronic media to make their mark. Kroker's Panic Encyclopedia and much of his other work (including class lectures) are on-line. There are also several websites dedicated to the promotion of Mark Kingwell and his books. As silly as Kroker and Kingwell's knee-jerk prejudices against electronic media may seem to enlightened techno-pragmatists, their attitudes are commonplace and the myths that these men perpetrate must be dispelled.

Myth #1- The written word (on computer screens) is inferior to the written word on paper because it lacks "discipline."

Some e-mails are mediocre or poor, but high-quality e-mails are exchanged on a regular basis. As I have already pointed out, people can think before they write, potentially raising the quality of personal interaction. Certainly my e-mail correspondence is much more edifying than my face-to-face conversations simply because I have time to think about things before I am compelled to push the "send" button. I often use e-mail correspondence in my "disciplined" writings.

Myth #2- The written word (on computer screens) is not immediate, like speech.

This is only partially true. Synchronous media, like chatrooms, ARE immediate. It is, however, true that facial cues are not (yet widely) present over text-based electronic media. I believe that this is actually an advantage to e-mail because of one's freedom to disregard physical appearance while exchanging information. In face-to-face exchanges, anxiety about physical appearance and articulateness (a motor skill more than a sign of intelligence) may prevent one from focusing on the message. If lack of immediacy is a problem, surely it is balanced by the fact that one can carefully consider one's thoughts before committing them to the screen. It is fascinating that Kroker and Kingwell are not inciting people to stop communicating with paper letters, which are far less immediate than e-mail.

This claim is so preposterous that it hardly merits attention, yet it is a prevalent attitude. If anything, e-mail exchanges enhance coherent thought because it is possible to get immediate feedback about ideas from a variety of different people. While newsgroups abound with fighting and flaming, ideas are shared and people learn. People report being very influenced by the ideas of others over the Internet.

Myth #4 Computer mediated communication creates only the illusion of personal interaction.

For techno-pragmatists, this idea is absolutely absurd. People are talking to REAL people on the Net just as surely as they are talking to people over the phone or by letter. The Internet is a new medium, not a fantasy world. There is no such thing as a virtual person and there is no such thing as a virtual relationship. Unless people are consciously playing fantasy games on-line (like MUDS etc.), there is nothing illusory about computer mediated interaction. In no way does it resemble television. Kingwell's suggestion that electronic media is comparable to television seems to be at the heart of confused thinking about e-mail and chatrooms. The television engages the senses, as McLuhan noted, but it does not demand intellectual commitment and participation. While one can learn from television, there is no exchange of ideas. Moreover, television is used to broadcast fantasy. Sit-coms and TV dramas are televised theater, designed to entertain viewers. While computer mediated communication can also be entertaining and escapist, this is NOT its primary function. The purpose of e-mail and other electronic communication media is to facilitate the exchange of ideas. The primary purpose of television is to broadcast ideas and to entertain the viewer.

Myth #5 Users of electronic media are losing touch with their physical bodies and are experiencing something called the "discarnate effect."

As I have pointed out earlier, communication over the Internet is neither sexless, nor genderless- to the contrary. Flirtation, sexual innuendo, and affection abound on the Internet, just as it does over phone lines and in letters. The difference between sexual attraction on the Net is that electronic media (still) mute the dictatorial power of physical appearance and people cannot physically have sex unless face-to-face visits are scheduled. I would argue that the myth of the "discarnate effect" is the only pervasive fantasy of the computer mediated communication age. Everybody is talking about it, and nobody has experienced it. This fantasy is being played out with great enthusiasm by intellectuals, who are both afraid of new media and frustrated by the fact that while things are changing rapidly, they are not changing fast enough to be really dramatic. Nevertheless, fear of the loss of the human body seems to be a recurrent theme in history. Mitchell Stevens describes reaction to the telephone in the early part of the 19^th century.

It is clear that we are living in a global village and that its effects on our cultural, physical, and psychological landscapes are profound. The changes are at once good and evil; delightful and painful. As electronic media continue to alter our sense-ratios, we struggle to adapt to an ever-changing environment. This can be both easy and difficult. In general, the global village is a force for good, although certainly it has its problems. Now, more than ever, we can communicate effectively with people all over the world. More interaction means greater understanding and increased dialogue but also introduces conflict where there was none before. This is to be expected. We do not fight with people we have not met. And now, in spite of niche marketing and the tendency to retreat into one's specialized communities, there is, at least, the potential for knowing our neighbors better than ever before.

It is important to note that we are in the Medieval period of the Information Age and that the far reaching effects of computer mediated communication, which continues to evolve at a break-neck speed, are probably still unimaginable. The Information Renaissance looms invisible, far below the horizon. All we can do is study the immediate effects of computer mediated communication and cautiously speculate about what may be around the corner. Now the Internet is text-based and for the most part, electronic information is typed. In the near future, we can predict the rise of the image (and of the voice) and the fall of text. The evolution of computer mediated communication will have dramatic and undeterminable effects on the psychic landscape of cyber-culture.

1. Marshall McLuhan From "The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Magazine (March 1969 © , 1994 by Playboy. Used with permission. All rights reserved) www.mcluhanmedia.com/mmclpb01.html pg. 21 of 29.

3. Patricial Wallace The Psychology of the Internet (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999), pg. 151.

5. Mark Kingwell, Dreams of Millennium: Report from a Culture on the Brink (Faber and Faber: Boston, 1996), pg.182.

8. Arthur Kroker, Data Trash: the Theory of the Virtual Class (St. Martin's Press: New York, 1994), pg. 155.

10. Pope, 439- cited by Mitchell Stephens, The Rise of the Image:The Fall of the Word (Oxford University Press:New York, 1998), pg.35.