Any new technology, any extension or amplification of human faculties when given material embodiment, tends to create a new environment...It is in the interplay between the old and the new environments that there is generated an innumerable series of problems and confusions.
We are creatures of our environment; both nature and nurture are features of it. We cannot escape our environments and yet, most of the time the environment seems to escape us—our attention, at least. In order to make sense of our situation, our world, we have a few tools at the ready to help pull the environment out of the background noise and into our focus.
Before we look at those tools, we need to first understand what Marshall McLuhan meant by new technologies creating new environments—and that it is largely when a new environment is created that we start to really see the old environment. Let's start with a quick example.
The Internet is just a huge file-and-folder structure linked together and stored on someone else's "computers." This seems obvious to developer-type people, but to everyone else, that framework is entirely missed. If you happen to be a Windows user, the File Explorer makes it easier to see the connection, because it shows you the "path" (think URL) of wherever you are currently looking on your computer, just like the browser does with the URL.
A website is composed of one huge folder, a.k.a. the domain, then you can explore sub-folders as far as you can go. For example:
https://cyborgnewsletter.com/ (The big folder)
https://cyborgnewsletter.com/newsletters/ (the newsletters sub-folder)
https://cyborgnewsletter.com/newsletters/what-am-i/ (the document, "What Am I" inside the subfolder)
This is a little bit simplistic, but the metaphor of files and folders, stolen from the older environment of real-world files and folders, is a really solid foundation for understanding what websites really are and how they work. However, the Internet is still a new environment in my opinion, and that's likely why there's so much confusion or total blindness to the basics of websites: how they work, what they can do, how dangerous they can be, how useful they can be, how they are both simple and complex, etc.
What's an Environment?
An environment is naturally of low intensity or low definition. That is why it escapes observation. Anything that raises the environment to high intensity, whether it be a storm in nature or violent change resulting from a new technology, such high intensity turns the environment into an object of attention. When an environment becomes an object of attention, it assumes the character of an anti-environment or an art object.
McLuhan sets up two opposing concepts: the environment and the anti-environment. The artist in me wants to simplify it to "background" and "foreground," because the background usually "escapes observation" in a painting or a drawing, while the subject in the foreground is what is calling our attention. Under this model, we can watch how technology changes how we behave and interact with the world and each other as systems either fade into the background or become inescapably noticed.
We can already start to recognize McLuhan's observation about technology and environments by looking at the Internet, again. There is a massive trend now (arguably for a decade or so) of people obsessing over physical notebooks, note-taking, and even reading. I see this as part of a response to the "new" environment of the Internet, which is hiding in plain sight as background, while the "old" environment of physical knowledge-related objects have suddenly moved into the foreground to capture our attention.
Watching the World Change
Many things can become the background or the foreground, but McLuhan does call out that society itself cannot be the background. I think that's because there has to be a third party in the model: an observer; the attention-giver.
Conventionally, society is always one phase back, is never environmental. Paradoxically, it is the antecedent environment that is always being upgraded for our attention. The new environment always uses the old environment as its material.
Just like the example of websites being just a bunch of files and folders (old environment), it takes that old metaphor and remixes it into something impossible in the old environment: interactivity, scaling the access to potentially the entire globe, becoming a destination and not just a container for information.
Another example that is even more tangible is music. McLuhan says that the music of the concert hall was anti-environment (foreground), because it was the content inside of the environment. You went to a concert hall for the purpose of hearing the music. Technology changed that game when music could be played whenever you wanted, wherever you wanted. In McLuhan's time, that probably meant vinyl records or maybe tapes. We have continued to push music into the environment as CDs, MP3 players, and online radios and libraries have been developed.
With these technologies, music has not only become a background—only noticed when it has stopped playing—it has also changed in the social dimension. "...when music becomes environmental by electric means, it becomes more and more the concern of the private individual" (McLuhan, pg. 13). The concert hall was a ritual for a group to participate in. The music on a tape, an MP3 player, or a smartphone is almost exclusively for a single person.
So what were those tools we have to lean on to help us sort through the mess of these new technologies and get some clarity on where we currently are?
The Enemy
The artist as a maker of anti-environment permits us to perceive that much is newly environmental and therefore most active in transforming situations. This would seem to be why the artist has in many circles in the past century been called the enemy, the criminal. It helps to explain why news has a natural bias toward crime and bad news. It is this kind of news that enables us to perceive our world.
As an artist myself, I was really intrigued by the realization that we are "called the enemy," though my foggy memory of art history classes confirms this. Perhaps it has only been more recently that the artists have started to become heroes instead of just weirdos. The artist as enemy, to me, actually gives me more purpose than the artist as hero.
When I was in university, I felt torn between two personas: the ingenious strategist that would help businesses succeed and grow, and the outspoken voice of warning or protest. Maybe a lot of that had to do with being torn between traditional art as a major and graphic design (which I ended up choosing). The traditional artists I learned from—whether as professors or those from art history—often saw their work as saying something or being part of some huge purpose. It was common for the artists with the greatest influence to be the ones that critiqued "the system" or government or other social and cultural norms. They were the rebels, the enemies.
My own art at the time reflected my inability to see the "environment" of theses systems, which is why most of the pieces I made are utterly unremarkable. I wanted to be the hero, not the enemy. In trying so hard to fit in, to not rock the boat, to ignore what I could see, I failed to fully inhabit that role of artist.
When an environment is new, we perceive the old one for the first time...when the Emperor appeared in his new clothes, his courtiers did not see his nudity, they saw his old clothes. Only the small child and the artist have the immediacy of approach that permits perception of the environmental. The artist provides us with anti-environments that enable us to see the environment. Such anti-environmental means of perception must constantly be renewed in order to be efficacious...in an age of accelerated change, the need to perceive the environment becomes urgent.
The tools that an artist uses to critique and create are the tools that are available to all of us, though it has often been the artists that assume the responsibility of helping the rest of us see. That's why I'm sticking my neck out a little bit and trying an experiment. I'm stepping into the shoes of enemy artist, and I'm creating a private art show that critiques the oppressive systems in our current environment. My goal is to generate in-person conversations about the difficult stuff we'd rather ignore or rage about anonymously online.
It's the first time my art has meant something. It's the first time I want people to see the pieces. I'll let you know how it goes, wish me luck.
To be continued...
P.S. Here's a sneak peak of the feature piece, I wasn't a stranger.