Interfaces
Not an easy interface, and the medium (clayey earths were used later to add muted color to the drawings) was crude, and god knows what they used for applicators since there was no Utrecht Art Supply down the street. The punchline, of course, is that genius tells. The quality of drawings ranges from pre-kindergarten to (a few) which, like all great art, leave you breathless and awed by their presence. No doubt Gork, Flug, et al. had an appreciative audience. But life was hard and little Gorks and little Flugs soon had 1) other things to worry about and 2) other, new interfaces to work with. McLuhan and cohorts, campfollowers, and epigones have covered cleverly and well what happened between then and now (clay tablets, papyrus, Gutenberg, etc.). Aside: Because of his word-bias, McLuhan missed on of the cleverest, most durable interfaces, the piano keyboard. Deceptively simple in appearance (far simpler-looking than the daunting alphanumerics of the typewriter interface), shatteringly difficult to even begin to master, but offering endless emotional payback for the effort, the piano keyboard has survived unchanged for three centuries. What Marshall the Great missed (because of his death in 1980) was the PC and the Internet. Which brings us to us. It's time, I think, to change McLuhan's big insight every slightly. It involves only adding one letter, an "s". Given our social, economic, technological, and artistic experiences of the last five years, I think we now have to say: The medium is the messages. Meaning this: with the personal computer and the Internet, we have finally created a (nearly) universal interface, one which is accessible almost anywhere any time, AND one which (unlike Gork's cave wall) lends itself to a very wide range of kinds of creativity. Not just artistic, but technological, economic, religious, journalistic, educational, and on and on. Not just that one message which McLuhan decoded for TV, but the multi-media messages of the Internet: print, still pictures, moving pictures, sound, music. It is the interface of interfaces, because we can so easily connect other interfaces (digital tablets, music keyboards, cameras, etc.) to it. It seems almost trite to say such things, but there is a danger, I find, in our losing sight of what's going on if we don't remain acutely aware of this new medium. (McLuhan was fond of reminding us that fish don't really think much about water.) Yes, the leap from print to television (which is what got McLuhan so excited) was a big one. But, given the puzzling, continuing global boom, it seems possible that the leap from the passivity of television to the interactivity of the Internet is a truly quantum change. The interface now is not only global (like TV), it is also both interactive and reactive. As such, it is an on-going, expanding spur, a stimulus to all kinds of creativity, ranging from stamp-collecting to DNA de-coding. The longer the Internet is up and running (in other words, the longer we keep from falling back into our old violent, internecine world-war ways), the more of a stimulus it becomes. The present youngest adult generation grew up B.I. (Before Internet), and they're already going great guns on it, using, exploring, expanding the creative potential. We've given ourselves a millennial present of an interface which, unlike the typewriter or the piano keyboard (tools for only one kind of creativity), is a chrysalis from which a billion butterflies may appear. The next generation that comes of age will have grown up with the Internet. The difference may well match that between Gork's simple hand prints and Flug's breathtaking horses. END
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The
first interface was a 