Nass (in conversation with Gunn, 2006) commented that the first sound a human being recognizes is the mother’s voice when it is in the womb. Other studies have revealed tentative findings of early literacy emerging in children whose parents read to them while they were in the womb, or others who demonstrated prescient musical talent on the lines of music their mother heard when they were in the womb. Some scientific findings on evolution of the universe also posit a “big bang of sound,†from which came all else. Most religions might relate stories of the first word, given by God. Clearly, our affair with sound, both individually, as a culture, and as a race, begins early, before sight, touch, or smell. It is an affair that carries beyond the womb, embedding itself in ways in which we learn to think, speak, and relate to the world. Cultural theorists have critiqued how the spoken word frames our vision of life, and how we perceive ourselves in the world (see, for example, the work of the Jesuit scholar, Ong, 1982). According to Ong (1982), tribal cultures were oral, and hence more in touch with nature, until slowly literacy, visuality, and print created a sense of individualism, rational logic, science, and our move as a race, away from nature. Marshall McLuhan (1964; 1962) in his famous idiom, “the medium is the message,†posits something on similar lines, stating that it is the medium, whether visual, aural, or print, that actually determines the content and how it is received and understood.
In conversation with Gunn, Nass (2006) discussed how our accents carry information like social class and ethnicity, aside from, of course, gender. To that extent, they socially construct us in ways we might not be aware of or be able to easily identify. Nass (2006) touched upon some significant social implications of understanding our relationship with sound: perhaps recent work on auditory computing might help bridge the digital divide, where many in the world are excluded not just on the basis of access to the hardware, but first and foremost, because of lack of basic literacy (Drori, in conversation with Gunn, 2006). Grori underscored the double irony of the Information Age (Castells, 1996) : dark patches on the planet are left without hope as they are doomed to spiral downwards in parts of the Fourth World left behind in literacy, hardware, and the means to get either in the technologically dominated information age, or in the violence and poverty of the inner city enclaves in developed countries. Sound promises to be the first stepping stone in bridging this increasing chasm: who among us cannot relate to the spoken word?
Gunn’s statistics as presented in class were thought-provoking: going from basic socio-psychological figures calculating the time taken by the human brain to process new information and sounds to how aural technologies may yet define our world to come in different ways, arguing persuasively for a “Golden Age of Audio.†Yet the tempting concept of such a golden age, both literally and figuratively harkening to a coming of full circle, a return to the beginning, could be qualified along several lines of thought. Technological, biological, social, and cultural evolution has led to a blurring of the cleanly defined lines between the various media through which we perceive the world. Gunn pointed out that in the scheme of the relative efficiencies that the different media empowered us with; audio was the largest Venn circle, within which came progressively the smaller circles of visual and print. Yet these circles blur and fade into each other as sight and sound, touch and smell interblend in today’s media surfaces, promising a more immersive environment than ever before. If the cell phone might yet kill the iPod (sad though that may be), it might just be because it would in some way offer an immersive environment of a combination of media. I was startled the other day when my mother in India asked her friend to “just SMS†her on her cell phone in case something came up! Honestly, my husband and I might not know how to do that- although both my mother and my son might! (It is not surprising then, that they understand each other better than I do either occasionally..). My point is that communicative media are not just ultimately combining in some sort of summative way; they are mutating to create new, blended media. Cell phones replacing iPod might be the first step toward that with their ability to combine text, visuals, and sound in one (affordable) device. But emerging developments in biotechnology presage more sophisticated and organic ways of immersing ourselves in the sensory, information rich world. Cyberkinesthetics envisages motion guided by thought, and might find ways to help people with ADD and other related disorders through a visually guided, thought as medium, way of controlling speed, and mind. Nanomedicine projects envisage tiny machine motor cells guided by laser light (and eventually, solar powered) as they block cancer cells from proliferating deep inside the cellular body. Each of these could likely find interesting applications as communicative devices of the future. Today’s Nintendo consoles for young kids combine remotes that reverbrate with surround sound, allowing the player to “feel†the tactile impact of sound. Experimental gaming technology demos show people “participating†in the game through sensors that communicate to the game through the medium of thought. If the medium is the message, and the golden age of audio is almost upon us, then it has to be audio redefined: such that it turns full circle so we sense the world of sight, touch, thoughts, and smell through its primeval biosensory motion. In a sense, this may be an interesting message in Gunn’s commentary on the parallels of the Golden Age of Audio emerging in the Biotech Century.
References
Castells, M. (1996) The Information Age: Economy, society and culture. Volume I: The rise of the network society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Drori, G. (2006).In conversation with Moira Gunn. Accessed online from http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail962.html on February 1, 2006.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. McGraw-Hill
McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The making of typographic man.
University of Toronto Press.
Nass, C. (2006). In conversation with Moira Gunn. Accessed online from http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail967.html on February 13, 2006.
Ong, W.J. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The technologizing of the Word. New Accents Series. London and New York: Methuen.
Nice connections with the older literature, especially ONG. Here Nass is not saying something new, just different. The Venn Diagram Metaphor is particularly powerful, as is the SMS example. We might indeed go back to a period of a new orality, one that is technologically induced, however.