What medium will you use? Electricity!
Dude, I'm a better antenna than you. Listen how much better the reception is when I stand here.
Image Credit: Alex Grey http://alexgrey.com/In the readings this week, in particular Sconce's, we get a good orientation on the concept of 'medium'. A scientific and following suit, a spiritual fascination with electricity began in the 19th century, not only for its value in creating light, the prospect of electric appliances, but also as a means to transport messages. This all seems to be governed by a principle we are all too familiar with: Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only changed in state.
An obsession developed with the idea of disembodying the voice from the body. Is this something we are less aware of, in a sense, because we are all used to it? But just imagine for a second, in uncovering all these different media that can send our voice or image afar, the true medium is electricity. Whether complex circuitry, an arrangement of mirrors or the simple amplification of minute vibrations, we harness electrical current to become the ghosts of our past utterances. The telegraph, which conjured much amazement with its introduction, uses the transformation of electrical signals to carry an encoded message across the country or ocean. The talking on a telephone converts our voice to a signal, which will later be converted back to audio the apparatus of a speaker. We have created our own ghosts, or phantasms, as Durham-Peters would call them, which are transmitted and stored through electrical currents. Look for the oldest video or digital photograph you have on your computer. While it may only be a couple years old, this is a phantasm of yourself from the past, stored in a converted state from when it was first taken; that light which bounced off your body and surroundings and was stored electro-magnetically, then transferred to its current home.
I could go on and on with examples, but I instead want to move to us as electric beings. In this time of amazement with telegraphy, scientists were uncovering more truths about ourselves. Sconce discusses how the 19th century gave way to knowledge that our bodies were actuated by electrical current. Humans, and animals alike, are great information processing machines, determined by the transformation of electricity. We process information, think, ultimately communicate through electronic pulses. Our muscles enable our mobility through the pulsing of current, discovered through some gruesome experiments performed on prisoners.
I guess what I think is the real trip about all this is that our memory, which seems like an inseparable essence in the realm of communication, as if communication becomes secondary to what we already know or have stored, is a complex system of electronically actuated neuro-receptors in our brain. Like the self is governed and maintained by electric phenomena.
So all this new found knowledge gave way to a very problematic set of Spiritual experimentation, according to Sconce. It seems like spirits of the dead are conducted through the air and can effectively be picked up by the human antenna. In light of my opening line, we are awesome conductors of electric current. As young women were believed to be the ideal mediums, they were effectively hooked up to copper wires in order to help spirits transmit a signal to the human medium. This whole topic leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It is possible that a human can pick up a signal, but believing in connection with the dead is a different scenario. I want to think it's all manure, but if energy can only be changed in state, what happens to the electric activity when the body ceases to withhold it upon death?
To close this delightful overview of this week's readings, I return to McLuhan. The medium is the message, like how the electric light illuminates a scene, and makes it visible to the participant, the scene becomes the content of the electric light. Like the email we read, or the voice we hear over the radio, we need to look beyond the technologies we (1st years maybe?) so erroneously cite as media, and praise the unsung hero, electricity, the ultimate medium. Setting aside the notion that our livelihood is enabled by electric current, our modes of communicating become more efficient as we learn to convert ideas to an electric signal, and back to an 'original' state in the presence of the recipient. If the medium is the message, then thoughts and messages are electric current, and humans are complex conductors and demodulators.
