THE MEDIUM: A NATURAL PERSPECTIVE
Marshall McLuhan has provided a very helpful framework for evaluating the impact of any new medium that arrives on the cultural scene. He posited a tetrad, a set of four verifiable questions that reveal the cultural impact of any communication innovation. These questions include:
- What does this new medium enhance or intensify?
- What does it render obsolete or displace?
- What does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced?
- What does it produce or become when pressed to the extreme?
Before addressing the impact of new media on the Christian message, we will first use questions 1 and 4 of this four-fold grid to understand what new media is doing to all messages, not just those from Christians.
What does new media enhance or intensify?
I cannot answer this question comprehensively. Instead, my primary objective is to provide a brief list of areas enhanced by new media, in order to impart a deeper awareness of the depth and breadth of its impact on our culture. We will then zero in on one particular challenge uniquely enhanced by new media—intergenerational communication. New media affects one differently if one is in early-, mid-, or late-life. Keep that in mind as I list the following areas. Then we will drill down into today’s generation gaps.
Direct Participation. New media elevates one’s ability to directly participate in various social activities. Consider the political process. In 1996, seven million American adults used the Internet to track the presidential election. In 2004, that figure grew more than tenfold to 75 million Americans—61% of 122 million total voters. Today, over 15% of Americans use the Internet as their primary source of political info, and 53% of online consumers look primarily outside the mainstream media for political content.
The Economics of Abundance. There is an economic reality underlying today’s increase in direct citizen involvement. We see this in the elevation of new media players such as bloggers, and in the reduced role of other media gatekeepers. Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail describes this as the natural result of a shift from scarcity to abundance in information. What we see in politics has already occurred in retail, travel, music, and many other business models. The middle man is being squeezed out as consumers have myriad data sources to guide their various consumption choices.
The Brain’s Right Hemisphere. New media intensifies the brain’s ability to process a high volume and variety of information using the complementary functions of brain’s two hemispheres. McLuhan was one of the first to recognize that electronic media elevates the role of the brain’s right hemisphere (RH). He also understood the revolutionary potential of this.
The rise of the RH involves a decrease in language dominance by the left hemisphere (LH). He saw that as electronic media began to rival written language as the dominant means of public communication, the distinct capabilities of the RH would intensify across society. The logic of the LH laid the foundation for the rigorous development of Western science, technology, and rationality. If the RH displaced the LH as the dominant mode of thinking, would these Western foundations be displaced or enhanced?
The LH is detail-oriented. It utilizes a top-down approach that breaks a thing down into component parts to understand it. The RH is interested in the big picture. It utilizes a bottom-up approach that connects various details together into a unified whole to understand a thing in a particular context. Put another way, the LH tends toward diversity, while the RH tends toward unity.
McLuhan argued that image-based electronic media favors the RH. Television is a concrete example. Technically, TV begins with a camera capturing a series of images, which are converted and transmitted as a collection of pixels, which are presented on a TV screen as a simultaneous collection of light and color. Conceptually, TV involves a series of diverse images that communicate certain ideas. TV requires more bottom-up processing, so it emphasizes the RH to find coherence from these diverse pixels and images.
In A Whole New Mind, author Dan Pink builds on McLuhan’s analysis. Pink describes this elevation of the RH as “a seismic—though as yet undetected—shift now under way in much of the advanced world. We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computerlike capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathic, big-picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age.” Pink’s book is an ideal place to start studying this shift directly.
Generation Gaps. This move from an Information Age to a Conceptual Age will intensify today’s generation gaps. Using Bill Strauss & Neil Howe’s landmark work Generations, we can consider today’s generations and their place in media history:
- Boomers (born from 1943-1960) are the last generation raised with written and printed media holding a mass media monopoly
- Generation X (1961-1981) is the first raised in an environment saturated by electronic media
- Millenials (1981-2002) are the first raised in an interactive, global media environment
In the bullets above, the word raised is the key term. The brain’s innate design makes it highly malleable in one’s youth and early adulthood. Katherine Nelson helps explain this in Language in Cognitive Development: The Emergence of the Mediated Mind. She found that an adult’s brain is “hardened,” making it difficult to gain deep proficiency with new forms of communication. Children, on the other hand, incorporate new media into their natural language processing with staggering proficiency.
Thus, the volume and variety of content available via new media will overload the hardened adult brain, inclining them to the accustomed information sources and ways of thinking. The earlier one is exposed to new media, the more one’s brain will seamlessly incorporate the available tools of communication into one’s natural language experience. A child’s brain is plastic. It can effectively learn numerous languages in the early years. Using new media effectively will become second nature through regular exposure.
As new and diverse media tools continue to emerge (will we call them the “new new media”?), the gap between the childhood masters and the late learners will only become more apparent. The marketplace will soon see the broad implications of this. As the Boomers take flight from the workplace, they will be replaced by the children of the Conceptual Age, whose RH’s have been active since childhood in the processing of electronic information. More media adeptness and RH-thinking will intensify in the marketplace.
(Note: Organizations that fail to bridge this generation gap will find it difficult to fully transfer their company history, culture, and capabilities to the next generation. This could result in the detrimental loss of proven thing that may be described in vanilla ways or on old data formats. As information overload rises and attention spans fall, today’s leaders should be thinking now about presenting their core values and other key details in clear and compelling ways, using multiple new and old media in harmony.)
What does new media produce or become when pressed to the extreme?
New media produces information overload. My research suggests this is a catalyst for what I term Contextual Dexterity. Contextual Dexterity (CD) is whole-brain cognition that involves the LH and RH working harmoniously together. As the flood of media content enters the brain, the RH is called upon to identify the appropriate context for incoming messages, while the LH is busy breaking down the details of those messages to understand their fundamental presuppositions.
Because Western culture has been steeped in LH-dominant written communication for roughly 2,500 years, CD is a major shift. We see this shift taking place in the U.S. Federal Intelligence Community (IC), where the “need-to-know” paradigm (a deeply LH-oriented notion) is being displaced by the “need-to-share” model of information sharing. Operationally, this shift recognizes the value of connectedness and context. These are RH-virtues.
Anyone familiar with the IC, even those who do not possess secret clearance, knows that this culture shift is difficult. The need-to-know model has strong adherents. Operationally, all should agree that our security entails sensitive information remaining confined to those who truly need to know. This reality strengthens the resolve of the need-to-know stalwarts.
Yet, the need-to-share model reflects the fact that an intelligence network is more value if the nodes composing the network are aware of one another. The viral rise of social networking technologies such as MySpace and Facebook are reminders that wholistic RH-thinking is indeed spreading far and wide. CD argues that need-to-know (LH) and need-to-share (RH) each have a proper role to play, and these roles can operate harmoniously.
Contextual Dexterity says that complex issues such as intelligence sharing cannot be approached dogmatically. Instead, CD involves the ability to perform three communication tasks in real-time:
- Isolating the defining details of a message,
- Recognizing their significance to various situations and audiences, and
- Effectively communicating with sufficient mastery of both message details and relevant contexts.
The IC example helps us see how CD works. There are many perpetrators who move illicit funds through the economy. Communication intercepts and financial records are key data sources for painting an accurate picture (i.e., the context) behind illicit activity. IC analyst teams are continually looking for the key data points evidencing these illicit activities. This is a left-brain approach, and it is effective when the critical data points reside entirely within the same or very similar organizations.
However, if key communiqués and transactions are tracked by separate institutions, analysts from divergent approaches may need to work together to connect the dots into a coherent threat picture. Analysts from each side must “see” from the perspective of the other side in order to properly interpret their data points and combine them with their own evidence. Moving from one perspective to the other effectively involves Contextual Dexterity. It is critical for national security.
Contextual Dexterity is a two-way street. It also enables one to translate one’s approach into other perspectives rapidly. For example, the monitoring of communication and transactions has strong privacy implications, which is of great concern to citizens and others outside the IC. Understanding the privacy implications of IC work is critical when government officials must call upon citizens to embrace increased personal transparency for the common good (i.e., to prevent terrorist financial activity).
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