Our computational culture: from Descartes to the computer.

We, all of us, have made the world too much into a computer, and...this remaking of the world in the image of the computer started long before there were any electronic computers.

Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, p. ix.

HISTORICALLY, the computer and its precursors developed as a result of the need for faster means of calculation in a blossoming, then a full-blown computational culture. Emerging in its modern form in the seventeenth century after the introduction of typography, that culture, it is here argued, remains dominant today, the effects of various electronic media notwithstanding. In his synoptic Turing's Man, J. David Bolter confuses the issues relating to computerization by equating Turing's man with "electronic man" and with electronic technology in general.

Whereas computer man is essentially a product of literate, visual culture, the perceptions of electronic man result from "secondary orality" created by media such as the telephone, radio, and television in a society dependent on writing and print for its existence. The purely oral tradition, or primary orality in the strict sense, today hardly exists, since every culture knows of writing and has some experience of its effects.

In primary oral cultures, experience is arranged by a dominant auditory sense-life which represses visual values. Children are born into an auditory-tactile universe, not a literate one, and, according to Marshall McLuhan, remain closely related to it because of the secondary orality imposed sensorially by electronic technology. Today the young are conditioned by radio and television long before they come near the visuality of the printed book. Moreover, the perceptual effects of low-definition (auditory-tactile) television and other electronic media, he argues, have retribalized Western cultures by changing their sensory, psychic, and social lives.

Earlier such cultural disequilibrium arose as a result of the introduction of phonetic literacy into Greece and typography into Western Europe, the latter being an intensely visual technology.

During the Renaissance, McLuhan says, the phonetic alphabet, in which semantically meaningless letters are used to correspond to semantically meaningless sounds, combined with the linearity, precision, and uniformity of the arrangement of movable types to reinforce the illusion of perspective and create the associated illusion that space is visual, uniform, and continuous. Further, the uniformity and repeatability of print permeated the Renaissance with the idea of time and space as continuous, measurable quantities. Such perceptual and psychic changes became the basis of calculus, modern science, nationalism, industrialism, mass markets, and universal literacy and education, all key ingredients of a computational culture.

That that culture remains dominant today, the cumulative effects of secondary orality notwithstanding, is evidence of the controlling, processing, transforming, and storing powers of the digital computer. This is a paradoxical technology because, although it functions electronically, its mode of data processing is sequential, analytical, and mathematical or literate. Yet its interfaces such as CRT monitors and dot-matrix printers may output data in low-definition or auditory-tactile mode (the higher the visual resolution, the less the tactility), and thus add to the phenomenon of secondary orality. The essential character of the computer, however, is determined by the assembly-line functioning of its Central Processing Unit (CPU) or microprocessor, the number-crunching and symbol-manipulating mill which is the ultimate extension of the visual or computational culture that flourished after the advent of printing.

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan states: "Print assured the victory of numbers or visual position early in the sixteenth century. By the later sixteenth century the art of statistics was already growing". As a result, there was soon great concern with ways and means of speeding up arithmetical calculations. Moreover, "the use of statistics permitted the isolation of economics from the social fabric of the sixteenth century".

Desk-top calculators owe their intellectual origins to the seventeenth-century machinery of Wilhelm Schickard, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Leibniz, and others. Also at that time, according to James Beniger: "Essential ideas for the analog computer developed from John Napier's logarithms (1614) and rods (1617), William Oughtred's rectilinear and circular slide rules (c. 1630) and the modern sliding rule (1654), and the calculus of Leibniz (1684) and Sir Isaac Newton (1687)". It can be argued that the development of the mathematical tools of analytic geometry and calculus made manifest the separation of the senses in science. As Galileo put it, the book of nature was now written in the language of mathematics, one which had been purified of colour, smell, taste, and other "secondary qualities." Descartes and Leibniz led the way in making algebra and calculus a matter of x, y, and symbols of a higher order such as d/dx and d/dy. Their mathematics became a truly artificial language of primary qualities, a logical core which was spectacularly successful in those areas of experience that yielded to quantifying and symbolic manipulation. Inspired by the success of the new mathematics, some thinkers, Leibniz included, sought to reduce much or all of human experience to a purely logical calculus.

Fermat, Huygens, and Leibniz shared an interest in physics whose focus was not mechanics but optics, the communication of visual images. Norbert Wiener makes it clear that Leibniz thought of the interaction of his "monads" largely in optical terms:

A preoccupation with optics and with message, which is apparent in this part of Leibniz's philosophy, runs through its whole texture. It plays a large part in two of his most original ideas, that of the Characteristica Universalis, or universal scientific language, and that of the Calculus Ratiocinator, or calculus of logic. This Calculus Ratiocinator, imperfect as it was, was the direct ancestor of modern mathematical logic.

Wiener states also that Leibniz's Calculus Ratiocinator contains the germs of the machina ratiocinatrix, the reasoning machine; this makes Leibniz the patron saint of cybernetics. He "saw in the mystic elegance of the binary system of zero and one the image of creation. The unity of the Supreme Being operating in the void by binary function would, he felt, suffice to make all beings from the void" (McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 114).

Although Brian Winston asserts that the computer "offends, fundamentally, the Cartesian duopoly of mind and matter," he refers to the idea of the machina ratiocinatrix in particular, not to computation in general, and adds that in the seventeenth century:

the dominance of the empiric scientific method which began in this period stressed observation and measure and thereby, to a degree, encouraged the production of calculating devices both mental and physical. This work was enormously aided by the appearance of printed tables freed from the inevitability of scribal error and capable, through repeated editions, of incorporating corrections. All this led to a tradition of contradictory attitudes to machines that "think".

Those contradictory attitudes were part of the dichotomies and divisions carried over from scholasticism to mathematics and science. McLuhan holds that the new passion for quantity and exact measurement arose as a result of rigorous separation and translation of functions by stress on visual quantity.

In the computer age, according to Bolter, "electronic space has the feel of ancient geometric space, but it has been mathematized and numbered according to Cartesian principles". That is to say, it is functionally auditory-tactile, but is organized visually. Computer time, on the other hand, is "the most abstract and mathematical notion of time ever incorporated into a machine... It represents the final triumph of the Western European view, in which time itself becomes a commodity, a resource to be worked...".

Descartes and his followers helped to make the clock a defining technology in Western Europe. Following Lewis Mumford's lead and that of Wiener, who observes that the "technique embodied in the automata of [Leibniz's] time was that of the clockmaker", Bolter sees the clock, not the printing press, "as the prototype of a variety of tasks which had previously been performed by hand". In response to Mumford's suggestion that the clock preceded the printing press in order of influence on the mechanization of society, McLuhan states that "Mumford takes no account of the phonetic alphabet as the technology that had made possible the visual and uniform fragmentation of space" (Understanding Media, p. 147), and that "for the clock to dominate there has to be the prior acceptance of the visual that is inseparable from phonetic literacy". The clock became the dominant metaphor of the seventeenth century only after it "and the alphabet, by hacking the universe into visual segments, ended the music of interrelation. The visual desacralizes the universe and produces the 'nonreligious man of modern societies'". The reductionistic onslaught brought about by phonetic literacy and typography continues with computerization, and leads Bolter to ask if religion will survive in the computer age.

Huygens, Leibniz, and Descartes agreed on logical grounds that there could be no space without matter. Once Newton and eventually all scientists "began to grant empty space the same status as matter" (Bolter, p. 95), the binary system of zero and one could be perceived as the image of creation, and God was marginalized. According to the absolute, mathematical, clockwork cosmology of Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton, "God the great geometer, was outside the machine of the universe to which he had merely given an initial push" (McLuhan, Mechanical Bride, p. 134). Although the human mind and soul remained linked to God, "both the human body and the body politic soon came to be thought of as machines geared to the mathematical laws of the universe". Society was seen as a self-regulating mechanism, free from rational controls and powered simply by human appetites and passions. Under the Leibnizean mathematical code of the eighteenth-century political enlightenment and also under the code of the nineteenth-century economic liberalism as understood in terms of the self-regulating market in land, labour, and capital, "any effort to achieve a social order guided and restrained by human principles is...arrogant presumption to the Divine omnipotence".

In the eighteenth century the new universal view spawned a "Hedonistic calculus," which transformed men and women into consuming animals. As McLuhan explains, print trained

whole populations in the habits of translating their wishes and desires statistically, as it were, by means of market mechanisms of supply and demand, and the visual technology of prices. It was only in the eighteenth century that the West began to accept this form of extension of its inner life in the new statistical pattern of marketing. So bizarre did this new mechanism appear to thinkers of that time that they called it a "Hedonistic calculus." Prices then seemed to be comparable, in terms of feelings and desires, to the vast world of space that had yielded its inequities earlier to the translating power of the differential calculus. In a word the fragmentation of the inner life by prices seemed as mysterious in the eighteenth century, as the minute fragmentation of space by means of calculus had seemed a century earlier (Understanding Media, p. 137).

Neither under tribal, nor feudal, nor mercantile conditions was there a separate economic system in society. The Hedonistic calculus was evidence of a shift towards such a system, as was the publication of the Wealth of Nations. In 1776 "the Newtonian laws of mechanics were translated by Adam Smith to govern the laws of production and consumption" (Gutenberg Galaxy, pp. 268-9). In nineteenth-century society, economic activity was isolated and imputed to a distinct economic motive. Familial and feudal economic and social ties were no longer of much concern in an age in which the social system had become the content of the economic system. The calculating businessman dominated the new market society shaped by steam-powered industrialization and transportation.

McLuhan insists that "to create a market economy that can handle what comes off the assembly lines presupposes a long period of psychic transformation, which is to say, a period of altering perception and sense ratios". For him the great visual transformation began in the Greek world with the introduction of phonetic literacy and was completed sensorially, psychically, and socially by typography. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, intense visual stress in everyday life made the visual sense dominant in the ratios and proportions amongst and between the human exteroceptive senses, and altered consciousness and social relations. The new visuality in industrializing Western societies conflicted with the old acoustic world of preliterates or "primitives" and made illiterates and semiliterates appear quaint or rustic.

The perceptual and psychic changes enabling the market economy to function took far longer to achieve than the physical control of the new mechanical technologies. The steam-powered railways and factories producing and distributing manufactured goods in nineteenth-century England and the USA initially experienced systemic breakdowns as a result of more power and greater speed. Beniger explains that technological developments in the USA in the late 1830s and 1840s (earlier in England) involved

one or both of two essential changes: increasing levels of energy utilization or power and the progressive translation of this power into the increasing speed with which matter, energy, and information moved through the system. All else being equal, increases in power will always result in increases in speed, which in turn increases the need for control and hence for communication, information processing, programming, and decision.

Problems of control involving production, transportation, and consumption were solved by a host of new devices, including feedback mechanisms in mines, mills, and factories, by electric technologies such as telegraph and telephone, by advertising, by immigration, and by the growth of bureaucracies.

In the nineteenth century the Western world was approaching the extreme phase of an alphabetic and typographic control revolution. Print, McLuhan says, imposed such an overwhelming environmental, visual stress that it virtually wiped out the primary orality of tribal cultures. In an oral/aural universe environmental "control" was achieved through myth, magic, and rituals designed to perpetuate the life of the tribe and to ensure that life was in harmony with cosmic forces and events. In a literate universe, social and industrial control is gained at the expense of environmental control, and results in such twentieth-century ecological problems as acid rain, the depletion of the ozone layer, and the gradual warming of the atmosphere, the "greenhouse effect."

In the short run, however, "increased control brought increased reliability and hence predictability of processes and flows, which in turn meant increasing economic returns on the application of information-processing technology" (Beniger, pp. 291-2). Beniger adds: "Foremost among all the technological solutions to the crisis of control -- in that it served to control most other technologies -- was the rapid growth of formal bureaucracy". Indispensable to it as well as to science, industry, the market economy, and warfare was calculation. Brian Winston notes that "all over Europe, throughout the eighteenth century and beyond, scientists worked on the calculator theme".

For greater ease of logarithmic calculation and for accuracy of nautical tables, a need of the British navy, Charles Babbage began in 1825 to build a difference engine based on a calculus of differences. Lacking the broad capacity of the Leibnizean calculator, it was designed to convert multiplication and division into operations of addition and subtraction. Babbage later adapted as inputs for his universal Analytic Engine the punched cards developed by Joseph-Made Jacquard in 1801 to programme the patterns woven on power looms. Its design also featured internal memory ("store"), a central processing unit ("mill"), and output to be printed or set into type, and so it contained the four essential components of the digital computer. It was never built, however, and even its realized successors were only partial prototypes for the computer because they did not achieve "the full potential of the stored variable programme" (Winston, p. 124).

Further theoretical and technical developments towards computerization include the work of the English mathematician and logician George Boole, who by 1860 had discovered the analogy between algebraic symbols and those of logic as used to represent logical forms and syllogisms. Electronic computer switching theory and procedures are based on Boolean algebra with its binary logic operators (e.g., AND, OR, and NOT). Herman Hollerith, a US statistician whose firm later became IBM, had by 1884 used punched cards as part of a tabulating system which automated census counts by using electromechanical sensing and punching devices, the forerunners of modern peripheral computer equipment. In 1903 Nikola Tesla patented electric logic circuits called gates or switches. "On Computable Numbers," published in 1936 by Alan Turing, gave the theory behind the creation of the modern digital computer. At MIT in 1937-38, Claude Shannon applied the propositional calculus of Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica to the design of electric circuitry and "also established that programming an electronic digital computer would be a problem not of arithmetic but of logic" (Beniger, p. 406). In 1947 John von Neumann devised a method for converting the concept of an externally programmed machine (i.e., by making hand adjustments of connections from one unit to another) to that of the stored-program computer of today.

Information of any kind can be represented in binary form (e.g., a letter, number, or color image), and informational processing by means of logical devices and memory circuits car involve complex tasks, if they can be broken down into a large number (even a ridiculously large number) of similar pieces. As Joseph Deken explains in The Electronic Cottage, information, the inherent entity of the digital computer, "resides not in any particular physical property of a system, but only in the differences which are possible in whatever physical property of the system you choose to look at. The more the different patterns which can be made with any structure, the more information the structure holds". "To process information by computer," says Bolter, "is nothing more than to replace discrete symbols one at a time according to a finite set of rules".

Representing information in binary form is the same as ex pressing it as a sequence of "yes" or "no" answers to some strategic set of questions. The programming unit for that information is a computer "word" ranging in length from eight to 64 bits, the former length (e.g., 10010101) giving 256 informational patterns, more than enough to assimilate the digits zero to nine, punctuation marks, and the 26 letters of the alphabet in upper and lower case.

Controlled by the same language it stores, the computer's unique capacity to transform as well as to transmit information resides in its "brain," the central processing unit or CPU. It may consist of separate linked components or one integrated circuit (microprocessor). Its principal parts are the central control unit and the arithmetic/logic unit.

The former selects and calls up program instructions from the main memory in proper sequence and interprets them so as to direct the movement of data through the system for processing and output. Its timing signals activate the other functional elements of the computer system at the appropriate moment to perform their respective functions. All data in the main memory are transferred to the arithmetic/logic unit for processing, which involves the four basic arithmetical functions and certain logical operations. The operational circuits include such binary logic coincidence circuits as the AND, OR, NAND and NOR gates and inverter (e.g., the AND gate has two inputs and one output. It transmits "1" or yes, if and only if its two inputs are "1"; otherwise it transmits "0" or no).

A sophisticated microprocessor is simply tens or hundreds of thousands of simple-minded components like ORs, ANDs, and NOTs etched and interconnected by metal-oxided-semiconductor technology on a thumbnail-sized piece of silicon, an integrated circuit containing all the arithmetic, logic, and control circuitry necessary to serve as a CPU. The analytical reasoning embedded in its minuscule logic circuits combined with its sequential processing of each instruction at exceedingly fast speeds (nanoseconds in mainframe computers) makes the computer "the ultimate assembly line" (Bolter, p. 34) of literate, mechanical culture.

In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong states that "logic itself emerges from the technology of writing", and that "the exquisitely analytic oral disputations in medieval universities and in later scholastic tradition were the work of minds honed by writing texts and by reading and commenting on texts orally and in writing". Although both medieval grammatica and dialectica were extremely oral in their orientation, print transformed later scholasticism into visual "method," a subject earlier discussed by Ong in Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue. Ramus taught a utilitarian logic for which he made the same claims that pragmatists make for "scientific method."

In revealing a process whereby European visual method was transplanted into the USA (and later embodied in the computer), McLuhan tells us that "the schoolmen went to New England, the quasi-humanist gentry to Virginia" ("Edgar Poe's Tradition," p. 215), adding that:

The tool of Ramistic scriptural exegesis proved very destructive of Scripture, naturally; for it was rationalistic and nominalistic. That is, it made all problems logical problems and at the same time destroyed ontology and any possibility of metaphysics, a fact which accounts for the notorious anemia, the paralyzing skepticism of New England speculation. Already in the seventeenth century Harvard had designated technologia as the true successor of metaphysics -- an absurdity... For this mind there is nothing which cannot be settled by method. It is the mind which weaves the intricacies of efficient production, "scientific" scholarship, and business administration ("The Southern Quality," p. 194).

Harvard's attitude towards technology is now echoed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other centres of artificial-intelligence research where binary logic is seen as a method of capturing the "steps" of logical process and extending "this kind of analysis into wider areas of mental activity" (Turkle, p. 245).

McLuhan regards autonomous dialectics and ontological nominalism as "the most destructive aberration of the Western mind" ("The Southern Quality," p. 199), a verdict worth considering in relation to Bolter's assertions that "computer thought is a triumph of nominalism", and that "the computer is the embodiment of the world as the logician would like it to be". He also defines its linguistic inadequacies by stating: "The whole course of linguistic philosophy from Leibniz to the positivists seems to culminate in the computer, where symbols are drained of connotations and given meaning solely by initial definition and by syntactic relations to other symbols" (Bolter, p. 145). That narrow, logical use of symbols contrasts with the approach of the linguistic anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, who developed the idea that humans build up their sense of reality through the unconscious working of their language to organize perception, a view shared by James Joyce, Marshall McLuhan, and other poets.

Given his humanistic training and poetic sensibility, it is not surprising that McLuhan complains that the computer is "programmed by fragmenting the ground of multi-levelled situations into homogenized 'yes/no' bits" ("The Medieval Environment," p. 21). Like McLuhan, Joseph Weizenbaum believes that "rationality cannot be equated to computability and to logicality", and that it "cannot be separated from intuition and feeling". To our disadvantage, we continue to confuse reason with literacy and rationalism with a single technology.

The great cultural infusion of intuition and feeling in the 1960s occurred largely as a result of television, the medium that, by endowing retinal impressions with tactile values, affects our perceptual, psychic, and social lives. Among cultural results of TV at that time noted by Marshall McLuhan were the hippie, civil rights, anti-war, feminist, and ecological movements, and executive and student dropouts, campus rebellion, psychedelic drug culture, and communal living and working.

Whether as a TV screen or computer monitor, the cathode ray tube remains a two-dimensional mosaic display favoring acoustic simultaneity. Because the user of the video display terminal, like the TV viewer, becomes the screen, he or she experiences inner, convulsive sensuous happenings. Unlike the TV viewer, however, the VDT user interiorizes the sudden arresting of cognitive process and the logical illuminations and happenings generated by computer programming, and becomes the computer. As a result of the tactility of "electronic visuality" and of interacting with mind-mirroring software programs through the digital keyboard and other input modes, the user expects knowledge to be an immediate revelation from within both subject and himself, a kind of cognitive illumination with which the printed book cannot compete. In Walter Ong's words, the book is inferior to the computer because the latter "optimizes analytic sequentiality by making it virtually instantaneous".

Besides the cathode ray tube, the computer, as a stationary logic engine and in robotic form, has taken as its content the typewriter, banking and finance, mechanical assembly lines, and bureaucratic organization alike. Yet because computerized control is executed according to literate, mathematical rules and procedures, the cultural ground does not change. Therefore Weizenbaum states correctly that "the arrival of the Computer Revolution has been announced many times. But if the triumph of a revolution is to be measured in terms of the profundity of the social revisions it entailed, then there has been no computer revolution". Giving as an example the automation and continued centralization of the administration of social services along established political lines, Weizenbaum affirms that the computer was "used to conserve America's social and political institutions. It buttressed them and immunized them, at least temporarily, against enormous pressures for change".

Earlier pressures for change came from the corporate perception of the undesirable human effects of industrialization, urbanization, and the market economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In part, the welfare state, says Marshall McLuhan, was brought into being by our electromagnetic technologies. They created a sense of collective involvement and responsibility, helping to foster beneficial political and social change. Now such events as privatization, deregulation, and North American free trade reveal a changed state of mind, one that appears to be subliminally conditioned by computerization.

Corporate restructuring has produced various forms of electronic serfdom, including unemployment, underemployment, sweat-shops, poverty, and overwork. In 1985 Lenny Siegel and John Markoff said that "computers, automation, and robotics could affect as many as 45 million jobs in the United States, of which 25 million could be totally eliminated". They claimed that while some jobs would be more challenging and better paid, the majority affected would pay poorly and would require less skill. A new working poor of semi-skilled office, service, and production workers might end the American "social dream of a middle-class society". In the 1980s in Silicon Valley (Santa Clara County, California), for example, production workers commuted long distances, and experienced hazardous working conditions, low pay, inadequate childcare, and expensive housing. In Asia, American corporations treated workers even worse, especially single women, who suffered indignities "reminiscent of the first industrial revolution". We forget, Siegel and Markoff state, that "the most proven path to economic development, as well as the most equitable one, is to pay workers enough so that they can afford to buy what they make".

Computers, satellites, cellular phones, and fax machines create continuous global conditions of business as usual, the ultimate in electronic serfdom. Managers and workers alike now experience longer, more stressful work weeks. According to polls taken by Louis Harris and Associates, "median weekly hours worked by Americans increased 20 per cent between 1973 and 1985, from 40.6 a week to 48.8, while the leisure time plummeted 32 per cent, from 26.2 hours to 17.7 hours" (Baker, p. D4).(*) The 1960s vision of a "Leisure Society" has yielded to the harsh reality of a globally speeded-up computational culture in which more companies are electronically monitoring their workers' performances. However, if demographic shifts create labour shortages in the 1990s, there may be demands for more leisure time and a healthier working environment.

In Western societies, "as work is replaced by the sheer movement of information, money as a store of work merges with the informational forms of credit and credit cards. From coin to paper currency, and from currency to credit card there is a steady progression towards commercial exchange as the movement of information itself" (McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 137). Peter Schwarz, former head of the London Stock Exchange, illustrates the informational nature of the planetary economy by noting that international foreign exchange transactions reached 87 trillion dollars in 1986, trade being only about 10 per cent of that sum. He adds that "'the values of currencies are no longer determined by trade volumes or any of the physical activities normally associated with industrial economies'" (Rheingold, Virtual Reality, p. 369).

Vast corporate and governmental informational needs create new societal problems. Even in a world of informational overload, for example, there is a potential widening of the gap between the informational rich and poor:

The "electronic cottage" envisioned by futurists promises a range of computer-based services for the informational haves, from electronic mail to home banking. But the have-nots may find themselves stranded in their homes with no phones, decaying public libraries, and declining postal services. Like the car-less urban poor in America's central cities today, they will be locked out of the benefits of a remarkable new technology (Siegel and Markoff, p. 7).

The break-up of American Telephone and Telegraph is but one illustration of how the telecommunications network is being reorganized and rebuilt to meet corporate demands. As telephonic monopolies end, local measured service begins, destroying universal, low-cost public access to the telephone.

The old kind of center-margin organization, whereby papyrus, paper, roads, railways, and sea routes created control at a distance and facilitated sending of staples and natural resources to industrial centres for processing, has undergone electronic modification. For example,

every work morning an American Airlines jet arrives on the Caribbean island of Barbados and unloads a quarter-ton of used ticket coupons. The tickets are taken to the airline's Caribbean Data Services (CDS) subsidiary, where over two hundred women, each earning less than $3 an hour, key data from the coupons into a local computer system. Almost immediately, CDS transmits the information via satellite to the company's central data-processing operation in Tulsa, Oklahoma (Siegel and Markoff, p. 99).

In sum, telematics, combined with advances in both surface and air transport, enable administration and the communication network to be centralized, while at the same time permitting production to be decentralized, both nationally and internationally.

Just as improved calculation was essential to the movements of the British navy in the nineteenth century, so it is to the delivery of nuclear missiles today. Moreover, miniaturization of guidance systems has had cultural side effects, as Joseph Weizenbaum explains:

The press of military necessity, among other factors, yielded ever smaller electronic components and almost miraculous bulk manufacturing techniques -- very large scale integration (VLSI), for example. Physically smaller but functionally more powerful computers in missiles allow their "payload," that is their death dealing portion, to be increased while at the same time "improving" their aiming accuracy... An incidental fall-out of such "progress" is that computers in general become smaller, faster, more powerful, and cheaper. It is this side-effect which is trumpeted by the media and which dominates the attention of the general public.

Other military applications of computers include intelligence-gathering, surveillance, and such recent projects as the Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars, whose ultimate goal was to give the USA "absolute nuclear superiority over the Soviets" (Siegel and Markoff, p. 19).

The foregoing examples serve to reinforce the historical and technical arguments that the so-called informational or computer revolution is merely a global computational extension of the control revolution brought into being in the Western world by phonetic literacy, typography, and the accompanying mathematics. Sequential computing has been "pressed into the service of rationalizing, supporting, and sustaining the most conservative, indeed, reactionary components of the current Zeitgeist" (Weizenbaum, p. 250). That is, it appears to support some of the worst features of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, e.g., militarism, commercial speed-up, centralized bureaucracies, unfettered markets, the long hours, low pay, and poor working conditions of sweatshops and factories, and, in some countries, a reactionary attack on the welfare state. Organizationally, the computer has entrenched and stabilized "social and political structures that otherwise might have been radically renovated or allowed to totter under the demands that were sure to be made upon them" (Weizenbaum, p. 31).

That the computer's effects differ in many respects from those of other electronic media should not be surprising in view of its logical ability to transform as well as to transmit messages, and its computational utility in government, business, and industry. It reinforces the Western perceptual and cognitive bias towards dialectics and sequential, analytical (visual) logic. The secondary orality imposed by media such as telegraph, telephone, radio, and television, on the other hand, is characterized by auditory-tactile, emotional, intuitive, and holistic human responses. In the 1960s, for example, TV created a temporary, affective, and attitudinal "generation gap" between young and old, a spiritual and social awakening which caused the former to reject the values of the latter. Today, claimed Marshall McLuhan, the acoustic electronic environment still affects the learning process, human relations, and social organization, and exacerbates social problems such as drug abuse. However, the twentieth-century technological and cultural upheaval whose nature he explained, has not yet resulted in fundamental economic and social changes because omnipresent computerization has ensured the ongoing dominance of literate, computational culture.

As we have seen, binary logic is an extension and amplification of the typographic culture which emerged during the Renaissance and experienced a "dissociation of thought and feeling" (Turkle, p. 249), that Sherry Turkle wrongly attributes to the computer. Her "second self" is merely a computational enhancement of habits of mind first induced by writing and print, processes of intellection characteristic of the Left Hemisphere (LH) of the human brain. The "first self," right-hemispheric and intuitive, arose out of the primary orality of tribal cultures. Although intuitive thought is logical, it "has criteria of absurdity which are different from those of the logical LH" (Weizenbaum, p. 215). A highly literate culture tends to be unconscious of the activities of the intuitive right hemisphere of the brain, assuming that the mode of informational processing we normally associate with logical thought and with computers is universal, not merely left-hemispheric.

Although the brain is organized from front to back, top to bottom, and left to right, it is the latter duality which seems to determine the nature of our consciousness. As Robert Ornstein explains:

The left hemisphere (connected to the right side of the body) is predominantly involved with analytic, logical thinking, especially in verbal and mathematical functions. Its mode of operation is primarily linear. This hemisphere seems to process information sequentially. This mode of operation of necessity must underlie logical thought, since logic depends on sequence and order. Language and mathematics, both left hemisphere activities, also depend primarily on linear time.

The sequential, analytical, logical mode of left-hemispheric cognition finds its ultimate expression in the computer. Weizenbaum skirts the issue when he posits that "the LH modality of thought...can in principle be somehow formulated", unmindful of the progressive formulation of such thought brought about by phonetic literacy, typography, and now computerization.

Speaking of computer databases and telecommunication, Robert Lucky, an AT&T executive involved with communication sciences research at Bell Laboratories, observed that with the addition of data, music, and graphics, "there's more of real life flowing by in more and more quantities. There's more of the essence of life" (Froelich and Power, p. A10). His words reveal the simultaneous, holistic, and synthetic aspects of right-hemispheric existence being observed by a literate person accustomed to a visual world of lineality, connectedness, homogeneity, and stasis. It would seem that, after more than a century of being exposed to an electronic flood of acoustic, resonating, simultaneous data, the West has found, in digitally controlled logical transformations at electric speed, a way to capture elements of right-hemispheric experience sequentially. However, since the "von Neumann bottleneck" of serial programming places a limit on attempts to invade the right hemisphere, there is now a drive towards concurrent or simultaneous data-processing, the so-called fifth generation project.

Simultaneous data-processing involves multiple microprocessors and their interconnections, and is now being applied in robotics and in machines which emulate functions of human intelligence. Someday a conscious computer may be built, one that McLuhan says would be an extension of our consciousness.

As he explains in The Gutenberg Galaxy, the introduction of phonetic literacy into Greek culture caused severe sensory, psychic, and social disequilibrium, resulting in a control revolution which persists today. Latterly, he added that "the overwhelming foundation or ground of the Western world remains lineal, sequential and connected, in its legal institutions, and also in its education and commerce, while its entertainment and its art are representative of right-hemispheric structures" ("The Brain and the Media," p. 58). The cultural chaos might be reduced, he thought, by "using the visual and the acoustic, the rational and the intuitive, in some sort of equilibrium, however shifting" ("Medieval Environment," pp. 18-9).

Now, however, the attainment of such sensorial equilibrium remains distant. Our culture is being accelerated to the point of breakdown by various electronic extensions of our central nervous system and by the vast memory and very fast analytic sequentiality of the computer, a medium which represents the extreme phase of the development of a logical, left-hemispheric corporate mentality. At electric speed of informational transmission and data processing, the social fabric unravels and our physical beings seem turned inside out, as we daily embrace and interact with our electromagnetically extended central nervous system. Perhaps a fitting note on which to conclude is McLuhan's observation that he could not "see that the physical existence of man is compatible with the speed of light" (Letters, p. 543).

* See also Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American, Basic Books, New York, NY, 1993.

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Froelich, G. and Power, B., "Dialling the Future," The Vancouver Sun, 11 February 1984, pp. A1 and A10.

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R. Dreyer Berg is director of the Canadian Centre for Culture and Technology, Port Alberni, Vancouver Island, BC, Canada. He writes and teaches part time for his local shoot district.