A Brief History of Brains and Screens (written in 2011)
Sometimes I remember a piece I wrote long ago and after much searching, discover that the publication it appeared in, no longer exists. While the the Wayback Machine is OK, it really doesn’t cope well with links and such. This is one I did back in 2011 for Media Magazine for an amazing issue guest edited by Brian Monahan, then head of the IPG Media Lab. Medium, please don’t let it fall prey to it’s original fate. Here goes:
A screen is defined as a surface where pictures can be projected for viewing. This term is not just related to media, it defines it; the screen is the membrane that “mediates” or stands between, an image and the individual viewing it. What happens without a literal screen? That image simply pipes directly into our mind’s eye so that we can “see” it in the same way we “see” a dream.
The classic starting point for media theory is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from the Republic. This thought experiment imagined an ancient tribe projecting flickering shadows on the wall of a subterranean dwelling. Like today’s media audience, the cave-dwellers may have felt, in watching images dance on the walls, much as we do at the movies. Like us, they may have imagined stories of the hunt and perhaps (re) experienced the dramatic events.
Clearly the Cave Allegory works here. There are the images on the wall, the events they convey (the hunt from last week) and finally the emotions evoked (pride at the kill). This philosophical idea is widespread in films because it’s so poignant. It’s The Wizard of Oz, the Truman Show and the Matrix rolled into one. What’s interesting is that each film mentioned could be called philosophical fiction. But iff we extend the Allegory to todays’ media environment, we are like audience members so enthralled by the movie we’ve forgotten the world outside exists at all and, at the same time, we can also step into the movie and shape the virtual worlds we find there.
For purposes of this essay, let’s focus our lens on the past 100 years of media. At the beginning of the 20th century, cinema began to replace live theater — it was magical to plunk down your nickel (at the nickelodeon) and settle in for a couple magical hours of newsreels and drama. By 1950, television screens had become predominant, ushering in the golden age of broadcasting yet still connecting many brains to a single, shared set of stories making up a media culture.
By the time the Web and mobile’s tiny screens emerged in the mid 1990s, cinema and television had fragmented into multiplexes and cable stations respectively. The Web changed this all. Suddenly, Moore’s Law met Melcalfe’s Rule — machines got ever faster and networks more valuable the more people they connected. Combining processing power with a network let creators and consumers make, remix and consume content as never before.
In 2007, in a now legendary TED talk, futurist Kevin Kelly rattled off a series of statistics about the size of the Internet: 170 quadrillion transistors, 240 exabytes of memory and 7 terabytes of data transferred per second (about 35 percent of the Library of Congress).
At this point, he stopped dramatically and said “the World Wide Web was is now roughly the same size as ONE human brain”. This was one of those magical and surprising statistics. How could something as vast and interconnected as the Web be quantitative equivalent to a single human brain? And yet the human brain has taken millions (or billions) of years to evolve while the Web has (as of 2011) arisen in less than 6,000 days.
Computers aren’t just becoming intertwined with our brains — they’re also rewiring them.
While children 10 years ago needed to memorize facts, now they can Google them. We can outsource individual memory to that of the collective; all a person needs to know is what question to ask. This is a profound inversion. Facebook has obviously furthered the “connected brains as media“ paradigm— if Google made data findable, Facebook linked people.
And how should we think about the real-time Web? I’d make the point that as Twitter scales it is redefining media again — now know what the “planet” is thinking. As radical as it sounds, this can truly be described as “global ESP”. Lots of connected brains. Simple.
The future of media is one of paradox. On the one hand, data will continue to explode and the number of screens displaying it will continue to proliferate. Yet oddly and mysteriously, screens will also disappear — we will notice them less and yet they will connect us to more.
What does this mean? It means that a global brain is forming, one in which the network connects man and machine and media flows seamlessly between all the brains on the planet. Hang on tight — this is going to be an interesting ride.
