The UFO-like Chedi (inner memorial hall)

Dhammakaya is a very new movement within Buddhism, and breaks from many of its classical precepts. As a philosophy, it has roots in the early 20th century, with a revered monk named Luang Phor Sodh who purportedly rediscovered a long-lost method of attaining enlightenment. In fact, the current sect is a posthumous interpretation of Luang Phor’s teachings that wasn’t founded until the 1970s, and its leaders are at least as successful as entrepreneurs as they are as philosophers. Their brand of Buddhism could be justly compared to any number of religious movements around the world that seek to make worship relevant to the moods and mores of modern life.

This includes, for example, an overt and intimate connection between material wealth and spirituality. Pictured below is a bag, distributed by the temple for carrying shoes while indoors, adorned with Dhammakaya’s official slogan: “Quickly Rich/Powerfully Rich/Thoroughly Rich”

Relevance also means heaps of technology. And size. The central building of the wat looks a lot like an airplane hangar (note the people at the bottom of the photo for scale), complete with a logo that evokes a disc-shaped aircraft set to launch.

From the inside, see the tall ceilings, open spacing, and minimal design. The woman blurred at the front is on her cell phone.

There didn’t seem to be a single point in the entire complex where one was out of view of a television, or out of earshot of a mounted Bose speaker. Between the morning and afternoon meditation sessions, a panel of young men and women chatted and laughed at a long table, talk show-style, their faces and voices amplifying throughout the vast terminal. Though there must have been hundreds of small televisions, the two largest screens, standing some fifteen feet tall, flanked the main stage, on which a group of novice monks sat in a geometrical array on top of a dais shaped exactly like the other building, the aircraft/Chedi. During the talk show, the presenters appeared on the screens as gigantic talking heads; when formal meditation began, they were replaced by blue orb graphics and fiery orange Buddhas. Whoever orchestrated the program most certainly understood color theory.

My companion described all of this as a great example of the Thai concept of Riyap Raawy, or perfect orderliness. Every element of the space, from load-bearing poles to floor mats to the seating arrangement of worshippers, was made absolutely uniform. And thanks to the even distribution of media, every person in the wat could see and hear clearly from anywhere – this is critical, since the space is touted as being able to accommodate a stunning one million devotees at a time.

There are certainly examples from throughout history of religious structures that, like Wat Dhammakaya, were built to be huge and awesome (in the biblical sense), and to thus give everyone the sense that they were encountering transcendence. This experience is often audible. For example, in the whispering gallery of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the acoustics allow you to hear another person with perfect clarity, even if they’re fifty feet away and whispering. The inner dome of the Taj Mahal has a similar effect. In both cases, the echoes suggest a sublime unity between the speaker, the space, and the cosmos – even the slightest utterance resonates everywhere. Upon speaking, you get the feeling that all things are connected.

However, the technological space of Wat Dhammakaya, although relentlessly amplified, works differently.

Around thirty seconds into the recording, we start to hear two speakers go out of phase, just a few milliseconds off from each other. The slight delay makes the voices (these are the talk show hosts again) sound warbly. Here, we become aware that this isn’t actually a space of unity, but of total atomization. For each area in the temple, there is a separate set of speakers – in accord with the mandate of mass media, each person is addressed in his own world. Although everyone hears the same thing, they never actually hear together, from the same source. In certain moments, such as when the speakers go out of phase, we overhear that others are also hearing, but the possibilities for joining them are limited. The only way to get the message is through your own private equipment. For a sect so focused on personal development, becoming thoroughly rich, and so on, this seems poetic.

Snaking through Bangkok’s concrete tonnage are khlong, natural canals that feed into the Chao Phraya river. Many have been filled in to build roads, but there are still plenty within the city boundaries. They’re crucial for understanding Bangkok’s massive and sometimes inequitable 20th century spatial transformations.

Khlong Saen Saep, pictured above and below, is used mainly by commuters; longtail boats packed with people on their way to or from work pass by every couple minutes. The city operates the main line, although there are also private charters available. Khlong Saen Saep is the only canal commuter line in the city with 24-hour service. The only statistic I know of has 90,000 people a day passing through Saen Saep alone.

Other bodies of water, as well as the Chao Phraya river itself, serve many other vital purposes for Bangkokians (especially poorer ones), including washing clothes, bathing, and swimming.

The picture above gives some sense of the state of the khlong, as well as of the areas nearby. Long neglected by the city, Bangkok’s water canals have become icons of filth. Houses are not maintained, motor boats leak chemicals into the water, and piles of garbage accumulate on the banks. Once khlong became old-fashioned in the mid-20th century, once they stopped serving the everyday needs of the city’s elite and middle-class (other than as roads), what incentive was there to keep them clean? Without alternatives for water access, poorer residents thus became victims of a change in development that privileged transportation above all other potential uses of space.

This is what the khlong sound like:

The piece begins with water lapping at the rocks under the bridge, intensified as a boat pulls up. The sounds of rumbling and revving throughout are cars and trucks driving directly above. These cause very low echoes off of the concrete cove under the foot of the bridge, where someone had set up a prayer shrine. As the water reaches the rocks, and returns to the main stream, more splashes and flows are audible. The recording ends with a woman, clearly in a hurry, hopping off the boat and running in sandals along the path toward the street.

This picture shows the cove (the path and shrine are to the left of the rocks). The two seated figures are ticket sellers for the boat line. Riders board at the bottom of the steps to the right.

Saep Saen Khlong, under Witthayu Road. Image by author.

Ross King and Cuttaleeya Noparatnaraporn published an article in 2007 about Khlong as symbolic of a bygone Bangkok – one where interactions between neighbors were fluid, rather than segmented and atomized as they are today under capitalism. Through the canals as they used to be used, King and Cuttaleeya argue, people were joined together by the material they shared in a single channel. This is no longer the case. From the abstract to their paper: “The modernization of Thailand has seen an aquatic everyday world replaced by a terrestrial one, and a loose occupancy of land supplanted by Western notions of rigid ownership and title deeds. While the aquatic past passes into memory (to pose some threat, however, to the interests of Thai elites), a Thai episteme based in images and surfaces transforms that memory to less threatening nostalgia and ritual; and the previous fluidity of space likewise “survives” in surfaces.” For those who have read some sound studies work, you’ll recognize similar tropes of anti-modernity/anti-visualism/anti-segmentation used in the author’s discussion of water as we so often find with sound.

The notion of a lost fluidity might on a certain level be a tad nostalgic and rose-colored (might – I’m honestly not sure), but it’s certainly apt to mention given modern-day anxieties about Thais’ inability to unite under a single national banner. What sources of atomization might be at the root of these divisions? Certainly, the way we regard and utilize space is one such source.

Max Neuhaus: Times Square, Time Piece Beacon
Lynne Cooke, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schröder, editors
Dia Art Foundation, 2009
140 pps., $35 ($21.75 on Abe Books)

As an art critic, it must be an awkward assignment to memorialize the work of an artist who rejected memorials. Sound installation pioneer Max Neuhaus, who died in 2009, productively confronted the limits of artistic form throughout his long career, but at no moment was this challenge more powerful than in death. A recent book by the Dia Art Foundation, one of Neuhaus’s key patrons, engages just this paradox.

Neuhaus was among the first modern composers (if that title even applies) to work with sound in a deliberately non-musical idiom. Breaking from predecessors and contemporaries in the field of sonic art, Neuhaus was never interested in how to bring concrete sound into composition, let alone the concert hall. To whatever extent possible, his work was publicly situated – on streets or in subway stations, for example. His authorial presence was supposed to be as invisible as his art. The idea was to engage audiences without ever signaling to them that they’d entered an artistic space. Working in the mid- to late-20th century, Neuhaus shared a number of insights and goals with contemporary Modernists in the visual arts, but his use of sound as a primary material gave his work a distinct status.

Neuhaus’s most famous piece is Times Square, an ambient drone that issues from beneath a grate on 7th Avenue between 45th and 46th streets in Manhattan:

Times Square is unmarked, and essentially unrecognizable as art. Passersby notice it all the time, and may even stop to listen, but generally in the assumption that the sound, however unusual, has something to do with the subway or Con Ed. In this respect, it can induce a kind of self-discovery for those who come upon it. Neuhaus hoped that such moments would be a gateway to more attuned listening down the line.

This piece, like much of Neuhaus’s output, was initially temporary. The Dia Art Foundation, however, has funded its continued installment since 2002. The quasi-permanence of Times Square, its objecthood, stands in ironic contrast to its intention – to project an artistic intervention without, at least as far as the listener realizes, marking itself off from the rest of the world.

The individual contributors to Max Neuhaus: Times Square, Time Piece Beacon (namely: Lynne Cooke, Alex Potts, Branden Joseph, Peter Pakesch and Ulrich Loock, Liz Kotz, and Christopher Cox) seem not to have read each others’ essays – their discussions are at times redundant – but this is actually a good thing. Perspectives shoot off like branches, parallel in some places, jutting sharply in others. The same quotes and chestnuts about Neuhaus are deployed repeatedly, but each interpretive treatment has its own gloss.

The question most consistently addressed in the catalogue is that of the migration from time to space. Neuhaus, by rejecting music, was also rejecting the proscribed duration of artwork. Rather than asking an audience to sit still and listen for a particular span of time, he wanted to alter the mood or character of public environments – of spaces. Alex Potts quotes Neuhaus: “Traditionally composers have located the elements of a composition in time. One idea which I am interested in is locating them, instead, in space, and letting the listener place them in his own time.”

This concept seems to have been initiated as a means of transformation, in which sound would decorate an already-installed architecture and make it feel different, to one where sound was itself treated as an autonomous spatial reality. This distinction is critical, recognizing as it does that sound is a material form rather than an ethereal engima. Sound, like any other space (including conventional architecture), requires both labor and maintenance.

Nevertheless, there was a register to Neuhaus’s politics that rejected the temporal structures of a capitalist society, and thereby its logic as well. So, even though his sound installations drew attention to the potent reality of sound, they also promoted a form of community predicated on phenomenological non-differentiation. Sound thus was used as a form of bodily envelopment that could envelop everyone at once. The question here, as Potts writes, was “How [ ] to make public art for a society that is intensely individualistic and whose public spaces, while shared by and open to a multitude of people, atomize the perceptual and mental world of those passing through it?” In other words, Neuhaus hoped people would hear his work as part of a massive flow of time rather than as a single, discrete signal. The last essay in the catalog, Christopher Cox’s Installing Duration, situates Neuhaus’s philosophy within broader mid-century debates about the nature of time – though politically radical in some sense, he was mostly in the mainstream among artists.

On a practical level, Neuhaus’s ethos of how to manage urban space was laid out most clearly in an Op-Ed published in the New York Times in 1974. In brief, aesthetics, joy, and discovery should trump the rationalization of space. The piece is reprinted in its entirety here:

“BANG, BOOooom; ThumP, EEEK, tinkle” by Max Neuhaus

The popular concept of ‘noise pollution’ is a dangerously misleading one. In reality, dangers to hearing do exist in prolonged, excessively loud sound levels. However, the residue of the idea that has ended up in the mind of the public because of misleading publicity is that sound in general is harmful to people.

A brief examination of a pamphlet Noise Makes You Sick published by the Department of Air Resources of the city’s Environmental Protection Agency is typical of the literature and clearly illustrates the problem.

The first sentence, ‘Sound is instantly transmitted from your ears to your brain and then to your nerves, glands and organs’, is of course literally true. Actually the reaction doesn’t normally go as far as the glands and internal organs.

However, we are left with the impression that we have absolutely no defense against unwanted sound. This is untrue. The body has automatic reflex barriers, both physical and psychological, to deal with sounds it does not wish to react to.

The pamphlet goes on, ‘Any loud or unexpected sounds put your body on alert’. This is true with a newborn child or in primitive societies, both of which need this reaction to survive. But certainly the modern urban dweller is not put into a state of fright (except of course when there is actual danger) very often by the sounds around him.

A human being conditions himself fairly quickly to what is ‘loud or unexpected’ in his particular environment.

Once having ‘established’ the impression that we are constantly in a state of ‘fright’, though, the brochure goes on to extrapolate in august pseudo-medical terms: ‘Adrenalin, an energy-producing hormone, is released into your blood stream. Your heart beats faster, your muscles tense, and your blood pressure rises. Sudden spasms occur in your stomach and intestines’. This finally gives the impression that every honking horn brings us a little bit closer to death.

The law defines noise as ‘any unwanted sound’. Surely several hundred years of musical history can be of value. At the very least they can show us that our response to sound is subjective, that no sound is intrinsically bad. How we hear it depends a great deal on how we have been conditioned to hear it.

Through extreme exaggeration of the effects of sound on the human mind and body, this propaganda has so frightened people that it has created ‘noise’ in many places where there was none before and in effect robbed us of the ability to listen to our environment.

Admittedly it may be necessary to oversimplify an idea to bring enough public pressure to bear on the producers of ear-damaging sounds in our environment to stop this victimization of the public. This degree of misrepresentation is not only unnecessary, but irresponsible and ultimately negative.

This present concept of noise pollution condemns all sounds by leaving, in the public mind, the impression that sound itself is physiologically and psychologically harmful.

It is this exaggerated and oversimplified concept that is doing most of the damage, not sound, damage that can and should be rectified by curtailing misleading propaganda and showing people other ways to listen to their surroundings.

Obviously we need to be able to rest from sound just as we do from visual stimulation; we need aural as well as visual privacy. But silencing our public environment is the acoustic equivalent of painting it black. Certainly just as our eyes are for seeing, our ears are for hearing.

Max Neuhaus is a composer

New York Times Op-Ed by Max Neuhaus, December 6, 1974

Undoubtedly, the most difficult claim here is that anti-noise legislation “has created ‘noise’ in many places where there was none before,” that the problem of noise is a consequence of a particular political reality that refuses listening as an art form. Neuhaus, tellingly, retreats from pure relativism, but remains adamant: we benefit by being receptive, and suffer by being too defensive.

Such a celebration of listening, because it locates artistic agency not in singular geniuses but in everyone, leads logically to the kind of anti-elitist stance that Neuhaus ultimately took. Thus, despite his explicit rejection of capitalism, Neuhaus was actually a proponent of installations and even mass-market gadgets that could bring avant-garde sonic experiences to the common man. Branden Joseph’s essay, An Implication of an Implication, discusses a couple of these fascinating ideas. One was a “silent alarm clock” that slowly, almost imperceptibly, increased in volume; the after-image caused by the cessation of sound would be the effect that woke its user, rather than the typical series of jarring beeps.

Another, called “Max-Feed,” was a machine that users could place next to their stereos, causing a wall of feedback noise.

These devices, though fascinating, were arguably the weakest ideas of Neuhaus’s career. They were attempts to objectify and lend semi-permanence to sound installation. On the contrary, the strength of Times Square is precisely its resistance to objecthood. That piece appeals to listeners without revealing itself as emanating from anywhere – and indeed, maybe it doesn’t. The fact that this catalog doesn’t even attempt to contain the artwork that is its main focus is really the highest compliment to an artist who, at his best and for all the right reasons, didn’t want to be pinned down.

เดือนหน้าผมจะไปกรุงเทพฯเพื่อศึกษาวิจัยเกี่ยวกับเพลงและเสียง

แอโรบิคทางใต้สะพานลอย

สนใจในวิธีการที่เพลงและสถาปัตยกรรมที่พัฒนาร่วมกัน ยังสนใจว่าเสียงมีผลต่อผู้คนในเมือง

ถ้าคุณพูดภาษาไทยหรือถ้าคุณอาศัยอยู่ในกรุงเทพฯและสนใจในเสียงโปรดส่งผมอีเมล(datageneral@gmail.com)นะครับ เวลาผมอยู่ในกรุงเทพฯผมต้องการจะพบเพื่อนใหม่และเพื่อนร่วมงาน

เช่น
-คุณมีปัญหากับเสียงในกรุงเทพฯไหม?
-คุณมีนักดนตรีหรือไม่?
-คุณอาศัยอยู่ในเมืองนานและคุณอย่าลืมว่ามันใช้เสียง?
-คุณสนใจว่าเสียงถนนมีผลต่อชีวิตประจำวัน?

ขอบคุณครับ

There are, today, somewhere on the order of 1.67 billion internet users in the world. Staggeringly, about 1.65 billion of these are new since the mid-90s. Today nearly a quarter of the world’s population has a degree of internet access. Just over a decade ago, that figure was a fraction of a percent.

A certain debate raged in the fraction-of-a-percent years, especially among people who predicted (or at least fantasized about) the coming expansion. A vast, valuable-looking tract spread across the horizon. Silicon-era von Bismarcks sitting in chat room Berlin Conferences began to wonder and clamor about who should control it and how. On one side, those of a more libertarian bent argued that “cyberspace” was fundamentally ungovernable, owing to its transnational infrastructure, and that in any case regulation would be overreaching, ineffective, and potentially a colossal buzzkill. On the other, proponents of internet governance countered that traditional regulations could and must be adapted to new contexts. If libel, theft, harassment, fraud, and other crimes were possible online – and they all were, demonstrably – then states were obliged to protect users thus exposed, and to prosecute the responsible parties.

The problem at the root of this debate was about spatiality, and the debate itself was often conducted in the language of territorial expansion and settlement. The libertarians believed that “real” and “virtual” space were distinct realms, structurally foreign to one another, and that the virtual was properly anarchic. John Perry Barlow, in a statement that typified this position, wrote in 1991 that “the old concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context, based as they are on physical manifestation, do not apply succinctly in a world where there can be none.” For Barlow, cyberspace was a world apart, at most a neighbor to the material universe of the real. But “coming into the country” (the title of one of his essays) inevitably meant making choices about how to live on the wild digital frontier. Would our new-world settlements facilitate personal privacy or corporate control? Barlow offered the analogical figures of frontier anarchists and corporate fur traders, respectively, to represent the advocates of these outcomes, and pushed hard for the greater legitimacy of the first. (An ironic position, as it happens – who benefits from decreased regulation more than corporations?)

Regulation proponents responded that the so-called “virtual” world was actually just a new aspect of a current reality, an overlay of communications that allowed faster and more flexible exchanges, but that did not by any means unsettle jurisdiction or legal doctrine, even if it might necessitate certain adjustments. Jack Goldsmith wrote, in 1998, that “the skeptics are in the grip of a nineteenth century territorialist conception of how ‘real space’ is regulated and how ‘real-space’ conflicts of law are resolved. This conception was repudiated in the middle of this century.” Goldsmith suggested that the activation of hardware or software amounted to real-world checkpoints where users automatically became subject to the legal restrictions of specific territories. With the stakes of digital communication rising by the nanosecond, accountability at the level of existing sovereign entities was not only practical but imperative.

In technological time, that was then. But one-and-a-half billion users later, the debate hasn’t budged much. On October 5th, 2009, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission published new guidelines for full disclosure of paid endorsements, with particular regard to bloggers. The guidelines are not themselves laws, but are an interpretation of the 1980 Federal Trade Commission Act in terms of how that act applies to new media. With the transposition of old regulations to contemporary modes of communication, the FTC is doing precisely what Jack Goldsmith argued for in the late 1990s; that is, adapting existing structures of accountability to modern environments.

And there certainly seem to be good reasons for doing so. PayPerPost, a deliberately opaque provider of sponsored online advertising, has become a multi-billion dollar operation within three years, and has inspired many clones. The company has also, predictably, recently developed a “Sponsored Tweets” concept. It is an ingenious system that matches posters with advertisers, allowing the former to shill for the latter in mutually profitable ways. PayPerPost’s transparency requirements (naturally, in the absence of any legal impetus otherwise) have been described as laughably weak.

Meanwhile, popular blogs and celebrity Twitter accounts might have millions of eyes on them in a day. The temptation for advertisers to arrange to transform these platforms into paid advertorials, all the more valuable because there is no mandate of transparency, is bound to be a powerful one. Consumers presumably lose in this scenario, having no way to know whether Claritin-D is a miracle cure for Miley’s allergies, or whether Schering-Plough is in fact writing her a check. Common sense suggests that the FTC, with limited money and personnel (just 1200 employees, in a nation with uncountable millions of blogs, not to mention social networking accounts) would concern itself precisely with high-profile, high-yield cases like this.

The outcry against the guidelines from bloggers, however, has echoed John Perry Barlow’s earlier objections with surprising fidelity. First, some bloggers assert, the internet is simply not a medium like television or radio. It is empty space, like air, and the communications that take place within it should be sacrosanct like any other constitutionally-protected form of individual free speech. As Jeff Jarvis puts it:

the FTC assumes – as media people do – that the internet is a medium. It’s not. It’s a place where people talk … for the FTC to go after bloggers and social media – as they explicitly do – is the same as sending a government goon into Denny’s to listen to the conversations in the corner booth and demand that you disclose that your Uncle Vinnie owns the pizzeria whose product you just endorsed.

Second, and relatedly, many bloggers see the guidelines as a tremendous overreach that puts ordinary citizens who discuss any product online – including in a Twitter post or an Amazon review – at risk of committing unwitting criminal action. About this, they point to the clause in the FTC’s interpretation which states that “bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.” Hypothetically, if a publisher sent a free copy of a book to be reviewed by a website, the site would have to include a disclaimer about the freebie along with its post. In the view of the dissenters, this gives the government the right to intrude unfairly on private affairs.

Third, many bloggers feel that the guidelines are ham-handedly ignorant about the specificities of blogging and social media, and that as a consequence any online communication may be compromised. Jack Schafer at Slate shudders that “the vagueness of [the] guidelines doth make suspects of you all.” The vagueness problem has also been cited as a reason why the guidelines will inevitably fail – the internet simply cannot be regulated by dead-tree-pushing bureaucrats. Several commentators have called the FTC’s actions a “power grab,” and others have even called for the commission’s outright abolishment.

—

A new sound studies book (of all things) makes a convincing case against the ontological assertions made by the anti-regulatory bloggers. Frances Dyson’s Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture is not about the legal particulars of online endorsements, but it is very much about our flawed and at times troubling perceptions of new media. Her book also provides a sober historical and philosophical perspective that fills in some of the most glaring gaps in debates about the internet as a place.

The thesis of Sounding New Media is, in brief, that our most ingrained assumptions about digital environments closely parallel similarly ingrained assumptions about sound. “The ‘new’ of new media,” she writes, “depends on redefining embodiment, space, reality, and experience in ways remarkably similar to notions of immersion and transcendence associated with audiophony.” ^[1]
Considering some tried-and-true deep sonic thinkers (R. Murray Schafer, John Cage, Edgar Varèse, Antonin Artaud, Pierre Schaeffer) and some fresher ones as well (Char Davies, Catherine Richards), Dyson identifies and critiques some predominant metaphysical tropes about sound. ^[2] These tropes, she argues, are often marked by romantic fantasies about the disappearance of mediation in environments so immersive, so full of feeling, that people look to them for psychic restoration.

We have all chased such a metaphysics or, at the very least, known others who have. Dyson briefly alludes, for example, to 90s rave culture, where the combination of sound loud enough to be felt on the skin, bodily co-presence, and chemical highs offered a wellspring of unity and pleasure among groups of people, as well as in one’s own consciousness. Sound was absolutely crucial here, since it seemed both inexhaustible and accessible to everyone at once. In an alienating modern world, sound promised to heal rifts both cultural and technological by bringing everyone together in a single sensual field.

Sound is conscripted in the production of this togetherness, according to Dyson, because in a society where the truest realities are the most empirically approachable (that is, visible), sound becomes an enigma, a thing which is not quite a thing because it cannot be grasped or observed. This effect is only exaggerated when we wear headphones, which encourages us to imagine music reaching our ears with nothing in between. In such a rationalist context, it is easy to miss the fact that sound is indeed and entirely real – that it is by nature a physical force with a material basis, and that it always travels through mediating channels. But being invisible, it draws anti-modern romantics like a spiderweb.

Fantasies about new media and virtual environments function in much the same way, snaring a specially credulous breed of romantics called technophiles. When our field of vision is encompassed by a screen, we tend to assume that we have entered whatever picture we might be observing. This assumption is motivated by an ontology so powerful as to be undisturbed by the utter lack of tactility, smell, taste, and dimensionality which, even with a quarter of the world online, remain stubbornly absolute. Focused in this way on seeing as being-in, we quickly jump to the conclusion that the internet must be a space. Furthermore, we imagine that once we enter that space, whatever conveyance brought us can be conveniently left behind, like a parked car. Our experiences once inside are thence regarded as untouched by technology. Recall Jarvis’ claim: “the FTC assumes – as media people do – that the internet is a medium. It’s not. It’s a place where people talk.” Logic like this leads us to believe, not only rhetorically but all too often really, that technological advances will progressively allow richer and richer modes of being “inside” digital space. The culmination of these advances, were they not imaginary, would be a total move away from the physical realm of bodies and into one of pure, immaterial communication.

But believing this depends on an extreme form of tunnel vision. The actual net effect of our partial blindness – far from partitioning the universe into virtual and real spaces – is the inauguration of a single material world, our whole world, the same one as before, where all entities can be regarded as digital, reducible to code like the things we see on screens. We collectively come to understand our bodies as mechanical, our histories as unfolding scripts, and even our houses as bug’s nests of binary code:

Dyson is most explicit about this in the chapter titled “Embodying Technology,” asserting tersely that “computing …. renders the body a thing to be computed.” ^[3] This portion of the book argues against, or at the very least complicates, some of the most frequently-cited literature on posthumanity, including the work of Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway.

Sounding New Media is in fact worthwhile for a number of reasons other than those discussed here. It is an original and astute analysis of perception, sense, and knowledge, and will be of interest to a variety of readers in different disciplines. But reading it when I did, it happened to resonate most powerfully as a well-crafted theorization of the source of some persistent prejudices about media. These prejudices, far from being obscure matters of ontological debate, have had a clear impact on the architecture of digital interfaces, which are very much a part of our world.

…

Footnotes