I’ve been reading quite a lot of McLuhan for my dissertation. I’m specifically focusing on the idea that technology can be an extension of our central nervous system outside of the body.
I’ve also been reading a little bit about Rhizome theory which seems very interesting but everytime I think I have got to a point in my critical thinking/argument in the dissertation to introduce the concept and say how it is relevant I find that it doesn’t quite fit. I do think it has potential to become a key concept in pedagogy when educational institutions realise that for every new generation of students who have grown up with the internet and other digital technologies the current classroom environment and teaching methods get less and less practical/efficient.
Anyay, I’m currently reading my way through a blog post written by William Gibson (author of Neuromancer) about cyborgs and one sentence struck me (just to contextualise, he was saying how change was happening in the 50s and before because of television) about what is enabled people to do. They are “viewing things at a distance, viewing things that had happened in the past, watching dead men talk and hearing their words”.
Dead.
Hearing their words.
Then a thought struck me. In extending our central nervous systems across such vast amount of media are we redefining the notion of “being dead”? Did the Gutenberg Press also impact on this idea, for in an oral society a persons ideas can only live on in the idea (thought/memory) of another person, in a literate age a person’s actual thought could be communicated without being recycled by another persons thought, even in death.
If our Facebook profiles, Twitters, Youtubes, Delicious’, blogs all survive as extensions of ourselves after our death then does this mean they are independent (or mostly independent, they’re not exactly autonomous or self-generating) of other parts of the CNS? It could be argued this spread of our CNS is non-hierarchical; instead horizontal, like a rhizome.
Even before the explosion of the internet age we could leave behind moments in time as photographs, anything we might have written down, us on video, etc etc. Text messages. Answerphone. Library record, etc etc.
By the time we die, have we extended so much of ourselves into other media that death is no longer finality?
And where could the future go? I wonder how unpredictable we really are. In death could the surviving parts of our nervous system one day be analysed for behavioural patterns so that our behaviour could be predicted accurately in spite of our death?
I remember someone mentioning to me that the brain is essentially a collection of millions and millions of 1s ands 0s that dictate our action and thought - way beyond the current processing power of today’s computer, but if Moore’s Law works forever then its only a matter of time until a computer as capable as the human brain is invented. As far as I can gather, consciousness is a whole different matter and something much, much complicated (and until a machine can ponder that autonomously, we need not worry 
)
This is all pretty much late night ramblings so if anyone actually reads this and has some input, I’d love to hear it.
Well science fiction.
