A Viral Game Change?

Marshall McLuhan, 1965 © CBC Still Photo Collection

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WATCH THE LECTURE Marshall Mcluhan Full lecture: The medium is the message (1977)

How It All Started

I wrote this article while sheltering in place at my home in Luxembourg this past April. Since the end of 2019, the whole world has been facing a health crisis, a pandemic of a new deadly virus.

During this period, I have realised that I am living in a connected world, in constant interaction with other people in the virtual world, while being isolated in the real world. In this context, I felt that we no longer can approach the idea of a virus in a traditional way* (please see the note at the end of this article). I wish to define the term from a more radical perspective, with the « virus » as the spirit of our time, its « Zeitgeist ».

This article will help the reader better understand how the world has evolved into a connected bubble, spreading ideas and western life models through media and the internet. Travelling is one of the habits of wealthy societies, and it has historically exacerbated the rapid spread of pandemics, to the point where this time around countries and regions closed their respective borders in the hopes of containing the virus. This article concludes by exploring how the world may develop in the future, in the near and long term. I wish to thank a good friend who wishes to remain anonymous for her help in writing on this subject.

A New Religion or “The medium is the message”

Our understanding of the word “virus” has been evolving since the internet became ubiquitous in the late 1990s. According to Collins Dictionary, “Going viral” describes the phenomenon of a “video, image, or story [that] spreads quickly and widely on the Internet through social media and e-mail.” The most “viral” video to date has been “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi ft. Daddy Yankee, which has racked up nearly 7 Billion views on YouTube.

In his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Canadian media theorist Marshal McLuhan explains his most-often-cited phrase: “the medium is the message.” Succinctly, with this idea McLuhan claims that different media, from books to radio and television, modify the effect of the message they convey.

The word “message” refers to the idea of modern media (primarily television in McLuhan’s time) becoming an extension of the human senses. Information from a book, McLuhan would say, is more linear and oriented towards a precise idea and type of reader. Television on the other hand reaches more auditors in a so-called “tribal way;” it’s a much more sensorial method of communication, one that conditions the viewer to adopt a state of mind, from which it is difficult to take a step back.

McLuhan anticipated and described the phenomenon of shrinking cultures with the expansion of technology as the “global village” we are living in today. The key idea is society’s shift towards immersion in electronic media, adapting to multiple sources of information that arrive simultaneously and becoming more concerned to integrate a group identity.

The Global Village in Isolation

Since the end of the 20th century, globalized markets have flourished in large part due to the convergence of ideas and demand created by the media. Prior to globalization, people wanted more and more of the same. Technology pushed forward the virtual commercial platforms as an alternative to local vendors. Everything seems at our disposal to enable us to avoid direct contact with each other.

The global community, however, encountered a new challenge in December of last year when China identified the spread of a novel human virus. By January, China had 11 million people in quarantine. As people continued to travel, the virus spread quickly to other continents. Soon Europe, Australia, America, and Africa recorded infections. Entire countries

asked their citizens to stay home, thus transforming the world into a “global hospital” of sorts. It has been a unique moment in the history of humanity when people from different continents experienced the same medical threats and actions. Habits, usage of space and technology had to evolve in real time. Virtually every corner of the globe has been affected by this situation, though some outlier countries without lockdown policies, like Sweden, attempted to take on the virus while preserving their ideal of freedom. Individuals, these less strict policies indicated, are responsible enough to make decisions for themselves. Conversely, some countries embraced new forms of “medical control” via mobile phone applications for contact tracing, which monitor when users come into contact with an infected person. In an effort to stem the spread, freedom of movement has been severely curtailed.

This sanitary confrontation has created a luxurious (for a few) and soft version of the home as a hospital, and it has increased the self-sufficiency of the individual in quarantine at home. Today the “Zeitgeist,” and the machineries, lobbies, and political interests that shape it, suggests to us that we can heal ourselves, feeling safe alone and staying connected via the medium of the internet - alone but never lonely?

Home Alone

In the 1990s, the internet came into our homes, and today, we create our home anywhere in the world. Still, the choice of the phrase “going viral” expresses the fas- cination and the careful respect that we as humans feel towards the power of the ex- 08 panding internet, as it becomes hyper-intelligent using algorithms that learn by doing.

Through this process of self-learning, technology feeds on our data: our hopes, fears, and wishes not to lose touch in a world of transcendental homelessness.

We may notice that it is the medium of the internet, and our high tech society, that allows the home to change its traditional functions. Home is the place where a family, individual, or collection of individuals find shelter and live separate from the rest of society. Our homes are becoming healing, protective places, as well as our places of work. By working from home, using computers and internet applications, we evolve and adapt our behaviour and needs. We may thus remain in contact with our outside social circles and transpose all the physical world gestures in a parallel virtual world. We have conferences, have dinner with friends, play with them online, get the latest news, and remain connected to the world. It all seems so natural!

During this particular period, the world is reduced to a curious uniformity, from listening to only one type of information concerning the virus to being reduced to the same daily gestures. We are all working from home with the same tools, the same me-

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com dium, and we share similar content. We get goods and food delivered by the amazing internet delivery giants. Suddenly, when we dive in the same media and the same exter- nal environment, we all start to act, or more precise re-act, in a very similar way. Our ac- tions become similar and as that of a world group. Our lives and economy become res- haped around the concept of the new viral collective behaviour.

But how about the idea of collectivity itself? How about the city landscape? What happens when people must avoid direct contact with other persons and practice social distancing? The collective spirit of the virtual world contrasts somehow with real-world behaviour. Are common spaces being abandoned for medical reasons, or will they just be used differently in the fu- ture? Will new signs appear, like lines drawn on the ground, indicating safe distances, benches for one for example, objects of our separation?

A Viral Game Change?

Do we want to return to the world as it was before the pandemic? Our connectivity and technology drove us to a new mode of existence. We experience a new way to so- cialize, more dependent on technology and virtual connections, where medical safety imposes choices that limit individual liberty and value solitude and new ways of experi- encing space and the community.

In a globalized world, the internet cre-

ated the possibility of uniting globally farflung family members with a dinner Skype call. The pandemic has shifted the percep- tion of the boundaries between us as indi- viduals and our physical and virtual neigh- bours once more. Today, the World Wide Web does much more than allow us to keep in contact with our loved ones living far away, that we can’t be with because of physical distance. The patterns we develop during the pandemic might lead some to feel that human interaction with the peo- ple that live or work close with us can be replaced and shifted to the digital level on longer terms.

The virus of the medium that aggres- sively developed during the pandemic has masqueraded as a “cure” for loneliness. It seems we are heading towards a viral game change in terms of what we are as a species and what we represent as a culture. Where do we go from here?

* Note of the author

About Viruses and Hosts

Encyclopedia Britannica defines a virus as „infectious agent of small size and simple composition that can multiply only in living cells of animals, plants, or bacteria.“ The name is from a Latin word for “slimy liquid” or “poison.” Viruses are „packets of DNA in a protein shell that can't reproduce on their own and that take over DNA and protein making machinery of a host in order to survive.“ This kind of lifestyle they have cultivated over 300 Million Years so - speaking in relation to the enormous time-spans of the world’s evolution - approximately since the time that the Tiktaalik, an intermediate creature between fish and for-legged land animal, first crawled on shore. Viruses existed unseen, invisible to the human eye until the 20th century when the German physician and microbiologist Heinrich Koch identified the specific causative agents of tuberculosis, cholera, and anthrax under the magnifying lens of the microscope.

Compared to actual viruses, the species of humankind has inhabited planet Earth for less than 0.01% of its existence and still we managed over these short years to shake the planet to its (literal) core: Various dates have been proposed for defining the Anthropocene, the geological epoch dating from the beginning of significant human impact on

Earth's geology and ecosystems. If we would suggest a time range of 12,000–15,000 years ago, since the Agricultural revolution, since humans settled 08 in order to cultivate crops and raise animals for milk and meat production, the time of humans on Earth only represents a fractal of all times and the very crust of earth age.

The industrial revolution created the need for powerful energy carriers, and after wood prices had skyrocketed, humans started to dig and hollow out the Earth in search for coal. Later on, the blood of the Earth took over and introduced very powerful international bounds and compromises, in short: dependencies that in the name of national interests had to stop. Humankind pushed the development of future and independent energy sources and welcomed the discovery, understanding, and splitting of the atoms that rang into the nuclear age. Today humans create their energy by the means of splitting the world’s smallest module / entity. The heritage bearing from this process is buried deep down in the earth body waiting for an external hiding ground to protect future human generations from their creation.

The Unseen and the Search for Answers

- Haus-Rucker-Co, Günter Zamp Kelp, Laurids Ortner, Manfred Ort ner, Klaus Pinter, Palmtree Island (Oasis) Project, New York, New York,Perspective, 1971 © 2020 Haus-Rucker-Co

Filmstills out of "The Truman Show", Peter Weir, 1998. © 2020 Paramount Pictures Corporation. Dana Popescu (*1981) grew up in Romania and France. Trained as an artist during her high school years, she graduated with an architect diploma in France after a master degree study in Japan. She has been working in France and Luxembourg, where she currently lives. Her artistic work is a contribution to anticipative design, photography and video, with exhibitions and performances in France, Switzerland, Germany and Luxembourg. She defines herself as a passionate art and architecture explorer.

>> https://danagabrielapopescu.wixsite.com/brili >> www.metamulhouse.com

WATCH TRUMAN SAILING TO WORLDS END Deadly viral pandemics have tested humanity at several periods in history. The “Black Death” in the XIV century was responsible for wiping out 30 to 50% of Europe's population. The Native American population has experienced massive, deadly infections from the plague and other diseases like smallpox, cholera, typhus, and influenza that https://www.youtube. were introduced com/watch?v=Gn5kuD- sometimes indeGzs tentionally - by Europeans conquerors.

Today, the population of the northern hemisphere is, due to the improvement of hygiene and the vaccination system, protected in high percentages against the dangerous viruses we know. That this protection is tennous was exposed once more at the beginning of this year when Covid-19 turned the life we know upside down. It challenged our governments to act in times of uncertainty and insecurity. Most governments reacted with total lockdowns, one stricter than the next - because of how they saw the situation escalating in Asia and in the European south? Because they feared for their reelection chances and decided to go with the general flow of opinion? We can‘t answer these questions today, but the situation as it emerged at the beginning of this year helps us to imagine the terror and pain that our fellow human beings in less privileged corners of society and the world, in countries of development or on the borders of Europe in overcrowded refugee camps, are living in today. Along those lines, it helps to understand previous epochs and the omnipresent existential fear of our ancestors when the source of death was not only unseen but also misunderstood and could only be interpreted as the workings of a higher force. Back then, God was called by all its names for help. If all the praying didn’t help, the miserable were isolated by being locked away from the rest of the society in barricaded houses, chased outside the city walls, or sent to abandoned islands, left to die.

Today, some might come close to a scientific understanding of what holds the world together. This way Research and the Enlighment Movement emancipated the human mind and replaced God and most spiritual leaders. This is without any debate right and true. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the vacuum that the radical abundance of the old world order created has essentially been filled up with one thing: Neoliberal capitalism and all the attributes that follow it. The capitalist ideologies of profit maximization and individualization can hardy be called desirable values. The system supporting this development is the Internet and the energy that powers is provided by us, all its users. The Internet draws from the same omnipresent, existential fear our ancestors faced when the cause of their pandemics was not only unseen but also misunderstood and interpreted as eminating from a higher force, an unsatisfied creator‘s will.