across the universe

scott: Here's a different train of thought: is writing a discarnate experience?
bob: On the internet.
scott: But putting words on a piece of paper--are you not out of your body?
bob: No, discarnate is simultaneity, you're communicating immediately with everybody else, and you don't do that with writing. When you're on the telephone, or on TV or radio, you've got millions of people sharing that electric space, so, no, all technologies up to the telegraph are not discarnate. The telegraph is the beginning of discarnate writing. McLuhan defines the telegraph as the electrification of writing, or the simultaneity of writing, and e-mail is the satellite version of the telegraph. That's why my chart begins with the telegraph.
scott: But even the book that's out there, with 1,000s of readers all reading it, that's not discarnate?
bob: No...
scott: Because it's not simultaneous.
bob: And it's not LIVE. See electric technology is alive, it's organic. All mechanical technologies, like the book, which is the mechanization of the handicraft of the wine press--in technologically historical terms--they are not talking to you. Anything that doesn't talk to you, you can't hear, is mechanical. But a radio you can hear, television you can hear, computers you can hear now. When computers came in in the '70s and '80s, they were visual, you typed on them, they actually brought back the Gutenberg values temporarily. And that may be why the '70s created the yuppie: it retrieved that visual, 19th century bias temporarily. But then once you get into virtual reality or CD-ROM, there's a voice speaking to you. And speech is the first human technology, it's the most intimate, most all-encompassing medium. When we get into the world where objects aren't speaking to you, that's the mechanical phase. In our time, it's from the book up to...just before the movie, I guess. The book and the newspaper, and machines--a lump of steel--doesn't talk to you.