Inventing Electracy

LANDON KAFKA

When I think of electracy, I am immediately reminded of McLuhan and his statement "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us..." This statement speaks to me in a multitude of ways, mostly regarding how we spend money to create new and greater war machines but also this statement can be considered when we discuss the electrate world we now live in. The internet for instance (which started as a project to allow for better communication between war apparati) did for visual culture what the printing press did for literate culture. If we put into perspective the amount of time it took for visual culture to be introduced mainstream, say 1940's, to the invention of the internet and compare it to how long writing was around before the printing press, we can see that this new electrate culture has not only taken over the collective consciouness of society but is also rapidly evolving.

I agree with Ulmer, in the sense that electracy is the next evolutionary step in data communication, even literacy would agree with this (when was the last time you looked through a card catolog to find a book at the library.) Massive amount of information from print-based culture are being made available each day and we may not have a "black-box" with access to all of this but many people do have something, assuming they have the right skills to access it, something that is as great as the Library at Alexandria sitting on their desks, traveling with them in their bag and floating in 3G style all over the world (unless you use AT&T, zing). It would be imprudent to say the electrate world is not taking over the literate world because the electrate world creates more access to the literate world and allows for more communication and interpretion between cultures than ever before in recorded history. The electrate world is the literate world, just better, and barring a giant solar flare or war waged with electromagnetic pulse bombs, the internet, visual and electrate culture will continue to evolve and expand.

I think one of the main upsides to electrate culture is the lack of impediment to access by institutional forces. Granted, not every community has access to the same things, some places still lack computers and the internet structure that allows for the electrate community to exist, but with that said, electrate communities are less controlled (especially now in its infancy) than print-based society was when it evolved. There are indeed governments and institutions that wish to limit the information available online but this for the most part is very difficult to do and generations of people growing up in electrate culture are finding new ways to send and receive information each day. In a print-bsed society it takes time and money to get something published, even more to promote it but in the electrate universe we are all publishers, we all have stories and there is no apparatus like the church or government saying that one story is more important than another. Electracy blurs the lines between what we are told is important and what we as individuals feel is important, meaning that we are able to read, understand and interpret any information we choose to, not just what we are told to read through a school program or by the mainstream media. These ideas are best displayed by the rise of "news" bloggers, which came under heat from mainstream media as "not journalists" but most in the electrate culture saw through this attack because essentially, the bloggers have access to the same information that appears in the mainstream news. Another thing that showed the power of an electrate community was Iranians use of Twitter during their protests of elections. Iran limited their communities ability to access things on the internet like youtube to get information out but students and the people of Iran still had access to Twitter (and no doubt would have found some other form of electrate communition if Twitter did not work), they used this access to Twitter to provide news and information from inside Iran, something that even major news networks could not get. This ended with major news networks reading, showing and interpreting news from Iran through Twitter accounts, taking power and control away from the institution of government and media and giving it back to the people, primary sources, regarding the events taking place. This is the power of the electrate community, the power of the user.

There are still problems with this electrate community however, institutions will try to gain control over time to limit access and provide more structured environments for communition and many "have-not" groups continue to be left out of this global information revolution, but the beauty of the electrate culture is that these institutions would have no idea whats going on unless the users help them. The electrate universe exists not because one group of people created it or because on group of people can turn it on or off, modify and change it, it exists because all those with access can do this. Every person has the power to modify it, to mold it in the way they see fit without much interference with outside forces. This ability to create gives new hope to imagination and change, it allows access to all features of the senses (maybe besides smell, smelltube on the way though) and in this way the electrate universe has made the individual powerful and the collective a rival force to institutions.