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The medium is (im)material: McLuhan's media ecology and the

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Special Issue 2013/2014 of Mind & Time
ISSN: 2291-5893
The Medium Is (Im)Material: McLuhan’s Media Ecology and the Metaphor of Cyberplace
[30 pages]
Author: Jaigris Hodson

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 The Medium Is (Im)Material: Mcluhan’s
Media Ecology and the Metaphor of Cyberplace

Jaigris Hodson
Ryerson University and York University

Abstract: We often think of Internet use as something immaterial. In other words,

we think that when we go online, we leave our bodies and the physical consequences
of our communication acts behind to become mind-to-mind communicators. How-
ever, despite McLuhan’s (1964) claim that electronic communication is an extension
of the human central nervous system, it is important to remember that online
communication is more than direct brain-to-brain (or soul-to-soul) dialogue (Peters
1999); physicality is always present. Drawing first on McLuhan and then on theorists
following McLuhan including Carey (1989), Castells (1996), Turkle (1995; 2011), and
Haraway (1991), this paper will argue that contextualizing Internet use using the
metaphor of physical place is a better way to theorize online activity. Just as global
cities are “ideoscapes” (Appadurai 1996) with a very physical presence, so the net-
work society is a cyberplace which leaves a material trace. The metaphor of cyber-
places puts technology scholars in a better position to understand both the opport-
unities of Internet use and their tremendous consequences.

Keywords: cyborgs, cyberplaces, ewaste, media ecology, network society, new

media technologies, online communities, post-human(ist), social networks, (commun-
ication) technology/ies; MOOs, MUDs, Second Life, World of Warcraft; A. Appadurai,
E. Castells, D. Haraway, H. M. McLuhan, W. Ong, S. Turkle
2 The Medium Is (Im)Material

1. A Call for Physicality

Since McLuhan’s death in 1980, the Internet, and our day-to-day commun-
ication practices involving it, have undergone dramatic transformations. What
started as a text-only medium has grown to encompass pictures, video, and
now immersive virtual worlds like the ones we see in the popular games
Second Life or World of Warcraft. At the same time, mobile devices have
grown and changed dramatically, from clunky analog mobile phones to the
digital smartphones that access the Internet from anywhere. With this
expansion of technology we are now seeing the beginnings of integrated
real/virtual geographies through technologies like Foursquare, Google Earth,
and Waze. But with this expansion also come very real consequences, and we
are encouraged to investigate and find ways to understand the present
effects of internet use including the commodification of our social lives,
invasions of privacy, and the very material environmental impacts of power
use, illegal mining, rising CO2 emissions and ewaste.
This is precisely why we must move beyond the limitations of conceptual-
izing Internet use as something that occurs separately from our embodied
materiality. McLuhan defined a medium as anything which alters the scale,
pace or pattern of human affairs ‒ in essence a medium is defined by its
creation of a new environment (1964, p. 11). Extending this definition of
medium to the Internet shows that McLuhan’s ideas can be an entry point
towards the productive metaphor of cyberplaces. Making online action
physical in this way allows technology scholars to materialize the consequen-
ces of new media use. Theorists such as N. Katherine Hayles (1999), Manuel
Castells (1996), and Donna Haraway (1991) support this argument. Their work
serves as an important reminder that we cannot separate the mind from the
body, nor the body or the mind from technology.
This paper will develop the metaphor of cyberplace by exploring three
main points. Firstly it will outline important ideas in McLuhan’s media theory,
which it will use to reflect on the commonalities between spaces of flows in
online and offline acoustic space. Secondly, it will explore the ideas of techno-
logically-mediated embodied or cyborg experience on and offline through the
work of theorists following McLuhan. Finally, it will show the benefits of
conflating online and offline cyborg experience and will conclude that, by
using a geographic/spatial metaphor for the way we engage with online tech-
 Jaigris Hodson 3

nologies, we are in a much better position to understand and deal with the
physical consequences of our use of technologies.

2. Theoretical Background
2.1 The medium is the milieu
McLuhan had a very broad definition of media, and famously wrote that an
electric light bulb could be thought of as a medium of communication. What
did he mean by this? The content of any medium, he wrote, is just another
medium (McLuhan 1964, p. 305). McLuhan did not think of media in terms of
whether a medium could transmit a message, because he did not view media
as merely vehicles for the diffusion of information. Rather, he saw media as
creating environments insofar as they organize important aspects of society
around themselves (Marchessault 2005). This is why he used the electric light
bulb as a prime example of a medium reductio. Since a light bulb has no
distinct message in McLuhan’s eyes, he used it as an example of a medium in
its purest form. We can also see in the exemplar of the light bulb his idea of
the ways media create environments through their effects, hence the expres-
sion “media environments”. Without the light bulb, human life followed a
certain rhythm. With the invention and widespread use of the light bulb, that
rhythm changed.
McLuhan’s definition of media is almost maddeningly open, and has been
criticized by some for not distinguishing between “cornflakes and Cadillacs”
(Marchessault 2005, p. 174). In fact, from a media ecology standpoint, this
inclusiveness is a great strength of McLuhan’s theory, since it allows theorists
to consider both the technologies that are traditionally thought of as media,
such as broadcast media, the telephone, and print media, as well as more
creative examples such as transportation media (planes, trains and automob-
iles), guns, and the clothes we wear (McLuhan 1964; Marchessault 2005).
McLuhan’s broad definition of media has led to some of his most important
theoretical contributions. Chief among these is his idea of the ways that
media extend human senses, that is media as “extensions of man” (ibid.).
Within this framework, McLuhan would say that the car is an extension of
human feet, because it allows people to cover great distances faster than they
could without the technological assistance. Similarly, print is an extension of
the eye, the radio is an extension of the voice, and electronic media are an
4 The Medium Is (Im)Material

extension of the central nervous system, as they effectively allow people to

extend their brains beyond the physical limitations imposed by their bodies.
But the brain, of course, is inextricably linked to the rest of the body, and just
as the brain influences the movement of our hands, feet, ears, and eyes, so
too do electronic media influence our physical bodies, even so far as to
influence how we can interact with each other. To explain this, however,
more detail is needed about how McLuhan and those scholars who followed
in his footsteps saw the effects of different types of media through changing
social and physical environments.

2.2 Cyberplace ecology

Since media are extensions of human bodies, we can better understand an
environment created by a medium if we can understand its dominant
physicality. In other words, the way a particular medium interacts with human
bodies influences the ways people interact with each other, which in turn
influences the kind of physicality people experience in societal interaction.
McLuhan illustrated this phenomenon when he described the differences
between oral and literate societies. Oral societies, according to McLuhan,
were connected to the ear, or took place primarily in acoustic space. Acoustic
space has important qualities that we see reflected in pre-literate life. It is
immediate, it is immersive, it is emotional, it is chaotic, and it is information-
rich. Print culture, on the other hand, is based on the eye. Literacy requires a
different sort of engagement than speech, and thus the culture associated
with literacy has different qualities than oral culture. Print culture is linear,
logical, quiet, sequential, and spatial. It offers time to think and process
smaller amounts of information (McLuhan 1964). So just as the demands of a
physical environment can influence how human beings in a particular society
interact with one another socially and politically, the physical demands of a
dominant medium also exert an influence. With the invention of radio and
television, noted by McLuhan, and also the Internet since McLuhan, we have
moved into yet another “media environment”, one characterized by electron-
ic media, and connected not through the ear or the eye, but rather the central
nervous system.
With the electronic age, we have moved beyond both the oral and the
print era, and have returned to an electronic-based tribal culture. How has
 Jaigris Hodson 5

this occurred exactly? It has come to pass through the birth of a new orality
(cf. Ong’s 1982 “secondary orality” in section 2.3). McLuhan suggests that
electronic media represent a different type of acoustic space. Like pre-literate
cultural communication, electronic media are immediate, chaotic, non-linear,
emotional and information-rich communicative environments. The Internet
goes much farther in this direction than the electronic media that were
around in McLuhan’s time. Like the original acoustic space of tribal society,
most Internet communication is part of a vast sea of information, it comes to
us in the form of many different media, with sometimes everything arriving all
at once. On the Internet, people are bombarded with the chaos of competing
hyperlinked social media messages, while online communities offer non-linear
and non-logical options for engagement with other human bodies. A review
of these new types of engagement has led some scholars to suggest that we
can “reach out and touch the Internet” (Rennie 2011, n.p.). Whether or not
this is the case, however, it is compelling to think about the similarities
between in-person acoustic space and on-line acoustic space, and it begs us
to consider the consequences of our engagement.
McLuhan (1964) famously spoke of a “global village”, which some have
interpreted to mean that people from all over the world could join together,
forming tribal societies in which we are all connected. This idea is often taken
by some theorists and the popular media alike to be insufferably optimistic, a
global village as a place where every person matters and we all live together
in harmony in a capital-C community. McLuhan however, did not intend for
this interpretation when he discussed a return to tribal society. In fact, he
meant something quite different, and expressed concern about the broader
consequences of the human coming-together which was facilitated by
electronic technologies. He noted that in tribal societies, where people are
physically and psychologically always in close proximity to one another,
certain behaviors such as terrorism are more likely to occur. “The clash of the
old segmented visual [print] culture and the new integral electronic culture
creates a crisis of identity … which generates tremendous violence … As man
is tribally metamorphosed by the electric media, we all become Chicken
Littles, scurrying around frantically … and in the process unleash tremendous
violence” (McLuhan 1969, p. 2). Indeed, McLuhan issued a warning about the
potential havoc that can occur as we adapt to new media environments. And
rather than seeing the global village in acts of cross-cultural compassion,
6 The Medium Is (Im)Material

Mcluhan associated electronic media with a growing tribalism he felt was re-
presented, for example, by youth practices of sexual expression, piercing and
tattooing, the blurring of gender binaries, and drug use.
Since McLuhan’s time, we have seen these same practices become,
arguably, even more mainstream. The Internet has allowed people who were
previously constrained by oppressive geographic communities to reach out
and form new communities of networked individuals (Anderson 1997; Castells
1996; Kreisler 2001). This has facilitated a greater awareness of diversity,
which has increased people’s acceptance of formerly taboo sexual and gender
identities, body modification practices, and drug use. Were he alive today,
McLuhan may have suggested that these practices are symptomatic of the
transition into the new media environment. For the purposes of this paper,
we are going to start with McLuhan’s work, and move on towards developing
a theory of media environments specific to the Internet, or cyberplaces. To do
this, we will examine theoretical work since McLuhan to map out the growth
of the media ecological view. Starting with general ideas about media and
culture, and moving to specific electronic media examples, we can see that
cyberplaces are to be found in the intersection between human online and
offline interaction as well as the changes in human relations with time and
space that have resulted from widespread digital media use.

2.3 The medium and the message: Scholarship since Mcluhan

Since McLuhan, scholars have continued to develop his ideas that dominant
media create social environments by favoring certain types of interactions
over others. Walter Ong (1982) noticed important differences between oral
societies and literate societies, and then with the development of new
information technologies, saw the emergence of what he calls “secondary
orality”, which is very similar to McLuhan’s tribal ”global village”. For Ong, the
invention of writing and later electronic media shaped human interaction in
major ways.
Ong (1982) argues that there is a discrete break that occurred with the
invention of writing. Before writing, speaking was the dominant method of
communication. The spoken word is ephemeral, dynamic, and interior insofar
as it originates inside the body, is made up of an action, but then disappears
as soon as it is spoken. In contrast, the written word endures in time, is static
 Jaigris Hodson 7

on the page, and is exterior to the body. These characteristics of the spoken
and the written word led to specific differences between oral and literate
societies. In oral societies, there is no written history. Mnemonic techniques
are used to remember things, however once the memory of the oldest
member of the culture is lost over time, history cannot endure, and so
becomes a cultural mythology. For this reason, oral cultures are collectivistic,
because they exist within a broader culture of myth and group memory. In
addition, oral cultures tend to be very present-oriented, because people in
them tend to immediately forget any information not relevant to daily life.
Finally, oral cultures do not generally support abstract thinking, and they tend
to conceive of time as a cyclical phenomenon, rather than a linear race to the
end.
In contrast to the group identity emphasized in oral cultures, literate
societies tend to emphasize individual identity since private reading and
writing encourage the development of a unique personality, points of view,
and a private identity. Literate societies have a different view of time and
history than oral societies since memory endures in writing. There is a sense
of a linearity of time, and a reification of human history. In addition, since
literate societies are free from the cerebral burden of remembering, they can
devote intellectual resources to other tasks, such as the development of
abstract thought and bureaucracy.
Following McLuhan, Ong notes another, more recent break, due to the
development of electronic media. Electronic media have led to the develop-
ment of a new society. This society is characterized by Ong’s “secondary
orality” and is an interesting combination of both oral and print cultures. On a
personal level, we tend to experience secondary orality as a sort of revival of
oral culture. The spoken word dominates TV and radio, popular music and
Internet chat. But though it resembles the oral culture of the past, secondary
orality is not the same, because it also has the logic of print lying behind it.
Though secondary orality in the form of television or the Internet seems to
invite participation, Ong suggests that it actually allows for little interaction,
and while it may seem spontaneous and ephemeral, it is actually premeditat-
ed and archived. This distinction is important if we consider cyberspaces to be
places defined by secondary orality. Other characteristics of this type of
society include a returned emphasis on group identity, and a focus on the
8 The Medium Is (Im)Material

present rather than the future, but in his writing Ong takes care to remind us
that “this new orality … is essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious
orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print” (1982, p. 136).
So for both McLuhan and Ong, writing and electronic media have led to
great changes in the structure of society. Other theorists have also noticed
important social changes associated with different media. James Carey (1989)
singled out the telegraph as an important development. Telegraphy is the
model on which all modern electronic communication is built. It led the
electronic revolution, which eventually resulted in the production of cyber-
spaces. This means that, like McLuhan and Ong, Carey recognizes the import-
ant cultural impact of electronic communication in a more general sense.
Carey singles out the telegraph in particular because of one key social devel-
opment resulting from it ‒ the separation of transportation and communicat-
ion.
Carey (1989) identified six major features of communication that changed
with the introduction of the telegraph. First of all, the telegraph greatly
accelerated the speed with which communication (and therefore culture)
could be shared in society. Secondly, it introduced a new model for business,
as Western Union became the first recognizably modern corporation. Thirdly,
it was the result of a partnership between science, engineering and business –
the first partnership of its kind, and one that would be repeated again and
again in our modern technological society. Fourthly, the telegraph linked
people as never before by reinforcing common cultural assumptions about
the unity of the world as a global village. Carey writes, "[this development]
identifies electricity and electrical power, electronics and cybernetics,
computers and information with a new birth of community, decentralization,
ecological balance, and social harmony" (1989, p. 114). Fifthly, the telegraph
influenced language, favoring shorter, more concise messages, such as the
ones we are accustomed to seeing in newscasts and much later in Internet-
mediated communication. And finally, by separating transportation and
communication, the telegraph meant that communication could be used to
control the physical movement of things. This particular development led to
such diverse activities as futures trading (and thus the modern stock market)
and post-Fordist assembly line management, to name just two.
 Jaigris Hodson 9

The results of the invention of the telegraph are still seen in our modern
Internet-mediated information society. Drawing heavily on McLuhan and
Carey, Manuel Castells (1996) argues that the use of electronic technologies
has resulted in the development of a new type of society – a network society
in which discrete geography becomes less important than the information
that flows through it. Though the network society would still exist independ-
ent of specific technologies, it is a direct result of what technologies have
allowed humans to do, insofar as we can see in Carey’s discussion of the
telegraph the very beginnings of an interconnected or networked existence
for those human beings touched by electronic technologies. The network
society includes both social and informational networks and is characterized
by the same forces that were recognized in the early telegraph, particularly
the separation of space and time and the easy flowing of information at ever
accelerating speeds. Thus we can say that socially, the Internet has changed
the way people interact with time and space, in much the same ways that
other human-built technologies can influence how we travel across space and
how quickly we can achieve tasks over time.
Carey, like McLuhan and Ong, examines how the effect of dominant
communication media sent ripples into society that, as we can see in Castell’s
writing, can be felt on the Internet. To put it another way, not only does
technology change communication in terms of the language we use and the
speed with which we can use it, but also it changes society in what it allows
and does not allow people to physically accomplish. Dominant media in-
fluence existing environments by changing how people interact spatially and
temporally. In addition, dominant media, when used for a sufficiently long
period of time begin to create new environments. In this case, the new
environments being built are not physical environments but virtual ones, or
cyberplaces. When new environments are created by the media we use,
previously unthinkable ways of living become the realm of the possible. We
see this in McLuhan’s example of the electric light, which shifted rhythms of
human lived experience and made places like Las Vegas and Disneyworld
possible. We also see this in Appadurai’s (1996) example of global cities,
which bring together people from many different cultures and thus form a
culture all their own. And finally, we see this in Castell’s example of the
network society (Castells 1996; Kreisler 2001), in which flows of people, ideas,
and commodity become more important links than spatial propinquity.
10 The Medium Is (Im)Material

Though the theorists above identify different media as the loci for social
and societal change, one idea remains consistent throughout their bodies of
work – the concept that the information transmitted through the use of
media technologies is less important than the nature of the technologies
themselves. While many theorists and philosophers of technology have
avoided the use of McLuhan-esque catch phrases such as “the medium is the
message”, their theories all stand in support of his famous aphorism. Whether
we consider media in terms of the senses which they extend, the ease with
which they transmit information, or the practical forces that they exert on our
embodied actions, the fact remains that any media technology influences the
way people communicate with one another, and in turn can influence social
and societal interactions on a much larger scale, regardless of the particular
message being transmitted. But even if we can agree with McLuhan that the
dominant medium of communication creates a new social environment, a
more thorough analysis of cyberplaces compels us to move from McLuhan’s
media environments, which are grounded in social interaction, to theories
that allow us to understand the physicality of online interaction as it relates to
our bodies. For this we turn to foundational theorists in feminist technology
studies, namely Turkle (1995), Haraway (1991) and Hayles (1999). The femin-
ist movement reminded us that the personal is political, and feminist
technology studies remind us that the personal is technological.

2.4 Cyborgs in cyberplaces

Feminist technology studies are an important theoretical tool for under-
standing how cyberplaces work on the body because feminist theory has
always been concerned with the body as a contested political space. Borrow-
ing from Foucault (1979; 1980), Butler (1990) was the first to show how his
theories of power and discourse can be applied to an analysis of gender,
suggesting that gender identity and gender expression are created discursive-
ly, with people acting out what they feel is socially appropriate. Though Butler
did not deal specifically with technology in her work, her discussion of
discourse opened the door for others to explore how non-embodied or text-
based online interaction can actually impact offline embodied experience.
Though there is an exciting and growing body of work in this area (Boyd &
Ellison 2007; Lange 2007; Marres & Rogers 2005; Regan-Shade & Crow 2004,
 Jaigris Hodson 11

among others), the three theorists most relevant to a discussion of the

embodied aspect of cyberplaces are Sherry Turkle (1995), Donna Haraway
(1991), and Katherine Hayles (1999). These three scholars deepen the
understanding of McLuhan’s media ecology by showing how our relations
with and through technologies create social environments that impact our
identities, and in turn our offline bodies.
In her work Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Sherry
Turkle (1995) conducted an ethnographic study of users of online MUD (Multi
User Dungeons) and MOO (Mud Object Oriented) games. These games are
virtual environments in which participants create a character and use it to
interact with others while completing a series of tasks as laid out in the game.
There is nothing in the rules for the games, or in social conventions around
the games, dictating that characters ought to resemble the person who is
playing them, and Turkle discovered that many players used their participat-
ion in the game as an opportunity to play characters very different than them-
selves. For example, some players interviewed by Turkle chose to create a
character that was a different gender than themselves. Sometimes they
would even play a character that was a different species – like a frog (Turkle
1995).
But even though in many cases people created characters that were
radically different than their offline self, Turkle found that players did not
generally use participation on MUDs and MOOs as an escape from real-life
interaction, but rather as a way to develop parts of their identities that they
were unable to address offline. As they tested out different identities in an
online environment, many subjects of Turkle’s study were able to become
more well-rounded in their offline lives, because they integrated aspects of
their online personalities into their offline personalities. Only a few of the
people Turkle interviewed actually used the Internet as an excuse to avoid
social interactions in real-life. The majority of cases used the Internet in ways
that reflected or strengthened their real-life personality, or as Turkle put it,
they “use[d] experiences in virtual space to play with aspects of the self”
(1995, p. 208). In addition, players formed meaningful relationships with each
other in the virtual spaces of the games Turkle studied. Online, people were
able to experience bonds of family, friendship, and even love. Furthermore,
these bonds sometimes influenced the ways people interacted outside of the
12 The Medium Is (Im)Material

virtual space. Some players met and married other characters online, and
then found that their virtual love led to a real-life romance and even
eventually marriage with a player they already knew through their character
(Turkle 1995). Just like other spaces in which people interact with one another
socially, the Internet allows people to develop aspects of themselves in
relation with others. Importantly, this development doesn’t end when the
computer is turned off, rather, it reaches into and shapes a person’s offline
life. However, with all of these different community and identity possibilities
made available, one wonders whether a self that is developed online is
doomed to fragment as people become lost in a sea of identity choices.

2.5 Fragmentation in online communities

In fact, fragmentation is indeed a large part of online or networked inter-
actions (Appadurai 2006; Castells 1996; Haraway 1991; Kreisler 2001; Lovink
1997; Turkle 2011). However, fragmentation in and of itself does not have to
be a bad thing. On the contrary, theorists such as Haraway (1991) and Hayles
(1999) see a fragmented identity as a radical subjectivity with emancipatory
potential. The benefits of fragmentation can be seen in Haraway’s (1991)
famous work on the cyborg as a feminist identification. Cyborg identification
occurs when we recognize the ways in which we are constantly engaging with
our technologies. Haraway would say that everyone in the developed world is
already a cyborg, and recognizing this fact offers tremendous opportunities
for people to unlock the positive potentials of the technologies they use. This
is because Haraway’s cyborg breaks down three boundaries: the boundary
between human and animal, the boundary between animal and machine, and
the boundary between the physical and the non-physical. This breakdown is
important for Haraway, because it is in the collapse of these boundaries that
new choices for subjectivity are made possible. Under this post-human para-
digm, new opportunities for identification are revealed, we can begin to
accept new social actors such as non-human animals (Wolfe 2003), and we
can begin to consider how subjectivity is created not only in our relationships
with humans or other non-human animals but also in our interactions with
the world of things (Latour 1999). Haraway reminds us that subjectivity is
created through our relationships not only with each other, but also with and
through the technologies that we use. In this assertion, Haraway gives much
 Jaigris Hodson 13

needed context for Turkle's findings. In addition, her ideas regarding the
breakdown of the boundary between the physical and non-physical is usefully
applied to cyberplaces. Cyberplaces are spaces in which the boundary
between online and offline life is permeable. Cyberplaces are spaces in which
we have both a physical body and an avatar and both are equally important.
This idea of the blurring between our physical and online selves is also
essential to the work of Katherine Hayles. Like Haraway, Hayles suggests that
we can understand virtual interactions much better if we accept the fact that
the boundary between them and our non-virtual inter-actions is neither solid
nor hierarchical.

2.6 Beyond discursive communities

The work explored by the previous scholars begins to address how we can
think about the Internet using the metaphor of cyberplaces, however it still
leaves us with an important question with respect to online interaction. If
online identities are made up entirely of discourse, then does a person’s
material form matter at all or once online, are we merely identities in ones
and zeroes? In other words, is online identity created solely through discurs-
ive interaction, or is there an important, and related, offline component? We
can begin to find an answer to this question in the work of Katherine Hayles.
Hayles (1999) critiques popular ideas of cybernetics in an attempt to resolve
the disembodied nature of much post-human theory.
Most people are familiar with the following scenario: You are sitting in a
dimly lit room, reading a chilling novel, when suddenly you feel the hair on
the back of your neck stand up and you notice that your heart is beating
faster. In this situation, you have had an embodied response to the frighten-
ing situation that you are reading about, rather than an adrenaline or fear
response based on the real-life threat of personal danger. The mind thus
produces an embodied response. In fact, the body and the mind are always
linked as part of every interaction. We can see the effects of the mind on the
body in Foucault’s (1979; 1980) genealogies when he described the various
ways the body can be disciplined without physical force. Following Foucault,
Butler (1990) showed how the embodied presentation of gender stems from
discourses of acceptable behavior. Both cases highlight the fact that identity
14 The Medium Is (Im)Material

starts when the mind identifies with certain discourses and then is realized in
material form through embodied presentation and performativity.
Hayles (1999) takes this idea a step farther. She suggests that since the
mind can affect the body, any technologically-mediated interaction seeming
to be merely a mind-to-mind connection must be reframed as an embodied
interaction. With this in mind, we can use Hayles to deepen Haraway’s def-
inition of cyborg. A cyborg is not merely a person who uses technology, a
cyborg is also the body within the technological environment, or the self who
is part of your online avatar. It is a virtual body connected to a real one, or
rather the lines between the virtual body and the real-life body are blurred
and a cyborg is the continuum between the two. For Hayles (1999), virtual
spaces are also embodied spaces, and as such, an interaction in virtual space
counts as a different type of embodied interaction, albeit one that is equally
important to the development of self. To answer the question posed at the
beginning of this section, Hayles would suggest that material form does
indeed matter, and people are not becoming merely ones and zeroes through
online interaction. Material human beings bring their bodies into cyber-
places, and in turn, cyberplaces work on human bodies, even when it feels as
though materiality has been left behind at the computer terminal.
Hayles’s theory is supported by Turkle’s (1995; 2011) ethnographic work
on online communities. In one particular case study, a woman who had lost
her leg in a car crash created a character in an online role-playing game who
was missing the same limb. Her online character learned to explore the
identity of being an amputee in a safe online environment. The online
character had a virtual relationship with another character in the virtual
world, and this interaction gave the player the confidence she needed to
pursue a real-life relationship, complete with physical intimacy. In this case,
an exploration of the virtually disabled body helped the player reach an
acceptance of her real-life disability. Her body was indeed an important part
of both online and offline interactions (Turkle 1995). This case study shows
the blurring between embodiment on and offline as identity is explored, and
performed online, and then in turn becomes performative in an offline
context. This brings up an important point about the social construction of
identity in cyberplaces. Just as online communities are part of a network of
both virtual and real communities that make up a person’s social life
 Jaigris Hodson 15

(Wellman 2001; Wellman & Gulia 1999; Wellman et al. 2003), so too online
social interaction is part of a web of interactions that include both distributed
and in-person relationships with others.
Online interaction influences and in turn is influenced by a person’s
embodied or material experiences in the world. In view of that, technology
scholars need to move away from the mistaken idea that online subjectivity
and identity creation are something different than offline or real-life subject-
ivity and identity creation. Rather, cyberplaces are just a few of the many
spaces in which people interact socially to form a sense of who they are in the
world. Furthermore, it also helps to remember that cyberplaces are not the
only spaces through which people travel in which they are limited in their
sense-interaction with their outside environments. There are many examples
of physical human travel in which people move through a space that they can
see and hear, but not touch or smell. From the depths of the ocean to the
surface of the moon and beyond, humans have physically traveled and
collected information with limited sensory cues, and yet these travels are no
less important to human development as a species than more sensual travels.
Thus, it is not such a large leap to consider Internet surfing as a material act-
ivity no less important than diving beneath the physical waves. Once this
theoretical leap is made, we are provided with a solid framework from which
to understand both the positive and negative material consequences of online
engagement. In other words, the metaphor of a particular type of media en-
vironment: a cyberplace, evokes a physicality which allows technology theor-
ists to understand how online activities fit in with the rest of our lives, part-
icularly the influence that online technologies have on personal relationships,
the physical world around us, and our individual rights of privacy and auto-
nomy.

3. Cyberplaces and Their Consequences

3.1 Virtually physical
Thus far in the paper, it has been established that a media ecology viewpoint
drawn from McLuhan and developed by theorists since McLuhan can help us
take the physical metaphor of cyberplaces and use it to describe people’s
engagement with online communities. But the question still remains, what
can the metaphor of physicality do for technology studies? The current
16 The Medium Is (Im)Material

section attempts to answer that very question. The physical metaphor of

cyberplaces is useful for understanding online communities for two reasons.
First of all, it offers a better understanding of what online communities such
as Second Life offer to their users, in particular those users who experience
limited mobility in their “first life”. And secondly, the metaphor of cyberplaces
allows us to rematerialize the Internet so that we are in a better analytical
space from which to consider the many physical and social consequences that
have resulted from our 24/7 networked lives. Just as the light bulb,
McLuhan’s medium reductio example, sparked profound changes in both our
physical and social environments, so too our electronic media have changed
our world, and not always for the better. To begin, however, we will look at
what has proved to be a profoundly positive outcome of cyberplaces – the
physicality they offer for those people who only have limited movement
through geographic space.
For some, the physicality of virtual space may be a very important part of
day-to-day life. In particular we can look at the experiences of those individ-
uals who are limited in their physical mobility. For some of these people,
cyberplaces offer a denied physicality. Consider this quote spoken by Alice, a
woman with Multiple Sclerosis, who plays the popular online game Second
Life as an avatar named Gentle Heron, “Here in this life I’m normally confined
to my home … [however, in the game] it’s really nice to be able to go out and
dance, I love dancing” (Schender 2008, n.p.). Similarly, Ron, who was para-
lyzed after a rare illness, also likes to dance in Second Life. He experiences this
activity in a very physical way, “When I see my avatar dancing … parts of my
brain feel what the avatar is doing” (ibid.). And research has confirmed these
anecdotal findings, showing that nerve connections in the body created
through rehabilitation in virtual environments are the same as those created
through rehabilitation in real physical environments (Schultheis & Rizzo 2001)
Though we tend to think of these technologies in relation to people with
disabilities as distractions that help people forget about and transcend their
physical limitations through a cybernetic freeing of the mind from the body,
what the research actually shows us is quite different. In these cases, the
areas of the brain that correspond to physical movement are being stimulated
through virtual movement or engagement with the technology. So the fact
that physical movement through real space has not occurred is irrelevant to
 Jaigris Hodson 17

the person engaging with the technology. As Hayles (1999) initially theorized,
the body is still there, and it is very much a part of the virtual or online space.
If physical bodies are responding to virtual environments in much the
same way that they respond to physical environments, we can see that
McLuhan was indeed on to something big when he defined medium as that
which creates and changes our surroundings. We see virtual environments
acting on the people who use them, and we do not yet understand the long-
term consequences, both beneficial and harmful, they have on our bodies.
But what we can see since the beginning of McLuhan’s electronic age is the
consequences our electronic media have had on the other parts of our phys-
ical and social environments. Famed media ecologist Neil Postman asks us to
consider the following with regard to technology,

Perhaps you are familiar with the old adage that says: To a man with a
hammer, everything looks like a nail. We may extend that truism: To a
person with a pencil, everything looks like a sentence. To a person with a TV
camera, everything looks like an image ... I do not think we need to take
these aphorisms literally. But what they call to our attention is that every
technology has a prejudice. (Postman 2009, n.p.)

Postman suggests that the adoption of any new technology brings practical
consequences which exert their influence on society. Some of these conseq-
uences may be advantageous to society, as we can see in the examples above,
however, others may be disadvantageous. We may not know in advance what
the consequences may be, but we must be aware that when we adopt any
new technology, there will be changes in human social and physical environ-
ments as a result. Instead of passively accepting the myth1 that any social
changes resulting from the adoption of new technologies are merely part of
the natural order of things, people have a responsibility to consider the
2
possible consequences of any and every new technology before adopting it

1
When Postman uses the term “myth” here, he is referring specifically to Barthes’s
ideas of myths – the dominant ideologies of our time.
2
We see the positive potential of new media technology in books like Clay Shirky’s
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008), and
in Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (2003). From these, as
18 The Medium Is (Im)Material

(Postman 2009). Here lies another strength of the cyberplace metaphor.

When we travel to other man-made environments, such as a mall or a theme
park, we can look around us to see the physical impacts that environment has
had on the world at large. Thinking of our Internet use in terms of place begs
us to take a similar look. Though the physical consequences of online activity
are not as immediately apparent, thinking of the Internet as a cyberplace
reminds us that every time we go online there are real physical and social
impacts to our engagement, including the commoditization and devaluation
of personal relationships, the problem of electronics disposal, ewaste, and
mining, and finally the threat of panoptic surveillance.

3.2 Virtually (but not quite) friends

Just as different types of social interactions are more suited to different types
of built environments (for example, you can yell and cheer in a sports arena,
but not in a library), so too different types of social interactions are suited to
different types of cyberplaces. And what type of interaction is best in any
given online environment is determined by the coding of that environment
(Lessig 1999). Cyberplaces are one of the many places we visit in which we
create and sustain relationships. But if we agree with McLuhan that the
dominant medium in a society influences the social interactions that take
place in that society, we are compelled to ask, What kind of social interactions
do cyberspaces best support? The literature seems to suggest that relation-
ship formation in cyberspaces tends to favor weak ties (Wellman et. al. 2003;
Grannovetter 1983). In addition, other work also suggests that people who go
to cyberspaces regularly for the purposes of interacting with their friends and
families are seeking interpersonal validation, and they are finding that large
companies are more than happy to step in and fill this deep psychological
need via the commodification of their social relationships (Turkle 2011).
While there are instances of people maintaining in-person relationships
using online tools (Ellison, Steinfeld & Lampe 2007; Kavanaugh, Carroll,
Rosson, Zin & Reese 2005; Kim & Yun 2007; Leadbeater 2008; Mazer, Murphy

well as from some of Innis’s (1972; 1951) work, we see that sometimes the results of
technology can be beneficial to society – but people deserve to have the right to
choose, and should be given some sort of agency in deciding which technological
changes to accept, rather than relying solely on the invisible hand of the marketplace.
 Jaigris Hodson 19

& Simonds 2007; Shirky 2008; Stefanone & Jang 2007; Turkle 1995; Valaitis
2005; Wellman 2001; Wellman & Gulia 1999; Wellman et al. 2003) and even
instances of people forming important lasting real-offline relationships with
people they meet in cyber places (Turkle 1995), as we spend more time
online, many types of relationships may be getting more difficult to sustain
both on and offline owing to the specific temporal and spatial characteristics
of cyberspaces. Edward T. Hall (1959) discussed how the ways that people
interact with each other through space and time form a “silent language” as
part of the cultural lexicon. As McLuhan (1964), Virilio (2000; 2006), Postman
(2009), Castells (1996) and more recently Turkle (2011) have pointed out,
electronic media in general, and the Internet in particular, exert a unique
influence on how people relate across space and manage time. Castells called
these two dimensions the “space of flows” and “timeless time”. “Spaces of
flows”, as discussed above, link people together through shared information
and shared meaning-making rather than shared geography. “Timeless time” is
connected to the spaces of flows insofar as technologies that allow for
information to flow easily across space facilitate this exchange, often instant-
aneously. It embodies a rejection of traditional linear expressions of time in
favor of an always-on culture.
But what are the characteristics of a culture that is always-on? While it
affords the luxury of flexible work for the most privileged in our society, the
downside of being always-on is being never-off. Many people who regularly
travel through cyberplaces begin to feel tethered to their devices (Turkle
2011). It turns out, then, that timeless time equals all the time. And a culture
defined by a time without limits, where messages travel not sequentially but
all at once feel simultaneously obligated to their devices and drawn away
from interpersonal offline connections. In her latest book, Sherry Turkle de-
scribes this condition as follows:

Online, we easily find “company” but are exhausted by the pressures of

performance. We enjoy continual connection, but rarely have each other’s
full attention. We can have instant audiences but flatten out what we say to
each other … We like it that the Web “knows” us, but this is only possible
because we compromise our privacy … The ties we form through the
Internet are not, in the end, the ties that bind. But they are the ties that
preoccupy. (Turkle 2011, p. 280)
20 The Medium Is (Im)Material

Turkle explores the online habits of both young people and their parents to
come up with an account of a culture of cyberplaces that should give us
pause. Granovetter and Wellman have previously written that social networks
are stronger when they contain a large number of weakly-tied individuals,
however, Turkle reminds us here of the importance of balance. Too many
weakly tied social links coupled with too few strong ties seems to be, nearly
twenty years after Granovetter’s article “The Strength of Weak Ties”, a troubl-
ing attribute of a culture that forms primarily in cyberplaces.
Another characteristic of cyberplace culture is the ease with which social
relationships can be commodified. Kline, Dyer-Witheford & De Peuter (2003)
famously discussed the ways in which video games commodified children’s
play, beginning with early video game systems in the 1980s and continuing to
the more sophisticated networked games that are popular today. They
suggested that commodified play is problematic because it is bounded. In
other words, play that occurs on video games doesn’t allow for a free
expression of creativity, but instead contains rules and boundaries (a codified
discourse) that dictate what is acceptable, or even possible within the game
environment. While scholars are now noting the creative ways that many
players get around rules dictated by their games through speed-running
games (attempting to play through levels as fast as possible) and playing first
person shooter games without killing any enemies (Parker 2011), players still
must construct these new narratives within the boundaries of the game
environment. Similarly, social interactions that occur in cyberplaces are also
bounded. Whether the interaction occurs in the MUDs and MOOs described
by Turkle, whether it occurs in popular gaming environments like World of
Warcraft or Second Life, or whether it is facilitated through online social
networks like Twitter or Facebook, each application will affect the quality of
social interaction that occurs through it. Furthermore, as people interact with
one another in cyberplaces like Facebook, they are taking social interactions
into spaces owned by private for-profit corporations. Social interaction in this
scenario becomes a platform for advertising, and as such, social interaction is
reduced to just another commodity for sale to the highest bidding advertiser
(Pariser 2011). But as discussed above, cyberplaces do not only influence soc-
ial relationships. The physical changes a medium brings to our environment
are worth careful consideration as well, and cyberplaces, like other built
environments, alter the physical world around us in some troubling ways.
 Jaigris Hodson 21

3.3 Virtual world, real waste

While it is important to consider the physicality of cyberplaces with respect to
the new forms of relationships they encourage, we must also use them as a
way to understand the physical consequences of our being-with technology.
Here cyberplace becomes an important metaphor for re-materializing our
networked lives. When we move through the Internet, surfing social net-
works, teleworking, or playing online games, we don’t often think about the
vast infrastructure required to create and power the technologies that enable
us to engage in this way. However, when we give our online activities a
physical context we are in a much better place to make the physicality of our
technologies quite present. When we build a highway, and then travel down it
in automobiles, we understand at least part of the physical disruption is part
of our mobility, after all, we see it in the road itself, and we experience the
energy costs through high gasoline prices, and so on. But traveling through
cyberplaces is just as disruptive, and we hardly seem to notice. Consider the
following:

A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts said the global IT industry
generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines – about two
percent of global CO2 emissions. (Leake & Woods 2009, n.p.)

One Google search alone can take as much energy as boiling water for a cup
of tea. And all current monthly Google searches could power a 100 watt
lightbulb for 4,534 years (Buczynski 2011). In terms of energy use, the con-
sumption cost incurred is beginning to surpass that of many other human-
built environments. And like other human-built environments that we spend
time in, spending time in cyberplaces results in not just energy use, but also a
tremendous amount of physical waste. For example, in 2005, ewaste made up
eight percent of all municipal waste (Widmer et. al. 2005), and that number
has surely grown in the last few years. Ewaste is highly toxic, being made of
metals and other pollutants. Much ewaste is exported to developing countr-
ies, making this problem one that affects even those who cannot yet visit
cyberplaces due to the digital divide. And the problem of digital detritus is
only getting worse. With the relatively short use-life, or planned obsolescence
22 The Medium Is (Im)Material

built into the devices that we use to access the Internet, as well as the
shrinking of said digital divide, ewaste is an ever-increasing problem.

3.4 Cyber-opticon
There is another growing challenge as the digital divide shrinks: privacy
invasion and surveillance in cyberplaces. And the increasing bleed between
online and offline life with the growing popularity of mobile devices only
exacerbates this problem. When much of our work and professional lives
occurs in cyberplaces, there is much of our lives that can suddenly be monit-
ored, recorded, and archived. And archived it is. Many organizations keep logs
of their employees’ computer use that they store for several years. Until
3
recently , use of the popular social network Facebook required that people
sign an agreement granting the site full ownership rights of all material
posted – along with the right to police the material and remove everything
without warning if the powers that be deem it to be inappropriate (Turkle
2011). Google keeps a record of everything you search for in order to create a
faster and more personalized search experience (Pariser 2011). And while it
can be argued that participation in online communities would be impossible
without some of these tools, a social life that takes place primarily through
online interactions in cyberplaces is open to being tracked, recoded, and if
considered inappropriate, erased without notice. This is an important and
mostly invisible aspect to life in cyberplaces. While we feel as though the
Internet represents a vast landscape spread out before us (Turkle 2011), in
actual fact it is more like a labyrinth, in which we are fooled into thinking the
path laid out before us is of our own choosing, rather than consciously de-
signed by someone else.
One of the original benefits of cyberplaces has morphed into one of their
biggest challenges. In the early days of the participatory web, many theorists
lauded the fact that anybody could use the Internet to broadcast their

3
As a result of public pressure, the clause concerning one’s own content reads: “You
own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control
how it is shared through your privacy and application settings”. However, “profit
perks” can come through collection of information and exposure to advertising, which
is problematic. Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities can be found at
https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms (last updated December 11, 2012). [ed.]
 Jaigris Hodson 23

message to anyone else with an Internet connection. But this framework soon
turned uncontrollable, as millions of participatory media users created an
information overload. And the main tool people use to solve this problem of
too much information is now beginning to look increasingly Orwellian.
Google, a seemingly neutral instrument to help sort through millions of pages
of online information, actually tailors searches, making them different for
every individual (Pariser 2011). While this initially seems helpful, the implicat-
ions are profoundly troubling. Google decides what information to include in
the search (and what to leave out). This means that people are limited in
what parts of the Internet they access, but not always of their own choosing.
A skewing of search results in this way is anathema to democratic communic-
ation because it can result in people thinking that the rest of the world is
more similar in its viewpoint than it actually is. This means that people who
spend a considerable part of their time in cyberplaces may develop a
distorted view of the geographic communities around them, and this in turn
can lead to polarization, online ghettoization, voter apathy, and on a more
personal level, lack of sensitivity to others
In addition to distorting citzens’ worldviews, cyberplaces by their very
nature are archivable. This means that any activity that takes place in them
can be monitored and mined for data. Often this data mining occurs in order
to create personalized advertisements on sites like Google or Facebook, but
this data can also be mined for other purposes, and everybody’s IP address
leaves a trace even when they enter no personal information. So while online
socializing feels much like its offline equivalent, it is different insofar as it
always leaves a trace. To some Second Life may seem like a second home, but
chances are every move you make in your first home doesn’t end up recorded
on a server somewhere (not at this point, that is – to our knowledge). Data
collected on the Internet is not only being used by companies looking to
target consumers with advertising messages. More disturbingly, though not
surprisingly, information gained in cyberplaces is very valuble to governments
around the world.
Various theorists have already started to address the potential con-
sequences of cyberplace surveillance. Greg Elmer & Andy Opel (2008)
showed the ways in which, rather than fostering democratic exchange as
some techno-utopians predicted, the Internet has actually become a keen
24 The Medium Is (Im)Material

system for preempting any type of citizen dissent since protests which begin
online are relatively easy to monitor and trace. Ron Deibert & Rafal Rohozin-
ski have also expressed concern about the consequences of personal Internet
use and state surveillance. They write:

… although not ‘socially sinister,’ as David Lyons puts it, what he calls
‘everyday surveillance has routinized itself into ordinary life in so many
myriad ways that is has become that taken-for-granted context within which
modern industrial society operates … Internet censorship and surveillance –
once largely confined to authoritarian regimes – is now fast becoming the
global norm. (Deibert & Rohozinski 2010 , p. 11)

And Colin Maclay (2011) describes the ways that even companies who want
to protect the privacy of their customers’ online information may be fighting
an uphill battle against the governments who want to monitor it. This means
that even a boycott of companies who do not keep information private may
not be an effective way to ensure that interaction in cyberplaces is kept con-
fidential. All in all, while it’s impossible to ignore the fact that cyberplaces, like
any other built environment, offer tremendous opportunities, they also incur
tremendous costs. We need to start integrating physicality into our discussion
of online worlds so that we can properly consider both the positive and the
negative material consequences of our lives in cyberplaces and, in so doing, to
decide how much we want to visit them.

4. Conclusion: The Great Weight of Immateriality

Now more than ever it seems that many of McLuhan’s ideas are proving
indispensable. When considering the impacts of Internet use on our bodies,
our social systems, and our physical environments, his discussion of the ways
that communication technologies create environments becomes surprisingly
prescient. The dominant media we use do indeed seem to influence the ways
we engage with one another over time and across space. Theorists since
McLuhan have supported this claim, which has often been misclassified by
many scholars as being technologically deterministic. Ong showed us that the
communication media we use encourage different types of societies. Carey
noted changes in social practices following the telegraph, and Castells took
 Jaigris Hodson 25

many of the ideas from those who came before him to show us that both
electronic media and global cities have encouraged a network society charact-
erized by “spaces of flows” and “timeless time”.
While many scholars have spent their time exploring how media in gen-
eral or specifically contribute to the structure of social interactions in society,
others have applied McLuhan’s media ecology directly to new information
technologies and the Internet. Sherry Turkle showed the ways we build our
offline identities through online role-playing. Donna Haraway recommended
we break down the boundaries between the real and the virtual, and
Katherine Hayles reminded us that even when we go online, we do not leave
our bodies behind, they are always with us. Together all these theories since
McLuhan support the idea that we must begin to view our time on the
internet not as something divorced from our materiality, but rather as a very
physical act, with physical and social consequences. For this reason, I recom-
mend the use of “cyberplace” as a metaphor to bring the ethereal internet
down to earth. Cyberplaces are the places we visit whenever we go online,
and like visiting the mall, a theme park, or Las Vegas, cyberplaces are built
environments that have a physical impact on the world around them through
the cultural norms within them. The metaphor of cyberplace is useful because
it allows us both to consider how our bodies are affected when moving
through this environment (in both positive and negative ways) and also how
these technologies are interacting with the rest of our physical environment.
Only with a mind to these environments and their effects can we mindfully
decide if and how much we want to engage with them.
Cyberplaces offer tremendous opportunities for those people who are
limited in offline physical mobility. They also offer what many theorists have
identified as the strength of multiple weak ties in diverse social networks, but
they also incur tremendous costs. Research reveals that social interaction in
cyberplaces may be starved compared to social interaction in geographic
space. Furthermore, the technology use required to visit cyberspaces creates
more waste than traditional built spaces, and requires an ever growing energy
expenditure. Finally, due to their nature as coded spaces, cyberplaces both
encourage the commodification of our social relationships and leave us open
to surveillance and other invasions of personal privacy. If we persist in
thinking of Internet use as something that occurs independently of embodied
26 The Medium Is (Im)Material

materiality, then we are somewhat psychologically divorced from the resp-

onsibility of considering its physical impacts. If we use “cyberplaces” as a
metaphor in the study of new media, however, we are encouraged to
consider all the material consequences of our love affair with technology.
Cyberplaces remind us to be mindful of our bodies as we travel, even when
that travel seems to be initially weightless.

►◄

Many thanks to Phillip Vannini and Kim Sawchuk for feedback and for hosting a
very early version of this paper on the Mobilities Panel at the Canadian
Communication Association 2011 Annual Conference in Fredericton, NB. Thanks to
my dissertation supervisor Daniel Drache, and Committee members Wendy Cukier
and Fred Fletcher for deepening my knowledge of McLuhan's media ecology. Thanks
to Jamie Rennie for a compelling discussion of McLuhan at Carleton CGC annual
conference. And finally, a thousand thanks to Peter Bevan for many long hours
discussing the physicality of cyberplaces.

►◄

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►◄

About the Author

Jaigris Hodson (BA Royal Roads University, MA York/Ryerson) is a PhD candidate
in the joint Communication and Culture program at York and Ryerson Univers-
ities. Her MA research focused on applying Habermas’ theory of public reason to
web 2.0 via three case studies of the participatory Internet applications Face-
book, Cute Overload, and Boingboing.net. Her doctoral research, to be completed
at the end of August, 2013, focuses on the discourse on the Facebook, Google
and Twitter blogs. She currently works as a research assistant at the Office of the
Vice President Research at Ryerson University, where she also teaches both
graduate and undergraduate classes in digital skills ans social media. She has
presented at multiple conferences and has published articles in a number of
journals. For more information visit http://www/jaigrishodson.com or email
jhodson@ryerson.ca

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