Why Do We Call It the “Technomediatic World”?

Some thinkers regard the period we have been living through since the 1990s as part of postmodernity and refer to it as the “age of techno-culture.” Their reasoning is that, especially in Western societies, new cultural technologies have penetrated so deeply that the resulting picture appears to people almost like a second nature… Perhaps here, they are referring to the German thinker Immanuel Kant, who saw culture as humanity’s second nature. What they are trying to convey is rather the situation brought about by the concepts of “cyberspace” and “virtual reality,” which entered our lives through information technologies — a situation in which the distinction between science fiction and real life, between the mechanical and artificial and the organic and natural, has become blurred… What the technologies that have infiltrated our daily lives at the hardware level bring, and what the cybernetic technologies we live with at the software level bring… The addition of contact lenses, pacemakers, smartphones, tablets, personal computers, artificial intelligence, and robots to our lives — or more precisely, to our existence as human beings…

Technology and tech are two very different things

I prefer to use the term “technomediatic world” rather than calling it the “techno-culture era.” (I also quite like the terms “New Barbarism Era” for our times or Yanis Varoufakis’ recent phrase, “techno-feudalism.”) I say “technomediatic world” because, first of all, there is a strong possibility that the period we are living through does not belong to postmodernism. When we factor in artificial intelligence and robots, what technology has added to our lives far exceeds the examples usually cited…

Secondly, we need to distinguish between the already highly ambiguous concept of “culture” — as we’ve been using it until now — and the new realities brought about by technology. Earlier definitions of culture certainly referred to human additions to nature, but let’s not forget that those additions were both compatible with nature and fundamentally based on it. Modern technological products, by contrast, are grounded in the destruction of nature and the disruption of ontology…

Third — and most importantly — although technology and media are closely intertwined, they are not the same phenomenon. Let us not forget: even the technology used by Apollo 11, which fascinated people at the time as a technological breakthrough, was extremely primitive compared to the technology in today’s smartphones. Back then, technology merely captivated its audience; now it has become part of the audience itself, shaping their minds…

“Technique” has existed in every historical era, but what we now call “technology” has evolved into a form previously unknown in human history. Neil Postman, the renowned media theorist famous for his book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1988) (1), soon felt compelled to write Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (2). He was absolutely right in calling our society a “technopoly,” due to the unrestrained deification of technology.

Just as technology is not the same as technique, today’s media no longer simply refers to a “medium.” Every culture once had its own unique medium of communication, but the overwhelming confusion we now call “media” emerged with modernity. Contrary to popular belief, media is not just modern mass communication tools like newspapers and television. “Media” is also the plural of “medium,” a word that means condition, environment, average, or surrounding. When considered in the context of human relationships, “medium” also carries the connotation of “average” or “mediocre,” based on what is expected to be present or prioritized in a given environment. Additionally, “medium” has come to mean someone who mediates between environments and people — as in “spiritual medium” — a usage found in almost every language.

All these semantic layers are interrelated… In every culture, the average or ordinary person lives and interacts within a particular environment, a kind of normality unique to them, and this is what we generally call “media.” In modern times, mass communication tools such as newspapers, radio, letters, home telephones, and telegrams — and now television, smartphones, and especially all forms of digital media — make up our basic communication environment, in other words, our media. First came the spread of writing, then visuality, and finally digitality entered the scene; and now, we find ourselves in the cyber era, where our cables have become as vital as our veins…

Artificiality and virtuality: two sides of the same coin

Technology and media are extremely similar; one cannot exist without the other — they are, so to speak, complementary components of one another… Yet, when we look closely, a shared characteristic of both immediately reveals itself: artificiality.

Artificial; that is, something that does not exist in its genuine, authentic form — man-made, fabricated… To understand the technomediatic world, we must thoroughly grasp this notion of artificiality, because virtuality — which constitutes the foundation of this world — is ultimately the manifestation of things and relationships (human-to-human and human-to-nature) taking on an artificial character. In our latest book Umuda İmkan Araman (Seeking the Possibility of Hope – Kapı Publishing), we described the connection between artificiality and virtuality as follows:

To explain artificiality, one must dwell on the distinction between truth and reality. In artificiality, the aspects of things and relationships that were not inherent in their creation but were added later to their authentic existence come to the fore. The artificial is indeed real — but it is not genuine. Something being artificial does not mean it is not real, but rather that it differs from its original, authentic state — from its own truth.

Just as a fruit processed by modern agricultural technology is still real, though its shape and essence differ from its authentic form, so too do the communication environments mediated by modern media (i.e., the media) retain their communicative properties — yet differ significantly from familiar, genuine forms of communication.

In the technomediatic world, human-to-human and human-to-nature relationships have acquired an artificial character. Virtuality is closely related to artificiality… Artificiality and virtuality bring about the most profound transformation — or, for those who wish, harm — to authentic human existence by greatly weakening the link between thought and reality as mediated by concepts. Concepts are gradually losing their influence; instead, images and the fantastical take center stage. This is a form of “de-philosophization.” That is why we no longer concern ourselves with the question of the ‘good life.’ We have surrendered ourselves, and our destiny, to engineers.

At the root of all this, perhaps, lies the dominance of the artificial over the authentic. We no longer value the intuitive, practical knowledge that arises from our lived experiences. Words like wisdom and insight don’t even come close to entering our minds. Even the most devoted believers in science are fond of taking astral journeys into the wells of fortune-telling, magic, and New Age beliefs at every opportunity.

We used to speak of the flight of birds, then the speed of sound, and now the speed of light… We prize speed so much that we have forgotten the meaning of deliberation. All of this has taken place while our perceptions of truth have changed — without us even noticing.
We remain constantly connected to both the internet and our relationships in a state of perpetual fluidity. Our relationship language increasingly resembles our internet language. We try to surf a web of connections. We seek relationships that are easy to enter and exit, that require no maintenance, care, or seriousness — stylish, user-friendly bonds that we can dispose of with the press of a ‘delete’ key.

We are well aware of how information technologies have brought about massive changes in fields ranging from medicine to architecture, from urban planning to archiving, from production processes to sales and marketing, from the arms industry to the automotive sector, from librarianship to intelligence work.

Even if we set those aside and look only at what is happening in our everyday lives, we are faced with a panorama that could leave us speechless. With each passing day, a network is emerging in which we would be helpless without the digital environment — our smartphones have become new limbs of our bodies.

Thanks to the internet, we manage many tasks with ease, swept away by the magic of speed, exclaiming in awe, “Wow!” The internet is increasingly becoming the default option for things like shopping, banking, medical appointments, and travel arrangements. Media — reading newspapers, magazines, and books, watching television, chatting, gaming, entertainment, even doing homework, listening to lectures, learning exam results, and communication — has long become indispensable.

This increasing digitalization of life, the daily substitution of virtuality for reality, is also stripping our language of its essence. Social media chatter appeals to us more than volumes of books. When we now speak of “going somewhere,” “browsing,” “traveling,” or “surfing”; of “sites,” “pages,” “addresses,” “settlements,” “worlds,” “rooms,” and “spaces,” we are referring to entirely different things than we did twenty years ago.

It would be ungrateful to deny the conveniences and benefits these changes have brought into our lives. Granted. But we must also recognize just how much we have given up — how much we have lost — in pursuit of greater speed, more pleasure, and longer life.

Isn’t it naive not to see that this trajectory may be leading to the end of humanity and the world as we know it? For some time now, we have already noticed how concepts like “human rights” and “democracy” have become almost useless in this “brutal new world,” and how terms like violence and fanaticism are more appropriate to describe it.

Especially after Gaza, we have come to clearly realize that the rulers — these paranoid sociopaths — will try anything to protect their interests. They will not hesitate to start a world war or use nuclear weapons. People, humanity, the future of the world — none of this matters to them!

Yes, “I now see the world we live in not only as strange, but as increasingly dangerous for people, nature, and living species.”

That is why, for quite some time now, I have abandoned theoretical rigidity and have been writing essays and books expressing this anxiety and concern — calling on all of us to unite, at the very least, around the concept of human dignity.

[1] First edition of the original text: Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Penguin, 1985 (Turkish translation: Televizyon: Öldüren Eğlence, trans. Osman Akınhay, Istanbul: Ayrıntı, 1994).

[2] First edition of the original text: Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, New York: Knopf, 1992 (Turkish translation: Teknopoli: Kültürün Teknolojiye Teslim Oluşu, trans. Mustafa Emre Yılmaz, Bursa: Sentez, 2013).