Melanie Puff, Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf So many voices in my head - hybrid comunication in the age of mass media

The present age can be characterized as the age of mass media and of its networks. Postmodern culture therefore should always be seen in the focus of the history of mass media.
ur perception and the view of the world connected with it are influenced and formed by the different media as media philosophers like Friedrich Kittler, Marshall McLuhan¹ and others have pointed out. In the twentieth century, modern culture has become a mass media culture and this development has caused the rising of postmodern theories claiming for the "end of the big narrations"², the beginning of the "age of simulation"³, of "l'inertie polaire"⁴ or of the "philosophy of weakness"⁵. However, it turned out that mass media means a kind of "shaking of the principle of reality"⁶ und this even more today when the internet and its virtual realities declare a general and global period of virtuality, where mimesis changed into simulation and the question of the warranty of reality can't be answered that clearly any more.

The end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twentifirst century seem to be stages of development of a process which started in the sixties of the twentieth century and became more and more obvious in the past fifteen years, when the World Wide Web was founded and the era of mobile comunication began. Since William Gibson created the Cyberspace⁷ and Donna Haraway wrote her Manifesto for Cyborgs⁸ it seems that the global village of McLuhan⁹ gets always more concrete in a plural society which is based on a network of information available any time and by anyone in any place. This means also a new structure of time and space, where space becomes an open passage without clear limits and time loosens of the old principle of an extensive and linear time for the sake of a new intensive and syntetical time of virtuality, a time without past, presence and future¹⁰ as Großklaus calls it.
Looking at the development of the new media it seems that a turn of models is taking place. The consequence is that old ideas have a drop in value and are substituted by new forms of thinking, which give up dichotomical and metaphysical visions and open up towards a more complex and global point of view. In a world governed by Cyber and Internet, insisting on terms such as privacy, individuality and uniformity becomes difficult, just as Cyberspace and Internetworks set up new ideologies, new models of society and - the most important - new forms of individuality. It is obvious and was marked by many critics such as Kittler¹¹ and others that the medium works as a dispositive which is the condition for any human discourse. With other words: all forms of thinking have always to be thought within a horizon of the medium mediating them. The postmodern era of internet and cyberspace is a multimedial one where different forms of media form a new hybrid complex. Hybridity is the term I would like to insist on. In the past five or so years, it has found a large interest first in the postcolonial studies, then in connection with visions of a Cyborg-Society based on a technical mass media world. There are already voices which prefer to speak of a hybrid culture¹² instead of a postmodern one. It seems that hybridity is the fitting term for nowadays phenomenons of mixing and penetrating taking place in any area of interest. This because it gives a more precise and clear instrument of interpretation of these phenomenons, just as hybridity doesn't mean a simple mixture where the single elements get mixed like colours and then form a new element where the different colours amalgamate and are not any more observable in their singularity. Hybridity rather means the combination of two or more different elements by leaving a formal and functional separation between them. Picking up the example of the colours, instead of this new colour received by mixing the other ones together, the new hybrid form would be kind of a prisma or a kaleidoscope, where all the different colours get in touch forming a new complex, but each of them remains in its formerly state. It only gets into a new context where its combination with the others generates a complex, multifacial identity.

The best example for a hybrid identity is a Cyborg, this famous combination of a human being and a machine described in an impressing way in Gibson's Newromancer. Its characteristic is the process of oscillation between formerly separated realities which now get in touch although they might be contradictional and formerly seen as dichotomies. What I want to say is that hybrid identities can't any more be interpreted by the modern metaphysical point of view of a monadic, intact unity. They can't be thought in terms of an identity and an alterity excluding each other. What they are is a quite paradox structure where identity gets a switching between different poles which might be conform but might also be absolutely contradictional and estrange to each other. Hybrid identities therefore differ from old concepts of identity and alterity, where the individual forms and protects its own individuality by marking off itself from other identities, that means by exclude or separate of the Other. Hybrids do already have frontiers within themselves, that means that their identity - if it is still possible to talk about identity in this context - is always inhabited by the Other, by many different voices. While in the old metaphysical model of the monadic identity the individual has a nuclear - its identity - which it fearfully protects of the Other by building up frontiers around itself, in the new model of a hybrid identity, the hybrid does alreaday bear one or more frontiers in itself, it is already a multiple identity formed by many voices, therefore the necessity to build frontiers around itself gets secondary. This implicates a new concept of identity and as a consequence a new relationship between individuals.

A philosophy which lies very near to the concept of hybridity is the "pensiero debole", the thinking of weakness of the italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo¹³. As time lacks I can't insist on it, but in short terms what Vattimo is pointing out is that we need a new form of thinking beyond the categories of metaphysics who thinks being in terms of completeness, strongness and harmony. A "weak" being, as Vattimo calls it, accepts its disunion and the contradiction within itself. Vattimo's philosophy could therefore be the base for a philosophy of hybridity which has just been started to think but which hasn't really been defined yet.

Hybrid identities seem to be perfectly adapted to the conditions of a society governed by cyberspace and internet or let's say by mass media. Perhaps hybridity is the only way to survive on the datahighways without having traumatic experiences. As hybrids are more flexible, exchanging information - the most important task in the mass media age - gets more simple. Being many personalities in one, hybrids can easily switch between different realities and thus adapt themselves to all the different registers spoken. Comunication gets completely changed by this, and this even more as english is turning out as the language used mostly in internet and therefore spoken by nearly anyone. Language is not a problem anymore, but what also might change is the way to comunicate between individuals. When hybrid identities unify many facets with many personal voices in one existence, there must be a comunication between the single parts. What I think is that this comunication is a telepathic one and that in consequence in the future comunication in a cyber-society might be a mixture between traditional linguistic comunication and new forms adapted to the way the internet works, which might be forms of telepathical comunication. Anyway, the time is to short to specify this and what I'm talking about here is a vision and unfortunately not yet scientifically based.

One of the problems talking about hybridity as a concept for individuals or for a society is the possibility of interpretation of such concepts. It is useless to discuss hybrid phenomenons remaining within the models of interpretation still valid for most of the sciences. That means: how can hermetically separated sciences who suspiciously look at each other without even trying to get into a real discussion be able to consider and interpret a world broken into different fragments and ruled by - as Heidegger called it - the "technisches Gestell"? It is true that in the past years the frontiers have become less rigid and that there have been some interesting meetings between formerly separated parties, but this is only the beginning. In the age of information what we have to do is form interdisciplinary pools of interest and investigation, where all the disciplines get in touch and stimulate each other in a discussion without prejudices. And that's the point: we have to realize that becoming a hybrid, a "weak" existence means closing with old discourses still present in the collective mind. Cyberspace, internet and genetics have totally changed the imagination of the individual, the reality it lives in and the time-space-structure constructing it. The latest developments of comunication move always more into the direction of a wireless, "any-time-any-place" comunication, and it has already been possible to clone photones which are then connected in a telepathical way and can be beamed using the qualities of a third photon as an energy-source. The technical development is incredible and things invented today will already be history tomorrow. And here lies the task of the cultural sciences: to get into touch with the natural sciences and to form a hybrid working complex where exchange of information is important for the two of them: the natural sciences can get more aware about the moral and human consequences of their work and the cultural sciences will take care of the ontological implications produced by the progress. Both together will create new visions of how to build the chaotic and fragmented cyberworld of mulitmedia. And throwing away the prejudices, both together will open their mind towards a consideration or even an acception of areas formerly excluded by scientific discourses, like the discourse of telepathy which is still devaluated as a parascientifical one. And doing this the different sciences will become a hybrid complex, where the Other is not banished into non-discoursive areas, but where it is accepted within the discourse itself knowingly that new aspects and visions can only be developed by integrating the Other into myself.

Notes

¹ Kittler, Friedrich, Draculas Vermächtnis.Technische Schriften, Leipzig: Reclam 1993; McLuhan, Marshall, Die magischen Kanäle. Understanding Media, Düsseldorf: Econ 1992.

² Lyotard, Jean-Francois, La condition postmoderne, Paris: Editions de Minuit 1979.

³ Baudrillard, Jean, Agonie des Realen, Berlin: Merve 1978.

⁴ Virilio, Paul, Rasender Stillstand, Frankfurt: Fischer 1998.

⁵ Vattimo, Gianni, Rovatti, Pier Aldo (ed.), Il pensiero debole, Milano: Feltrinelli 1997.

⁶ Vattimo, Gianni, Die transparente Gesellschaft, Wien: Passagen 1992, S.19.

⁷ Gibson, William, Newromancer-Trilogie, München: Verlag 2001 1995.

⁸ Haraway, Donna, Die Neuerfindung der Natur. Primaten, Cyborgs und Frauen, Frankfurt: Campus 1995.

⁹ Mc Luhan, Marshall, The global village, N.Y.: Oxford Univ. Press 1989.

¹⁰ Großklaus, Götz, Medien-Zeit, Medien-Raum, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1997.

¹¹ Kittler, Friedrich (1992).

¹² Schneider, Irmela, Thomsen, Christian (ed.), Hybridkultur. Medien - Netze - Künste, Köln: Wienand 1997.

¹³ Vattimo, Gianni (1997).