“Technology and the senses: an ethical account” – Irene Alcubilla Troughton

In the past session of Transmission in Motion, thanks to the lecture of Frank Kessler, we gained more insight on the role of the senses in different media, with special attention to the reconfiguration of them and the discussions around that topic from several scholars. Beginning with the legend of Zeuxis and his competitor Parrhasius, we introduced the well-known Modern fear of media fooling the human being. Even if, due to the advances of technology, this worry has increased, the story of the Greek painters shows us how media as a way of blocking the access to the real has always being a hot topic.

In the heated controversy over the positive or negative implications of being able to perceive something through technology that would not have been seen by the naked eye; the work of McLuhan stands out. His reflections not only on how media influence the senses but also on how it can divide them, gave us the ground to reflect on the reconfiguration of the sensorium.

A part of McLuhan’s ideas on the education of the senses particularly caught my attention: in this endeavour of involving the synesthetic nature of the senses and the sensus communis, he goes on to consider the “possibility of a consensus or ratio and balance among these [senses] for our collective sanity” (in Friesen; 2011: 14), asserting that new technologies could “conduct carefully orchestrated programming of the sensory life of whole populations” (in Friesen, 2011: 14).

While reviewing an article of 2014 about new ways of creating punishments in prison, the worry that arose when reading McLuhan came back to me under a different shade. The piece of news briefly familiarised the reader with the possibility of extending the perception of time of the prisoner by means of biotechnology. In this way, using technological developments, a person’s perception of the world could be changed in order to enhance their punishment in a shorter period of time. Dr. Roache, in charge of the research project, asserts at the end of the article:

“Is it really OK to lock someone up for the best part of the only life they will ever have, or might it be more humane to tinker with their brains and set them free? When we ask that question, the goal isn’t simply to imagine a bunch of futuristic punishments – the goal is to look at today’s punishments through the lens of the future.”

Apart from the clearly economical interests that lay behind this idea, another ideological principle struck me as important in her assertion: the ability to associate, quickly and without hesitation, ‘freedom’ with reconfiguring someone’s perception without their knowledge or permission. Even if McLuhan’s interests differed from this, I cannot stop thinking that his educational enterprises were ignoring, in the same way as these new ways of understanding punishment, who holds the power when taking a decision and to what extent an option is offered or imposed on someone. The question right now that we should be asking is not only in what ways media is influencing our senses but also who has the agency in that reconfiguration and what ideological purposes support it.

Bibliography

• Friesen, N. (2011). “Education as a Training of the Senses: McLuhan’s Pedagogical Enterprise”. In Enculturation. Online access [http://enculturation.net/education-as-a-training]
• Williams, R. (2014). “Prisoners Could Serve ‘1,000 Year Sentences in 8.5 Hours’ in the Future”. In The Telegraph. Online access [http://www.businessinsider.com/prisoners-could-serve-1000-year-sentence-in-85-hours-in-the-future-2014-3]