What is Electracy?
Coined by Gregory Ulmer and building on the works of Walter Ong, Electracy is the communication form of the digital age.
{literacy and electracy as invented, partly technological and partly ideological desiring machines what is it that the machines desire?}
- The “desiring machine” is a “cybernetic” component that allows you to / aids you in wanting new things by giving you new capabilities. Literacy gives you the technology to read and thus new desires flow from that (I think)
Contributing Factors
- Apparatus Theory
- Hyperlinks & Hypermedia
The progression: Orality -> Literacy -> Electracy
Orality
- Transmission is fluid, the story evolves
- Very memetic in the way that it flows along
- More vibe/aesthetic
- Trust derived directly from the level of trust one has in the speaker
- This means it’s personal, lower spread potential
Literacy
- Rigid transmission; information is verbatim
- Everyone can have a similar experience
- Trust comes from the fact that it seems an immutable, direct copy
- Mass spread due to the printing press, but there is a slight cost to each copy
Electracy
- Fluid transmission and verbatim information
- Experience is different for each person who encounters it, but the info there is text and thus the same
- Hypertext and Hypermedia create a dynamic experience; choose your own way of encountering the experience; a highly aesthetic experience
- Hyper-rapid / hyper-wide spread due to the medium, incredible memetic potential because of directed evolution (remix)
The Spirit World
The internet (in an electrate sense) is the spirit world; a place devoid of physical substance, inhabited by spirits. Spirits are ideas made manifest that will possess you if they can. It is because of this that when entering the spirit world, one dons a mask as the shaman do to prevent possess and the loss of one’s soul. {Talk about why This is the spirit world and not orality/lit} {provide an example of possession} {provide an example of a mask}