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186 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
• They have a Geist which can be likened to the expansion of freedom.
• They have their own logic that informs the judgements people make
about the utility or value of the technologies in their environment.
• They inform the predictions that scientists and technology producers
might make about personal technologies.
• They also have a socio-logic that results from ‘communities of people
“thinking and acting together over time”’ (307).
• In making possible Apparatgeist PCTs, ‘the compelling image of perpetual
contact is the image of pure communication ... which is an idealization
of communication committed to the prospect of sharing one’s mind
with another, like the talk of angels that occurs without the contraints
of the body’ (307).

Moreover, perpetual contact has a univeral historical status, parallel
with the ‘the image of perpetual motion that has driven the machinery of
the past two millennia’ (307). ‘Whereas the idea of perpetual motion con-
cerns the means of production, perpetual contact concerns the means to
communicate and interact socially, which is fundamental to humans’ (308).
Whilst Katz and Aakhus want to stress that their term does not
require technological determinism, because it is about constraint of possi-
bilities (307), their account is technological determinism at its worst,
as well as tautological. The essay is subtitled ‘A Theory of Apparatgeist’, a
theory of something that is predicated on their own theory. Their inabil-
ity to even imagine that any of the phenomena in the list above, even the
more credible amongst them, are attributable to any agents other than
PCTs and their Geist is worrying, but unfortunately typical of a growing
methodological essentialism around New Media impacts.

Post-social society and the generational divide

Youth instinctively understands the present environment – the electric
drama. It lives it mythically and in depth. This is the reason for the great
alienation between generations. Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are
interfaces within the new environments created by electric informational
media. (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967: 9–10)

A key consequence of the transition to an information or knowledge soci-
ety that has received a lot of attention is the widening of the differences
between generations accompanied by a contraction of the time in which
this gap appears. Moreover, New Media environments such as ‘cyber-
space’ are said to have their own ‘time-worlds’ which operate at far greater
8
cycles than other forms of time. In shorter and shorter cycles, the way
in which persons are formed by media is quickly outdated. Computer
companies employ adolescent ‘geniuses’ who seemingly have a natural