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Theories of Cybersociety 69
As I have argued elsewhere (Holmes, 2004), the path-dependence on
motorized transport and the path-dependence on telecommunication
are mutually constitutive. When our social world becomes geographically
fragmented, we privately come to rely on the agents of separation that
have aggregately produced this condition. Wherever freeways have driven
corridors of speed and efficiency through a city, it creates a culture of
avoiding accidental contact with strangers. Emphasis is placed on the
control which individuals have over their use of urban space. As we
become more monadic in retreating to spaces from which we can exercise
this control, such virtualization has the added ‘benefit’ of removing us
from physical danger from embodied others, at the same time as it
encourages us to fear others. As soon as we leave our car we become a
delinquent, as Baudrillard quips about the LA freeway system. The motor
car is as much an agent of protection as it is of transport. Our fleeting
association with others travelling at high speed is unfulfilling in any
physical sense of exchange as other drivers become our objects of ‘road
rage’ just as anonymous interlocutors on the Internet can subject each
other to ‘flaming’.

The return of McLuhan

Having addressed recent literature on the urban and technical dynamics
of cybersociety, it is instructive to return to the work of Marshall
McLuhan as a case example of a thinker who provides a very early
account of network media culture.
What we can nominate as McLuhan’s ‘second media age’, which he
calls the age of ‘automation’ or cybernation, is contrasted with the mechan-
ical age of mass reproduction, which is the first media age. However, in
McLuhan’s texts we can identify two prior forms of media-tagged societies
in relation to which the mechanical/electric distinction operates. These are
‘tribal’ social conditions based on speech and scribal society based on
alphabetic writing. Together, the four kinds of society – tribal, scribal,
mechanical and electric – do not evolve in a linear progression, but rather
each kind of society can encompass a number of qualities which are found
in others. Moreover, McLuhan does not posit an over-arching process to
the development of these revolutions. It is only in the electric age that what
he calls the sense ratio and sensory balance that individuals have with
their environments becomes stable once again. This results in what he
views as a ‘re-tribalization’ of culture, a return to days of audile sensory
stability, before the distorted technological mediums of writing and print.
The mechanical age is characterized by fragmentation but uniformity,
repetition and centralism corresponding to the first media age, whilst the
electric age is one of integration via decentralization, which creates
‘extreme interdependence on a global scale’. To a large degree, individuals
in information societies are still catching up with the new possibilities of